Tyler the Creator vs. His Fans: How Drake Became Collateral Damage at the Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival

Nov 12, 2019

Happy Tuesday! Thanks for opening the ninth edition of the Stan newsletter. A newsletter exploring fans and their bidirectional relationships with the artists that they love. As always suggestions and feedback are always appreciated. You can shoot me an email at dkuhlor@gmail.com.

The internet woke up Monday morning to a situation that people frankly would not have believed if it had not been accompanied by video footage. Drake, one of the biggest stars in the world found himself being booed at Tyler the Creator’s annual festival,Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, leading him to cut his set short. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch the situation here. After watching the video from multiple vantage points, reading attendee accounts, and reading Tyler’s feelings on the situation it becomes apparent that while unfortunate for Drake, the crowd's reaction had little to do with Drake himself. Rather the crowd's reaction served to provide real time feedback to Tyler about what Drake’s presence meant to their overall movement. This article seeks to explore the “underdog” fan dynamic that Tyler the Creator and Odd Future fans subscribe to and how Tyler's reaction to his fans could impact that dynamic forever.

The Underdogs

Tyler the Creator has had a highly engaged following for years. Looking at his audience through my proposed artist framework for tracking audience engagement I would guess that a majority of his audience falls into the highly engaged or stan categories. While built over many years this super engaged audience is a direct result of the unique and consistent ways that Tyler has provided for his fans to interact with him. Creating everything from clothing line Golf Wang, releasing five solo albums, launching Golf Media a streaming service that hosted original scripted series and birthed the infamous:

It is through these initiatives that Tyler was able to build a deeply engaged following that views their collective fan community as largely participatory and one that is not entirely mainstream. Not being mainstream has always been synonymous with Tyler’s brand and something his audience takes pride in. Tyler’s fanbase enjoys showing the music industry and the rest of the world that prioritizing quality over quantity can still breed massive commercial success. Tyler shocked his fellow peers in the music industry and even himself when his fifth studio album, Igor, debuted at number one over DJ Khaled whose album was chock full of features from major artists and in some ways was flop proof based on the bundle deal put in place to ensure it would hit the charts at number one.

Heavy is the Head: The Artist as the Curator

Artist curated music festivals have increased in the past years and continue to be wildly successful. Fans trust artists ability to curate and introduce them to other artists and as a result artists have been capitalizing off this dynamic for years. Between their own record labels, choosing who they do features with, and artists they showcase as being fans of, there is an inherent trust in an artists taste level. As a result, that trust was personified when Tyler released the line up for Camp Flog Gnaw which proceeded to sell out even though the flyer said the headliner would be a surprise. Anticipation of who the headliner would be led to fans creating a hypothesis that Frank Ocean (who rarely does live shows) would be performing, given his relationship with Tyler and the surprise element. Imagine fans surprise when the headliner turned out to be one of the biggest (and most mainstream) artists, Drake. Which in a lot of ways represented the antithesis of Tyler the Creators fan community, the Odd Future movement, and just being a Camp Flog Gnaw attendee. Although, multiple videos have been released in response to the incident showing Tyler enjoying Drakes performance - I ultimately believe festival attendees booed to provide real-time feedback to Tyler about their unhappiness with the headliner. At that moment it was less about their appreciation for Tyler as an artist and more about feedback about the lineup that he curated. Given that Drake is so mainstream we can easily infer that he had many fans or at least people that would appreciate his performance in the audience. However, the issue comes down to time and place. That was not the time and place for a surprise Drake performance and that was not the experience that attendees came to Camp Flog Gnaw to participate in.

Ten Toes Down

Tyler the Creators reaction and public scolding of his fans post-festival highlighted an interesting dynamic between the two.

Tyler’s tweets acknowledged that Drake might not have been the best headliner for the audience while still reminding his fans that their attempt to cancel Drake in real time was not ok and an embarrassment to him. Ultimately, I think his choice of the word “us” reaffirmed Tyler’s commitments to his fans and the Odd Future movement overall while still reminding them what they did was not okay. As a curator he acknowledged how his personal bias potentially got in the way of making the best overall decision for the group and vowed to be more conscientious of this moving forward. Will be interesting to see who headlines Camp Flog Gnaw in years to come. Let Drake tell it, he’s on residency for the next ten years ;)