“If Tegan and Sara Need Some Hard Dick, Hit Me Up!”
If you heard a guy yell this to some woman he barely knew across a crowded street, odds are you’d probably write that person off as a misogynistic prick, or if you’re a straight guy you’d at least give your girlfriend a look like “wow, there are some truly regressive, backwards people out there, good thing I—a kind, sweet-natured guy with just the right amount of scruff—am not one of them” and then continue walking to the 2:10pm screening of Bridesmaids.
And yet Tyler the Creator says it and lots of sweet-natured, “progressive” types snicker—for a reason that, I think, had very little to do with the actual content of what he is saying. The line itself (in case you needed reminding, it’s “If Tegan and Sara Need Some Hard Dick, Hit Me Up!”) is pretty much as vulgar and anti-clever as it gets. In and of itself, it is not a joke; it is, rather, an extremely public piece of sexual harrasment.
But the very public nature of it is why some dudes (and maybe some ladies?) laughed when they heard about it. The reason it is “funny,” or can be considered funny by people who would never actually say shit like that in real life, is because it is a totally fucking insane thing to say, and is made even more insane by the fact that he is saying it in front of millions of people.
Like, imagine if your neighbor came up to you one morning and in a totally reasonable and clear-headed tone was like “I’m really sorry to bother you about this, but your playing loud music in the evenings is preventing me from getting the requisite eight hours of sleep I need to perform my demanding job,” and you listened with an idiot grin on your face and then said “YO MAYBE THIS WOULDN’T BE A PROBLEM IF YOUR EARS WEREN’T SO BIG AND GROSS!!!” and then cackled maniacally while peeing yourself.
Okay maybe not the best example and also of course the violent sexual nature of the tweet adds a whole other unfortunate layer that was in no way addressed by the above example but the point is that it’s just an absurd, outlandish way to respond to criticism, especially criticism that was not directly addressed at you. It brings to mind the hyperbolic comedy of Dave Chappelle or Aziz Ansari, except with one extremely crucial distinction that I will get to in a moment.
When you remove Tyler from the insular, at-least-kind-of-reasonable music blog world and drop him into the #5 slot on the Billboard charts, things start to get scarier. The difference between Aziz Ansari making a joke that ends with “you faggot, fuck you” and what Tyler tweeted is that Ansari is completely self-aware of that joke’s absurdity/outlandishness, whereas Tyler is just sort of…speaking his mind, I guess. And with his fanbase increasing to encompass that segment of the population sometimes referred to by sociologists as “those unlikely to write long think-pieces re: the morality of listening to Odd Future,” that mind now has the power to influence a whole lot of other minds.
But anyway that’s at least part of the reason why maybe some people who are otherwise nice might have found what Tyler tweeted kind of funny, or at least ridiculous enough to be like “what, that’s insane, ha” about.
(Also I’m really sorry to clog your dashboard with MORE O.F. talk, but know that this is totally non-musical and that I haven’t even listened to Goblin yet, because I’m not that good at finding leaks of “big” albums.)
