What happens when a SoCal hip hop ruffian meets a NorCal chillwave pioneer halfway? Fortunately, it sounds more adventurous than Bakersfield. Or in rapper Tyler, the Creator‘s words,
Sounds cool to me,
Sh*t sounds cool to me.”
By now both Tyler the Creator and Toro Y Moi are household names in the independent scene, having surfaced from the West Coast at around the same time. They have successfully ascended to work with top-tier industry personnel: this year, Tyler and the rest of his LA-bred Odd Future crew nabbed a deal with Sony/RED distribution for their own label, Odd Future Records. In 2011, Toro Y Moi (real name Chazwick Bundick), hailing from the East Bay Area in Northern Cali, released his BNM’ed second full-length Underneath the Pine on the reputable Carpark Records. With that album, an eclectic mix of electronic and acoustic instruments, he broke free of the chillwave confines that he helped establish with his equally outstanding 2010 debut, Causers of This.
Fortunately for hungry Odd Future fans, and since the prolific hip hop collective sets its own rules under their eponymous label, tracks have been released even in a partially-produced state. In addition to Hey You, music blog-hunters were recently treated to an incomplete remix of Odd Future‘s more R&B-inclined member Frank Ocean‘s song Thinking About You by the one and only Flying Lotus.
But even though their blog advertises Hey You as a rough draft, the dream team makes its rawness sound wholly intentional. At this point, a seasoned listener should be impervious to Tyler‘s method of wearing his erection on his sleeve, and will appreciate the bare bones, eye-rolling crass yet appealingly forthright lyrical flow he lays down over Toro Y Moi‘s sweetly carved G-funk/chillwave recipe.
With their artistic growth following similar lines at seemingly the same pace, (through not only their studio output but unrestrained live appearances), this track is nothing less than a tangential collision of two of our generation’s most innovative pop musicians. Feasibly, Toro Y Moi and Tyler, the Creator could maintain the intersection of their talents long enough to produce an album’s worth of material. After hearing Hey You, let’s hope that goes down sooner than later.