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Music

Tyler the Creator Sells T-Shirts with the White Power Logo

He's colored it in with a rainbow to "piss off the guys who takes this logo serious."

People with a permanent sense of outrage have been a bit confused by Odd Future. On the one hand, they rap about rape for shits and giggles, unapologetically use the word "faggot" and have had concerts canceled for perceived homophobic and misogynistic lyrics. At the same time, they have a a couple of LGBT members, and rather than making dumb club-footed statements about their lyrics in the media, they try and explain why they use words in the way they do. For example, back in 2014 told NME:

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"It hurts me when people can't see beyond the first layer. They don't listen to the word play, or the patterns we use in the song, or the vocabulary we use. They just look at the word 'sodomise,' or 'rape,' or 'bitch' or some shit, and just go like 'Oh my god, did you hear what he just said?' No, did you hear how he said it? The terms he used to say it?"

Well if you were looking for an easy way to work out which side they're on, you're not going to get one today. Tyler the Creator started selling T-shirts with the American white pride logo on, but colored in with a rainbow, as a nod to LGBT rights. The lookbook photo displaying the T-shirts show Tyler holding hands with a male model. Rather than an explicit gay rights message though, the T-shirts read "Golf Pride World Wide".

It's an incredibly mixed message, and one Tyler wanted to be explain further—today posting this to the Odd Future tumblr.

The message may be mixed, but the intention is incredibly clear. Tyler has essentially re-appropriated a symbol loaded with connotations of hate and intolerance, and married it with one of love and acceptance - not too dissimilar to the way in which some LGBT communities took back the word "queer" as a positive label. Or, adversely, how the Nazi's lifted the Buddhist swastika (meaning "all is well") and took it from it's furthest possible message. It's about challenging perspective, and pissing people off.

Is Tyler the right person to have made this statement? Maybe not, but—as is the ultimate justification for a lot of the things Tyler does—somebody had to.