Written by Nicole Rayner

I’ve seen Tyler The Creator live twice before. Once in 2018 for the Flower Boy tour, and once in 2019 for the IGOR tour. At the Flower Boy tour I was still in my barricade fiend phase, and my friends and I were close enough to the side stage that I got a selfie with the white boy everybody thought Tyler was dating at the time. In 2019 I claimed to be out of my barricade fiend phase, and an hour before doors I was in bed in my pajamas claiming that I didn’t feel up to going. Two hours later I still somehow found myself front and center, so close that the stage pyro made my nose sore the next morning. 

I can’t help but feel like I’m already well beyond Tyler’s target age demographic. I did, still, and always will adore Tyler’s artistry, but his music has always been something of a curse in the pop culture zeitgeist in the sense that it always seems to be the first thing indoctrinates teenage boys to the concept of taste-based elitism and pretension. 

How am I already auntie? 

The day before the show I was in RAW Market and everywhere I looked I saw 17 year old German boys dressed up like Wes Anderson camp counselors, and I already knew they’d be the ones I’d be bumping shoulders with 24 hours later. Those are the people that should be at the show, mind you. When you’re 17 stadiums feel like spaceships and concerts leave you giddy for the whole following school week. When you’re 23 the magic isn’t quite the same anymore. When you’re 23 you have work the next morning and a guy from one of the opening act’s teams is in your Hinge matches trying to schedule a hook up as quickly as he can before the tour moves on to the next city. 

What do you do in this situation, with a nosebleed ticket and nobody to go with you? You drink, obviously.

Beer 1

First beer was consumed at 5:30pm at my band practice. All I’d eaten that day was a small mug of cereal that morning. Clearly a good omen for the night ahead.

Beer 2

At Warschauer Strasse station everyone above the age of 25 seemed to be on their way to more responsible engagements, while everybody below the age of 25 fumbled their way down the station stairs like wool-vest wearing sheep being herded away. On my walk to the venue I decided to start counting Kangol berets. During the duration of the 6 minute walk I saw 4, along with a crowd of 13 year olds filming TikTok dances and three girls tying green ribbons around their wrists in an attempt to fake floor wristbands.

Beer 3

11 Kangol berets. And a shit ton of Golf Le Fleur too, obviously. How can 16 year olds afford these brand names? Is this the lifestyle you can bag by living off of TikTok creator cheques?

The line for beer wasn’t long (unsurprising, based on the age demographic) but I still only made it to my seat after Paris Texas had already hit the stage. 

The Paris Texas trio looked like toy soldiers from above. From my section, the stage was a cinder block in the middle of a sea of swaying bodies. Small, unassuming and surrounded, the openers had no bells and whistles to aid their performance; they had to rile up the growing beast of an adolescent crowd with nothing but their bodies. Given the minimalism of it all, I was fully expecting the openers to do a bit too much. You know those openers that are too focused on the hype and opening the pit than on the performance itself? I was imagining something like that. That’s what I would’ve done at least–When you have 5000 moshpit-hungry mouths to feed, would it not be a normal reaction to freak out a bit? 

But Paris Texas did just the right amount. Bubbly but not sloppy, excited but not delusional, the three guys on stage were clearly just there to have a good time, as they should be. I don’t know how to say that it felt like a high school talent show without being derogatory, because I truly mean it in the best possible way. Imagine the cool older kids you had a crush on in freshman year. Juvenile energy with confident crowdwork, all executed with the suave self-assurance of knowing they don’t need to prove themselves to anyone.

The most shocking thing about Paris Texas’ set wasn’t anything to do with the performance itself, but with the crowd. The pit, which moments before appeared vast and flat like a flesh-tone speckled sheet, suddenly formed into two unstoppable colliding waves large enough to swallow the entire section as soon as the beat dropped on Girls Like Drugs. Who knew Germans could mosh? The North American mosh pits I’d waded through in the past looked like kindergarten playtime compared to this. How embarrassing for us, honestly. I guess all the pent up energy that gets hidden away in polite, proper German society needs to get released somewhere. They played their best–Nü Whip, PANIC!!, Heavy Metal–and the crowd traced their every peak and valley. To call the mass movement in the audience ebbing and flowing would be way too casual; they didn’t make waves, they made tsunamis. 

Paris Texas were sent off with a field of phone flashlights, and they disappeared as quickly as they appeared, escorted through the crowd away from the center stage fighters walking out in reverse.

Beer 5

The night starts getting a bit blurry here.

After Paris Texas, the crowd barely had a moment to gather their bearings before the house lights once again cut to black. Lazer-esque lights began beaming up from the perimeter of the stage, forming soft, glowing walls, thickened by the smoke. A figure entered through the crowd, cut through the wall, and screamed. 

If Paris Texas were the cool kids at your high school talent show, Lil Yachty was that guy a couple grades above you that always starts freestyling while you’re taking bong rips in your friends garage after school. Again, I promise I say this with the utmost respect and admiration. Not quite as excitable as Paris Texas, Yachty addressed the crowd with knowing, older sibling sensibilities. Grounded and unbothered, he commanded the stage with all the casual authority that only someone as experienced in the industry as him can harbor. 

I was expecting most of Yachty’s setlist to consist of his most recent album Let’s Start Here, but I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity in his song selection. What I was not-so-pleasantly surprised by is how incredibly nobody seemed to know their 2016 cultural history. Why was I one of the only people in my section that knew Broccoli? I know these Tyler fans are young, but Jesus Christ. The entire throwback medley went totally under appreciated among the crowd, and in my drunken sensitivity I felt the need to call out a little too loudly how this all deeply offended me.

My highlight of the set came in the form of a tiny little figure in the very middle of the ever-growing moshpit. The kid clutched a Polish flag and orchestrated the pit like a conductor. When Poland finally rang out through the arena, the crowd burst around the flag kid like a shaken soda, obeying his conduct as if he was the cult leader. By this point I was antsy and indoctrinated too, and I was trying to devise a plan to get down there myself (a drunk 23 year old woman sneaking into the mosh pit alone… don’t even get me started on the optics of that). Before I had the chance to try anything stupid, Yachty ended his set (fairly abruptly) and walked off just as nonchalantly as he arrived. Thank god for his timing.

Beer 6

At this point all the natural inhibitions that you’re supposed to hold in a crowd full of strangers had fully been flushed from my system. I started chatting to (startling, probably) the people around me. The two boys to my left told me they were seventeen, from northern Germany, near Hamburg. This was the second concert they’d ever been to, but they decided to come at the last minute, so their assigned seats were far behind us and separated. The whole time we spoke they kept breaking eye contact to peak the stage, as if Tyler would appear out of the blue, suddenly, with no introduction. Their excitement was palpable. They asked if I would keep trying to protect them so they wouldn’t get kicked out and I told them I’d do whatever I could. 

The person standing behind me was the biggest character in the section. He had the classic TikTok e-boy haircut and the kind of aggression that only makes sense in the pit; in the upper stands, that’s the kind of energy that makes you think someone’s gonna bite you. He filmed himself the entire show on his snapchat. More on him later. 

I didn’t talk to the person on my right. They were a gorgeous butch lesbian, exactly my type, there all alone. We made eyes at each other a couple times but never said a word. It’s really awesome that alcohol never helps me in the one area where I could use some support. 

It took longer for the lights to cut back to black this time, but the moment they did, the arena erupted. The crowd broke into a deafening rendition of the St Chroma chant long before the stage lights burst to life. 

In its resting form, the stage set up didn’t make sense to me. The layout consisted of a wall of green cargo containers stacked against the back of the arena, while a tall, thinner cargo crate jutted out from the center to create a catwalk. The small stage in the center of the pit remained, now re-dressed to look like a living room, but there was no identifiable way there. 

As the chanting continued, the stage began to shift. One of the cargo containers started to rise (where to? I have absolutely no idea. It looked like a magic trick, and I swear it’s not just because I was drunk), revealing a costumed, masked Tyler The Creator standing on an empty platform. He was fully in character; his body movements were stiff and unnerving. The crowd’s singing was skull shattering, and when the beat dropped, the pyrotechnics fully jerked my heart out of my body.

The energy didn’t let up either. Rah Tah Tah and Noid followed, Tyler maintained his eerie demeanor, amplifying his erratic movements with the crowd’s feedback. The stage pyros burst higher, the pit around the stage grew more restless; it all felt satanic, in the way you want things to be when you’re young and edgy and have pent up adolescent rage inside of you. 

The arena was allowed a collective deep breath after this three track run. Tyler thanked the crowd for coming, cracked a joke about the depravity of Berlin nightclubs (as if he’d never been in one… something I find hard to believe). He slowed the tempo ever so slightly for a couple more Chromokopia tracks (I can’t remember the specific ones, to be honest- they weren’t set highlights for me, so the 6 preceding beers sifted them out of my memory), but what I do remember is the way the arena turned into a swaying galaxy of phone flashlight stars for Judge Judy. 

As with every Tyler show I’ve ever been to, the energy couldn’t stay contained for long. The popcorn-bag pit did its heating and wanted to explode again. Suddenly a walkway appeared above the crowd, connecting the main stage with the middle stage; it must’ve descended from the ceiling, but I was so locked in analyzing the patterns of the mosh pits beginning to develop that I didn’t even notice. Tyler played Sticky. I have nothing to say about it. I just about blacked out during Sexyy Red’s verse. I only snapped out of it when the snapchat demon behind us was kicked from where he was standing and fell on top of me, slamming me into the glass barricade, while still having the nerve to continue dancing from my seat as if nothing happened. I’m not proud of the broken-German verbal child abuse I engaged in after that. 

Once Tyler reached the second stage, my favourite part of the set began. While it sat untouched, I found the dressing of this stage quite underwhelming. Compared to the incomprehensible cargo containers that made up the main stage, the living room layout on stage B looked a bit incomplete and boring. Stupid of me to doubt an artist known for his visuals and design, of course, because it ended up being absolutely perfect.

Curtains covered Tyler’s descent to the stage, lit up with projections to resemble a cottage. As the curtains lifted, Tyler, now stripped from his Chromokopia alter ego, milled around the stage as if the living room was his own. The crowd fell silent. On the corner of the stage, stacked upon a pile of suitcases, there was an old crate filled with vinyl records. Tyler began to flip through it, passing albums by many of his contemporaries (Pharrell and Nas to name a few), before stopping on IGOR. Once I realized what was happening I laughed out loud. I wrote a particularly jarring passage in my notes at this point that I won’t bother to reword, I’ll just leave it here:

(sorry Taylor I didn’t realize I turn into such a mean spirited demon when I’m drunk)

Igor went into Goblin, then into Wolf–this whole time I started to get a stomach ache, and I was positive it wasn’t just because of all the beer I’d drank. It was one of those moments that trigger such intense nostalgia inside of you that they knock you off balance and possess your skin. The eras-tour portion of the show concluded (quite poetically for my circumstance) with Flower Boy, which was criminally too short compared to the other album mini sets. The bridge reappeared from the sky and Tyler made his way back to the main stage. The best performance of the entire night, undoubtedly, came with Like Him. The arena once again lit up in an array of phone flashlights, this time even brighter than before. The performance was understated at first, with Tyler’s now stripped down outfit making the performance feel even more vulnerable. The crowd breathed life into the song, rising with every swelling melody and swallowing the instrumental with cheers right before the midpoint drop. Tyler then morphed into something of a 90’s heartthrob, embracing the theatrics with his whole body, while a waterfall of sparks began to rain down behind him. It was an absolute spectacle, and it was fucking beautiful.

Tyler closed the set with a couple more of his biggest hits before sending the crowd on their way with I Hope You Find Your Way Home. Zoomers were herded out of the arena like cattle. 

Beer 7 

The one thing I can’t deny changes with age is the way concerts stick with you. Maybe I’ve just attended too many at this point, but the post show high is not as strong of a drug as it used to be; it now hardly lasts my commute home. I’m not going to pretend that this gig magically restored my adolescent concert butterflies. What it did do is build something homelier. Tyler the Creator is an artist I can proudly say I have grown with. There’s only a handful of artists active today that do what Tyler does; from his longevity to his ever developing aesthetic and taste, this is a musician who has truly altered the creative landscape and raised a generation of young creatives to follow in his footsteps. More than making me giddy, going to this show felt weirdly like checking in on an old friend. Looks like we’re both doing well. I can clown on the Kangol berets and camp counselor outfits that these younger Tyler fans were wearing all I want, but really I’m so happy that the kids still have this. I was there in my checkered vans back in 2016, and I hope the pretentious internet kids of tomorrow will be there too, sporting the next trendy sneaker, for Tyler’s 10th album tour in 2030. 

I stood outside a spati in Kreuzberg an hour after the show, drinking a Sternberg that would be the final blow to push me over the edge, fucking with my memory.

26 Kangol berets total, by the way.