Tyler, the Creator

In 2002, months after that year's Easter, a young Tyler sat in a car outside a Los Angeles laundromat with his mother when N.E.R.D.'s "Run to the Sun" came over the radio — a memory he can still place by the season. Two decades later, Pharrell was still recalibrating him. During a 2023 studio session filmed for the Hulu docuseries RapCaviar Presents, Pharrell told him: "You got it, you just don't see it. You got it, you got the shit." Tyler's own account of that day, relayed to NME, is blunter: "Oh fuck. No more being silly – music first... the switch fucking happened."

listen: upstream & hereshare

2002

Run to the SunPharrell Williams

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2015

DeathcampTyler, the Creator

listen forListen for the four-count intro that opens "Run to the Sun," a Neptunes tic Pharrell reused across a decade of hits, and then cue "Deathcamp," the song that opens Cherry Bomb thirteen years later: the same clipped synth stabs and thudding, off-kilter drum programming, sped up into something angrier. Tyler doesn't hide the source — mid-song he raps that N.E.R.D.'s In Search Of... "did more for me than Illmatic," naming the record inside the very track it shaped.

By Wolf (2013), Tyler had already reached for Roy Ayers' harmonic language on "Treehome95," the album's most overtly jazz-inflected track. Two years later he got Ayers himself for Cherry Bomb: he sent over the song he wanted him on, and Ayers called back with a verdict Tyler still repeats verbatim, as he told PBS's Tavis Smiley: "Aw, young man — Tyler, these changes, they cold, man, these chords are cold." Tyler, who named Ayers one of his three favorite producers, called that validation from someone "who has been doing this since forever" the whole point. Ayers later played Tyler's own festival, Camp Flog Gnaw, in 2017.

listen: upstream & heresource: Music Times — transcript of Tyler's 2015 PBS/Tavis Smiley interview (Roy Ayers "these chords are cold" quote) ↗share

1976

Everybody Loves the SunshineRoy Ayers

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2015

FIND YOUR WINGSTyler, the Creator

listen forPlay "Everybody Loves the Sunshine" and its vibraphone runs sit loose over a warm, unhurried groove — the instrument is Ayers' signature, and the network BET later singled it out by name as his fingerprint on hip-hop and R&B production. On "FIND YOUR WINGS," that same vibraphone is Ayers playing live, not sampled, laid under Tyler's own chord changes; the harmonic patience that made Ayers call and compliment those chords is audible in how unhurried the whole track feels, next to almost everything else on Cherry Bomb.

On his 2009 mixtape Bastard, teenage Tyler built "Odd Toddlers" around a loop from Cortex's obscure funk cut "Huit Octobre 1971" — the same source Madlib had chopped five years earlier for MF DOOM's "One Beer," the lone Madlib-produced track on DOOM's Mm..Food. Fans studying the lyric sheet noticed a second nod: in the second verse Tyler raps "I'm your favorite rapper," a boast that reads differently once you remember DOOM's own nickname, "your favorite rapper's favorite rapper." Fifteen years later Tyler made the debt literal, staging a 55-minute tribute at his own Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival with a 30-piece orchestra, Madlib, and Erykah Badu.

listen: upstream & heresource: WhoSampled — MF DOOM's "One Beer" sample of Cortex's "Huit Octobre 1971" ↗share

2004

One BeerMF DOOM

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2009

Odd ToddlersTyler, the Creator

listen forBoth tracks are built from the same four bars of Cortex's "Huit Octobre 1971," but the productions diverge in ways that mark generational distance: DOOM and Madlib chop the sample tight and dry, needling under DOOM's verses. Tyler slows the same loop and layers it thicker, dragging under his and Casey Veggies' bars like a beat still finding its shape. Listen for that swaggering guitar-and-horn riff in both versions — clipped in DOOM's, stretched heavier in Tyler's — a young producer studying his hero's source material rather than copying his exact technique.