*speaker crackle* Clean-up in aisle [7.14]…
Julian Axelrod: My favorite version of Tyler is the kitchen sink mad scientist throwing a whole marching band’s worth of bells, whistles, horns, cymbals, snares, chants, giggles and Solange vocals into an open blender, with a few carefully selected four-bar guest verses added to taste. A rap nerd’s fever dream.
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Al Varela: “Sticky” is one of the best rap posse cuts of the past couple of years. Even if GloRilla, Sexyy Red, and Lil Wayne only get four bars, the way they quickly rotate between one another is like being in the midst of a big street dance, with everyone coming in for a brief little solo and getting out of the way for the next person to show off their moves. Tyler takes up the majority of the song, but he’s more than deserving of the main spotlight as he delivers banger line after banger line. It’s not enough that he starts with the deeply gender proclamation of, “Don’t give a fuck bout pronouns, I’m that [guy] and that bitch”. He has to go on and declare, “Better find a mop, it’s getting sticky in this bitch” as the horns swell and the song’s marching band sound escalates to its natural conclusion. It’s a march for the bad bitches ready to cause chaos wherever they go.
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Tim de Reuse: Atonal whistling tone clusters -> helium voice pronouns joke -> a half-second of GloRilla -> industrial hip hop -> plodding Southern brass stabs -> cream-colored piano Jazz -> Solange oohs. This pathway would have been breezy and unfocused were it given over to Tyler’s more musique concrète ambitions (c.f. Noid) but here he turns the stream of consciousness to his advantage with a little momentum. We’ve got a tasting platter of Tylerian miscellanea, a tour that cooks one very simple hook (the word “stickyyyyyyy”) through five different sounds he’s marinated himself in over the last decade, arranged such that each vignette starts abruptly enough and keeps itself short enough that you can feel the G-forces as he veers between them. Four minutes packed with forty minutes.
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Ian Mathers: “So should we go with the whistling, the playground chants, the perky little triangle, the footstomp beat, the horns, or the guest rappers?”
“Fuck it, throw ’em all in.”
[7]
Katherine St. Asaph: This feels like 7:30 AM on an all-nighter does. I just can’t deal with the whistling and the needling hook; it sounds like Lumidee’s Wario.
[1]
Jel Bugle: More of a twig to be fair, bit of a racket, but not the good kind.
[3]
Mark Sinker: Old enough to know that prog is a habit of practice that just keeps coming round, old enough to be pleased when I see it again. “The ruckus is kicking off and I’m fine with that” quilted into “super-sensitive, no softy” and also the thing where he has itchy, sweaty palms, agitated modernist jump-cut density of notions where the trick is making them ride with one another, and the ride having a flavour you know and choose to return to.
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Claire Davidson: I love this song’s commitment to being as outlandish as possible, a musical bit that revolves first and foremost around Tyler, the Creator’s determination to bend his flow into as many different vocal registers as he can muster — including a playful falsetto that gleefully teeters on the edge of genuine obnoxiousness, and is all the more infectious for it. That’s the trick of this song: vocal affectations or bars that may have otherwise come across as slapdash or gimmicky gradually evolve into something truly celebratory. The song’s marching band instrumental rises to accompany GloRilla, Sexyy Red, and Lil Wayne as they trade short but no less memorable lines. Everyone’s verses are confident but never rote in their sense of pride, resulting in a song that resembles both a figurative and literal parade of enthusiasm, like a silly high school cheerleading chant that somehow becomes a badge of honor when surrounded by so much spirit. I do think “Sticky” switches rhythms and refrains a few too many times to cultivate a truly lasting high, but I also can’t deny how often this song has put a smile on my face since I first heard it.
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Nortey Dowuona: I heard some folks want Tyler to rap over others’ beats after Chromakopia dropped and some folx found it a bit samey. It speaks to how starved we are for actually well-rounded musicians who can create a song this big that works from beginning to end and includes a specific, deeply recognizable sample from this amazing gem that isn’t lazily jacking it to gas itself off nostalgia fumes. What more could, say, RonRon the Producer add? Especially since he hasn’t done it himself?
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Jonathan Bradley: Reinventing the Neptunes’ digital minimalism as its inverse — lo-fi maximalism — has been a Tyler approach that I find engaging as often as I do alienating. He loves the blunt corners resulting when oblong sounds and oblong ideas and his oblong voice wedge against one another and, on “Sticky,” those honks and blarts and croons crowd so tightly they barely leave room for guests or listeners. Sexyy Red stands out — just — but I forget Glo and Wayne are present unless I check the playbill. “Better find a mop” is a slick post-“WAP” hook, but I’m more impressed that he found a pronoun joke that doesn’t sound like it was pulled from your uncle’s Facebook page.
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Melody Esme: Shout out to Tyler, the Creator. Gotta be one of my favorite genders.
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Alfred Soto: Tyler-the-producer has trouble shaping album-length statements for Tyler-the-rapper, but this viscous track has a swampiness that its guests stomp through, including an invigorated Wayne.
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Taylor Alatorre: Maybe it’s my 2000s chauvinism showing (and hopefully not any gender chauvinism), but Tyler really should’ve let Lil Wayne cook here. A four-bar Weezy verse serves little purpose other than to remind the audience he’s still alive, and also to lend the song a droplet of the Dirty South, 106 & Park-era credibility that it so thirstily craves. It wants to be a trunk-rattler, or more precisely a desk-rattler in the vein of schoolyard favorites like “Grindin’” and “Lip Gloss,” but those were built on sturdier rhythmic foundations, where any annoyance felt was a product of listener biases rather than a core intended feature of the music itself. It’s possible Tyler wants to get back to his main mission of offending the squares, only this time in ways that don’t lead to an Australian travel ban. If so, it would partially but not fully explain the ponderous synthetic horn sound that recalls his thinly-veiled expy from the Popstarmovie.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Not only is this a great song that makes me feel like I’m getting hit by hammers, it is also the best bet I’ll have to vindicate my prediction that there will be a Billboard top 10 hit mentioning ketamine in the lyrics this year. Godspeed, Tyler.
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