Tyga is preposterous. He’s a platonic doofus, a happy-go-lucky heel, and a distillation of Los Angeles’ most garish impulses. The canary-yellow Lamborghini shrieking through red lights on Sunset Boulevard? That’s Tyga. A pseudo-pensive pose on the glass-ringed balcony of a rented Hollywood Hills mansion, Instagram captioned: “it took alot of grindin to get here”? That’s Tyga. The guy in a gold backwards cap getting served legal papers at an L.A. Gear event? That, quite literally, is Tyga.
It’s appropriate, then, that his latest career move is a preposterous one. Kyoto is a pleading, quasi-introspective R&B album by a rapper previously best known for unsubtle lyrics about his unyielding acquisitiveness—he gets laid, gets money, and gets high. Why the sudden change in tack? “The last five years of my life has been a lot of me in the media because of my relationships,” he recently told Billboard, presumably referring to his time with Blac Chyna and a youthful Kylie Jenner. “I can’t even go to the movies with a girl anymore. It’s a gift and a curse. I really wanted to step in front of the narrative and create my own story.”
After 52 minutes of Kyoto, it remains unclear what that story is. Instead of addressing the alienating nature of celebrity, or the motivations for his romantic choices, or the past (and maybe necessary) falsity of his public persona, Tyga mostly opts for bad puns and shallow platitudes. On “Temperature,” a dancehall-style dud that recalls “1 of 1” from—sigh, deep breath—Bitch I’m The Shit 2, he intones in a half-assed patois, “I lost my watch and I still found time.” Or, on “Hard2Look” (more like “Hard2ListenTo,” amiright?), he sings, “I know this bustdown Patek won’t switch sides/I know this Lambo won’t switch sides/I know my true fans won’t switch sides.” Or, worse, on the hazy “King of the Jungle,” he admits, “I’ve been unfaithful/I’ve been lyin’ like the king of the jungle.”
More obvious than its spiritual emptiness is the album’s somnambulance. As is de rigueur in contemporary R&B, Kyoto tries to pass off silken textures and washed-out vocal samples as sensual and vulnerable. But those sensual, vulnerable tones should, ideally, boil at some point into something with a burning immediacy. These songs don’t, and much of the album just sounds exhausted. These inert instrumentals don’t do Tyga any favors: He’s more of a melodic, vibing vocalist than an outright singer, and the sparseness only serves to highlight his limited range.
Eventually, the yawning void of imagination at the center of Kyoto becomes downright oppressive. The album is nearly an hour of rote box-checking: two dancehall songs—check (“Temperature” and “Holdin On”); an EDM-inspired club track—check (“Leather in The Rain”); near-scandalous revelations about another celebrity, in this case Kylie Jenner—check (“King of the Jungle”); an A-list guest verse—check (Gucci Mane mails it in on “Sip A Lil”). I’ve seen more daring artistic flourishes on the walls of gas station bathrooms.
Sadly, this album seems likely to generate a crossover hit or two. My predictions: “Temperature” is going to score the transfer of a communicable disease at a Las Vegas pool, and “Leather in the Rain” will ooze from tinny fitting-room speakers at fast fashion stores across the country. For a project with a sexualized cartoon cat-woman on the cover, recorded by an artist known for his horniness, the whole of Kyoto is, well, flaccid.
