GMU Pop Culture Journalism

Odd Future Wolf Gang Feature

Odd Future Wolf Gang is a collective of rappers, producers, skaters, homies, and artists from the LA area. To put it simply, they have developed a cult following over the past few years through self-released, self-designed, self-produced mixtapes; and a rack of youtube videos that are sometimes hilarious, usually ridiculous, and always shocking. What they do is like a culmination of Jackass, Wu-Tang Clan, The Neptunes, and Slipknot that results in an unusual brand of gory-rap by teenage kids in Supreme hats and skinny jeans.

Odd Future releases the grimiest rap music I’ve heard since Wu-Tang Clan, without making it sound forced. They also release videos on their youtube channel that span everywhere from them skating, to them smoking weed and tagging, to them slapping each other. Their self-produced videos are ridiculous: the video for “VCR” is a lovesong where the main dude is making love to a doll. Their movement has won over countless fans and earned them a cult following, they also recently caught the attention of such publications as Pitchfork, Fader, and Rolling Stone. Whether intentionally or not, their sound is somewhat of a postmodern response to the current state of rap. In an interview, the undisputed brains behind the operation, Tyler the Creator, claims “what do these f***ing kids have? They have f***ing Drake. Let’s be honest, we’re not all sitting at the club with 40 f***ing b***hes around us every night.” That is very true, Tyler… let’s hope this might be a trend of new artists talking about what things are really like in America right now. Especially in hip-hop, we could use this kind of revival.