Spin Magazine

"They are them. We are us. Fuck them all." So goes the motto of obscenely groundbreaking hellions Odd Future. The white-hot epicenter of hip-hop's New Underground take their stage-diving family affair on the road, and we join the caravan.

More From SPIN's December 2011 Issue:
• Live from the New Underground: SPIN Celebrates Hip-Hop's DIY Moment
• G-Side Launch a Hardscrabble, Regular-Dude Revolution
• An Insanely Obsessive Infographic Tries (in Vain) to Diagram the Hip-Hop Galaxy

It's freezing in Vancouver, British Columbia, but these two tow-headed white kids have been waiting for hours. When the tour bus, a rock-star-sized whale, pulls up to the club, the teens — Brandon Lachance, 18, and Isabel Van Wyk, 16 — trail the driver's slow, creaky three-point turns until the bus stops. The ten members of the Los Angeles collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, groggy after an overnight haul from Portland, lumber out, one by one, and the fans' excitement reaches a fever pitch. As Tyler, the Creator, the group's leader, emerges, wearing his signature devastating grin, Van Wyk is at the crest of hyperventilation. When he reaches out to hug her for a photo, she nearly erupts into a full-blown bawl. Tyler tenses, and looks a little panicked. "Don't cry," he begs. "Please don't cry — it's okay."

This scene isn't that extraordinary. Considering all the fan freak-outs so far, Odd Future's first-ever North American tour (September 28 to November 8) actually resembles a microcosm of Justin Bieber's mall jaunts. "Their music is so rebellious and they just don't care," says Lachance, after the group moves on to soundcheck. "It makes you do stuff you didn't think you'd do. I used to be really shy before I listened to them, but after a while, I just kinda got crazy." He took off from work today, hoping for a photograph.

Odd Future have provoked nonstop conversation throughout 2011, creating some of the year's most vital, kinetic, urgent, raw music and art. A brief overview of the young crew's output: Tyler's solo album Goblin, which has sold 135,000 copies via indie label XL, and his riveting "Yonkers" and "She" videos; Frank Ocean's twisted R&B confessional,Nostalgia, Ultra; MellowHype's remastered re-release of their Blackenedwhite album and the effectively creepy "64" video; Domo Genesis' Under the Influence mixtape; Mike G's chopped-and-screwed mixtapes; Syd the Kyd's Raunchboots instrumental EP; the stunning coffee-table photo book Golf Wang, with writings by Tyler; not to mention all the group's Tyler-designed merch. Their 2012 is booked with worldwide tour dates; they're shooting an Adult Swim show, tentatively titled Loiter Squad, set to premiere in early 2012; a clutch of releases, including a full crew album, are planned for the newly minted Odd Future Records (distributed by Sony Red); and there are rumored collaborations with Pharrell (Tyler's idol) and Justin Bieber (an acknowledged fan).

Moreover, they've defined a fresh rallying cry for disaffected youth and have reinvigorated the decades-old debate over whether rap music reflects, or ruins, society. Amid discussion forums and Tumblr'd fan tributes, there are hundreds of essays parsing whether the group are misogynistic, homophobic, or hate-filled, due to several graphic depictions of murder and rape in their lyrics. They were subject to domestic-violence protests at the Pitchfork Music Festival and were admonished in GLAAD press releases. This May, Sara Quin of lesbian folkies Tegan and Sara denounced Goblin on the duo's website, wondering, "Why should I care about this music or its 'brilliance' when the message is so repulsive and irresponsible?" Tyler's response, via Twitter: "If Tegan and Sara need some hard dick, hit me up!"

"That was the first thing that came to my head," Tyler explains later, sitting on a Seattle hotel bed, after the show following the Vancouver date. "When I said that shit, I thought it'd be funny. But then I was like, I don't even care anymore….I mean, I guess my dark side comes out in my music, but it's just weird that so many people think I'm such a fucking evil person. I don't fucking hate gay people. I'm probably one of the least homophobic rappers in the world. I don't discriminate, because that's what the fucking whites did to the blacks back then, and that's what kids did to me at school, because I listened to different music and shit. So I don't fucking discriminate.

He continues: "If you listen to 'Yonkers' and 'Sandwitches' [from Goblin] and that's it, you would think I'm an evil asshole. People might not expect me, goofy as fuck, pulling my balls out and wearing tie-dye and shit."

Goofiness is part of the package for Odd Future's collection of rappers, producers, singers, artists, skateboarders, and funny people. As is irreverence. Critics have chalked up their attitude to shock tactics. To the group, their dark humor and apocalyptic imagery are more like catharsis, a natural outgrowth of all they've experienced. But spend any amount of time with them and it's their charm and vitality that shines through.

"A lot of people won't realize unless they meet us that we're very nice people," says Syd "the Kyd" Bennett, Odd Future's ebullient DJ/engineer, sister of jaunty hype man Taco, and sole female member. "We're all very honest. We realize that the truth is the only way you can go."

A feminist outsider joining Odd Future on tour — through four cities (San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, and Seattle) over seven days — might seem like a cat trying to swim with sharks. And though I'd met Tyler before and found him perfectly respectful, my pretour G-chats with friends consisted primarily of the sentiment: "FRANKLY, I'M SCARED."

Would my age (over 25) and inherent dorkiness become a bull's-eye for a mass of wisecracking brats? Would I become a symbol of the stodgy journalists they so vocally hate? Would they revolt and drop me off in the middle of Nowhere Valley, California, where I'd have to beg some local reclusive militiamen to drive me to the bus station? None of those things happened; Jasper Dolphin didn't even draw on my face with a Sharpie while I slept.

During a week of crashing on their tour bus, cackling at their jokes, and marveling at their intuitive connection and unwavering honesty, it was actually tough to leave. Beneath the surface, Odd Future are an extremely tight knot of friends who have stayed close through an astonishingly quick rise to stardom.

That's not to say that every moment is charged with blithe chaos. Huddled in a basement green room before the San Francisco show, the crew's smokers crouch over a laptop, as the unusually stoic rapper Hodgy Beats conjures fight videos via World Star Hip Hop. It's a weedy vibe, and the dudes — fierce, brooding producer Left Brain (Hodgy's partner in the duo MellowHype), sharp but stony spitter Domo Genesis, sunglasses-wearing suave rhymer Mike G, and jokester hype man Jasper Dolphin — debate the best, most absurd clips. Reloading a video of two family members getting into a scrap over a cheeseburger, they laugh hysterically. Syd and outré producer Matt Martians dip in to ogle a left hook. Tyler, drug- and alcohol-free, tends to roll solo before shows, entertaining himself with Twitter pranks, answering Formspring questions, or making Mac beats.

Despite their jumble of personalities, the group operates like a fully functional family unit, bound by shared backgrounds and intense creative energy. Tyler is the centrifugal force, but each member plays a necessary role. From the audience, an Odd Future live performance looks like a vortex of arms, heads, legs, and middle fingers. As I watch from backstage, though, the members interact via instinctive physical cues; if Tyler's asthma requires a lie-down break behind the booth after "French," Mike G breezes in for a supersmooth delivery of "Everything That's Yours," without anyone missing a breath. "It's uncanny how this happened, because we all genuinely care about each other," says Matt Martians, who first met Tyler in an online Neptunes forum. "We're all dependent on each other."

A couple of times during the trip, when the tour bus is too hotboxed or somebody's boxers are on the floor, Tyler jokes about going solo. But when he accepted his MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist this year, his mom crying and screaming at his side, he delivered his largely bleeped-out speech with the group hopping around and hugging behind him. "I would never, never leave these dudes," he says. "Without them trusting my lead and having my back no matter what the fuck happened, I wouldn't be here. Because I come up with some crazy shit, and nobody trusted me, but these motherfuckers was like, 'You know what? Fuck it, eat a roach.'"

Lionel boyce, or l-boy, wakes up early every day, incapable of sleeping in. And on this particular morning, Odd Future's resident idea man, a linebacker-sized 20-year-old, is sitting at the front of the tour bus, working on "Thoughts From a Random Black Guy," his column for the LA Weekly blog. This week's topic: a fantastical story about adopting an Asian baby for the purpose of attending her career day. (In another column, he imagined Jasper Dolphin rescuing said baby and "three baseheads" from a burning building.)

Al B. Sure's 1988 R&B classic In Effect Mode bumps from his laptop speakers. L-Boy, like several others in Odd Future, shares a love for the bass-heavy slow jams of the '90s — particularly Aaliyah — but he doesn't remember how he first discovered Al B. Sure. "I was born in '91, so it was, like, '98, '99 when the Internet started getting big," he says. "I had friends who used Limewire in ninth grade and followed music blogs to see when songs came out. I always wonder how people found out how new songs came out before the Internet."

Part of Odd Future's success, of course, has been due to their brilliant use of Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Formspring, the Hypebeast forums, et al. to spread their gospel, whether releasing the free albums that created an early buzz on their website or uploading their spastic, often hard-to-watch videos of skateboarding face-plants, and other tragicomic slapstick. Similarly, Odd Future obsessives have compiled intricate networks of fandom online, hoarding stray shreds of info and photos. Spend any time on Formspring, for instance, and you'll find out which ex-girlfriend appears in Tyler's "She" video, why they broke up, and what he thinks about her new haircut. "These guys are a walking new-media department," says manager/de facto dad Christian Clancy, who formerly worked at Interscope with Eminem and 50 Cent. "I've learned more from them in a year and a half than I did at a label in ten years."

But as their fame skyrockets, transparency gets more complicated. It's sweet that there's a blog dedicated to the cuteness of Lucas Vercetti, Tyler's straight-edge skater homie, and that when Vercetti and L-Boy work the merch booth, kids ask for their autographs, too. But then territorial fans found out about Lucas' young girlfriend via Facebook. "They hate her!" says the bleach-blonde Vercetti one night after a show, sucking down an ever-present Red Bull. "She's like, 'What the fuck, why are all these people all crazy over you.' I don't even do anything."