CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
Call Me If You Get Lost is the sixth studio album by American rapper and producer Tyler, the Creator.
The album was released on June 25, 2021, through Columbia Records. The album is narrated by DJ Drama and features guest appearances from 42 Dugg, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Ty Dolla Sign, Lil Wayne, Domo Genesis, Brent Faiyaz, Lil Uzi Vert, Pharrell Williams, Teezo Touchdown, Fana Hues and Daisy World. Tyler produced the album himself, with additional production contributed by Jamie xx and Jay Versace.
The album marks a departure from the lighter and more soulful aesthetics of Igor (2019) and Flower Boy (2017) in favor of bold beats and raw rhymes, influenced by DJ Drama's Gangsta Grillz mixtape series. Genres on the album span hip hop, pop, jazz, soul and reggae. The cover art depicts an identification card for a character named "Tyler Baudelaire" in reference to Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, referencing the Baudelaires' constant travelling in the books.
CONCEPT
The cover art depicts an identification card for a character named "Tyler Baudelaire", which some critics have taken as a reference to the French poet Charles Baudelaire. According to Matthew Ismael Ruiz of Pitchfork, "Baudelaire, the character Tyler plays throughout the album, is a proxy for Tyler's newfound worldliness—and his inability to leverage that sophistication into the relationship of his dreams."
Charles Baudelaire's most famous work, 1857's Les Fleurs du mal (transl.The Flowers of Evil), was "originally banned for being too explicit, and Baudelaire himself was prosecuted fozr indecency", similar to Tyler's evolution from an "angsty teen spewing filth for shock value into sensitive lover man with a mischievous streak".Luke Morgan Britton of NME also compared the two, saying that both "have been fixated on the struggle between romance and realism, luxury and love, beauty and death, talents and controversies."
Initially, when Tyler unveiled the cover art for Call Me If You Get Lost, people thought that he had taken inspiration from Ol' Dirty Bastard's 1995 album, Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, when in actuality he had taken inspiration from "...old passport and travel cards from early 1900s".
