This past January, as wildfires descended upon Los Angeles, Tyler, the Creator, like thousands of other residents in the evacuation zones, was forced to sort his life’s possessions according to what he could save and what he might have to let burn. He protected some predictable things — certain cars, clothes and jewelry — but for unpredictable reasons. “The value is not within the stones or the materials,” he says, “but within the air that’s around them. Each one is a diary of an era for me.” The rapper, now 34, packed his actual diaries, too, which he’s been writing since he was a child, and which are filled with “all my drawings and ideas and raps.”
As Tyler sorted, he FaceTimed friends. One of them was the film director Josh Safdie. A month earlier, they’d finished making Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” Tyler’s feature film debut, a period drama due out in December and set in 1950s New York in which he shares the screen with Timothée Chalamet. Much to his surprise, Safdie, 41, saw Tyler boxing up old magazines: hip-hop and pop culture periodicals like The Source and Vice and Mass Appeal, dating back more than two decades. “They’re disposable,” Safdie told me, “but they helped shape his persona.”