I Was Cranking Ian, but Tyler, the Creator Was Damn Near Right

Before I get into this I gotta be honest about where I was standing. When Tyler, the Creator made his comments about Ian I was in the middle dead ass. I was cranking Ian. However I'm also very pro-Black and when I heard what Tyler said I was like damn, he's damn near right. I know that sounds like I'm trying to have it both ways, but that's really where a lot of people were at and we got into it on episode two of Inside The Screen.

What Tyler actually said

If you missed it, back in August 2024 Tyler went on Maverick Carter's show Mavericks and talked about a white kid, a regular Caucasian man in his words, making music that sounded like it was mocking Future and Gucci Mane and not even as satire. He never said a name. The internet filled it in for him and the name everybody landed on was Ian.

And I get why. Every time I listened to an Ian song I'm like damn this reminds me of Gucci Mane, this is some Future shit. His stuff was heavy Gucci and Future with a little Chief Keef in there. Which is not a crime by itself. Any artist can have references and be heavily influenced by whoever they grew up on.

Ian fell into the trap

Here's my whole take though. For Ian I felt like he fell into the trap. There's traps in this and the biggest one is replying. Tyler didn't even say his name and his side answered anyway. His manager Bu Thiam posted on his story that Ian sounds nothing like Gucci or Future and that it's called influence, and then Ian talked about it himself in a Lyrical Lemonade freestyle in March 2025. That's seven months later and the story is still alive because of it.

We don't need your reply. Just keep making the music and act like you didn't hear it. If a Black artist is telling you something about the culture you're pulling from, bro just shut up and keep making music. That's what the white artists coming into this scene need to do. A lot of them come in thinking that just because they like something that's a sign of them respecting the culture and that's not how it works.

Compare it to Yeat. Yeat just kept making the music. You can hear that he's a collection of this, this and this but he's his own thing at this point and nobody is asking him to explain himself.

You're not winning that argument

You might be asking why replying is such a big deal. Think about who you're going against. You think Black people are gonna go against Tyler, the Creator for a white boy? In my opinion Tyler is the second biggest artist on the West Coast and the number one artist in his lane doing what he's doing. Chromakopia debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 which was his third straight. You're not winning a public argument with that. You're not Drake either, there's no side for people to pick.

I compared it to sports on the pod. A hooper hears trash talk the whole game and the move is to keep bouncing the ball. Same thing here. Don't fall for the traps.

Ray didn't fully see it my way

Ray had a fair pushback. He felt like Ian's references go deep, all the way back to old Gucci that a lot of the TikTok kids don't even know about, and that going back that far at that level without stealing anybody's songs leans more toward appreciation than appropriation. He said he didn't really understand the Tyler beef.

Ray was also the one who said Tyler might have killed his shit, because he hadn't seen Ian on his feed since Valedictorian. That's where the episode title came from. I'm not going that far. Ian made the 2025 XXL Freshman class and dropped a mixtape called 2005 in October 2025 so the career is not over. What I will say is the conversation around him changed and the reply is part of why.

He could have been his own beast

Like I said I was a big fan of Ian. I went through his catalog and he's actually a very big underground rapper. Some of his older songs are on some weird beats and that's where I think he could have been his own little beast in his own little category if he would've just kept his head down. For Ian we know where the roots come from and there's only three. That's fine, influence is how this whole thing works. What separates the ones who last is if you add something to it and then let the music do the talking. It's the same cultural integrity conversation I had about Kendrick and Dave Free launching Project 3.

I would be crazy if I didn't say this goes past Ian. A&Rs and labels might want to tune into Inside The Screen for this one, because every new artist who catches a viral moment is gonna hear something they don't like about themselves eventually. Most of the time the ones who keep making music come out fine. Just look at how Chief Keef keeps building.

So I'm asking you. When a Black artist calls out what you're doing, should a white artist respond at all or just keep making music? Tell me in the CXM Discord.