While Odd Future are the face of hip-hop’s DIY audacity and Frank Ocean is R&B’s most compelling ascendant superstar, their managers (and guardian angels) are making the most of the music industry’s slow implosion.

Recently, Tyler sat down at a sold event in New York’s Highline Ballroom to speak to Elliot Wilson, for the CRWN live interview series. The interview – which lasted over an hour – took place on April 23rd and was not your typical Tyler interview. Instead of the usual joke answers we have come to expect from Odd Future interviews, Tyler instead gave fans an insight into his life and creative process, among other things.

A portrait of Trash Talk, featuring skating, graffiti, weed, Odd Future, and mayhem.

Much of the early Odd Future buzz centered around Earl Sweatshirt, whose video for “Earl” was a teen-rebel fantasia of drug use and other misbehavior. A provocateur with a dry wit and an outrageously dexterous gift for wordplay, he was a clear inheritor of Eminem’s macabre humor and Lil Wayne’s dyspeptic logorrhea. He was a savvy, schooled rapper: gross, entrancing and thrilling. And also one of the only pop mysteries left. By the time Odd Future began performing and doing interviews, he was nowhere to be seen. In a time of Internet-speed information flood, Earl Sweatshirt’s absence — he was sent to Samoa by his mother — a striking rarity.

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.'"

Wild AF Odd Future Documentary In Their Hometown Ladera (Cooking To Waka Flocka).

We’ve always been a fuckin outcast and shit, but it’s cool, because that’s what’s gonna make us great in the future.