Considering the venue for Tyler, The Creator’s long-running festival, Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, a rain delay was borderline inevitable at some point. Despite Southern California’s reputation, the area surrounding Dodger Stadium does, in fact, experience precipitation every so often, and 2025 — a year that has seen Los Angeles battered by both fire and ICE — just happened to be the year that decided to rain out the festival, as well.
But one of Tyler’s most endearing — and frustrating — traits is that he refuses to be deterred by setbacks. The same ornery impulse that drove him to terrorize 2DopeBoyz for years for not posting his early records now serves better angels, spurring him to move heaven and earth to ensure that Camp continued as usual. The one-week postponement meant borrowing, begging, and cutting deals to keep artists, vendors, and venue partners onboard, he revealed during his set.
Camp Flog Gnaw has been, and remains, a labor of love — the kind of love that sparks sleepless nights, that demands whirlwinds of activity as colleagues and contemporaries begin to wind down operations for the year, that prompts the creative mind to defy man and nature, the markets and the skies to make something shake. It’s why Tyler, The Creator simply can’t be canceled, and why not even a rain delay can keep Camp Flog Gnaw from being a home run.
That resilience was something of a running theme for the reshuffled roster — especially on Saturday’s Camp Stage lineup. From Samara Cyn, who played her first-ever show in 2019, only to have her career nearly derailed by COVID the next year but persevered to reach XXL‘s Freshman cover and receive co-signs from the likes of Lauryn Hill, Nas, and Smino, to PartyOf2, who started their band as Grouptherapy, a collective catharsis from the traumas and travails of life as child actors and survived the scarring departure of a core group member, it seemed like every artist to take the stage on Saturday had some kind of survival story.
Even Saturday’s closer, Childish Gambino, back for the first time since canceling his tour last year, had some surprising news for the crowd as he insisted there wasn’t enough time for him to play all his hits before curfew. With the help of a dazzling drone show, Glover revealed that he’d suffered a stroke — a setback that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, when it revealed a hole in his heart that he was able to have surgically closed.
It’s a scary thing to learn (I have some secondhand experience via a close friend), and the sense of relief and release he undoubtedly felt permeated his set, which ran the gamut from Camp classic “Bonfire” and Kauai game-changer “Sober” to Grammy-winner “Redbone” and a pointedly truncated “This Is America,” which he clearly has a few conflicted feelings about. “We gotta move,” he protested every time he cut a song a little short. Move we did, dancing out the accumulated stress of a truly toxic stretch of months that has felt like a personal attack on the city of angels.
I know I keep saying Flog Gnaw keeps improving on perfection, but what can I say? It’s true. Where so many other instances of founders and entrepreneurs tweaking their products and services can get annoying — we’re talking Google breaking search, Instagram’s pivot to video, and Elon turning Twitter into an everlasting dumpster fire of foreign bots pushing nasty ideologies of all sorts — Tyler keeps fine-tuning Camp Flog Gnaw in ways that actually improve the experience in ways you might not have even noticed needed fixing.
For example: Flipping the Gnaw stage opened up movement festival-wide, making performances from artists like BBTrickz and Alemeda feel more intimate while also making it easier to straight line from Gnaw to Flog (on opposite sides of the main Camp stage). Congestion never felt like the biggest problem at this fest, but that slight traffic relief was noticeable for me.
Even more noticeable was the decision to rotate the Flog stage from its east-west position to a parallel spacing with Camp facing south. OH MY GOODNESS. The last couple of years, watching acts like Kevin Abstract in the afternoon or even Denzel Curry after sunset, it had occurred to me that maybe facing the sun or trying to cram in fans from the right side of the stage weren’t the ideal eyelines. Apparently, Tyler’s team agreed, and the difference was — forgive me — night and day.
Seeing how every iteration of Camp Flog Gnaw actually adds something or makes little fixes with big impacts is even more encouraging in light of the last-minute postponement. It shows that the organizers not only know how to roll with the punches, but find ways to adjust for them before they even hit. If future fests face similar challenges from inclement weather, I wouldn’t be surprised if Tyler and co. find a way to make sunshine from scratch.
