It’s a great week for rappers being petty on the internet. Drake is trolling NBA team owners’ offspring, Kanye is trolling Drake on Letterman’s Netflix talk show, and Tyler The Creator — the King Of The Trolls, if ever there was such a thing — is taking aim at an opponent who made his life much more difficult over the past few years. Once upon a time, UK Prime Minister Theresa May — then Home Secretary — forced Tyler to cancel the UK leg of his Cherry Bomb tour when she banned him from the country altogether in 2015.
As they say, though, success is the best revenge. After Tyler cleaned up his act somewhat over the course of a pair of widely-acclaimed albums, Flower Boy and the recently-released Igor, he announced a trio of upcoming shows at London’s Brixton Academy, effectively celebrating the end of his three-year ban. In that time, May became Prime Minister (in 2016) and it seemed like Tyler’s chances of ever seeing Big Ben again were slim, but today, May announced her resignation, prompting Tyler to send a gloating tweet: “theresa gone, im back.”
theresa gone, im back
— T (@tylerthecreator) May 24, 2019
Of course, both sides had their points. May’s letter to Tyler’s manager Christian Clancy opined that, at the time, his lyrics “encourage[d] violence and intolerance of homosexuality” and “foster[ed] hatred with views that seek to provoke others to terrorist acts.” While it’s arguable that Tyler’s lyrics ever actually prompted anyone to attack anything — they were more obnoxious and juvenile than anything else — it was understandable that the objectionable material got called out. However, Tyler probably also had a point when he expressed his belief that the ban was racially motivated in a 2015 interview with The Guardian: “I was starting to think that they did not like the fact that their children were idolizing a Black man.”
It appears, though, that Tyler has the last laugh for now, as May steps down and Tyler prepares to board a plane this summer to hop the pond and put on a show in foggy London.
