This “Rack City” Rapper Wants You to Know He's More Than Just Kylie Jenner's Boyfriend
Photography by Eric Ray Davidson
Styling by Christopher Kim
Grooming by Hee Soo
Just days before I’m scheduled to interview Tyga at L.A.’s Milk Studios, the news breaks: The 26-year-old rapper and his Calabasas Barbie doll girlfriend have broken up
For those of you living under a rock (or somewhere with really patchy Wi-Fi), that girlfriend is the ultrafamous teenage reality star Kylie Jenner, and at the time of writing, keeping in line with Young Hollywood’s time honored tradition of the on-and-off-again relationship, Tyga and Kylie are back together.
But at the time, I thought the news would alter my plans one of two ways: Either Tyga’s handlers would cancel the interview altogether, to shield him from a prying journalist (or because working with a broken heart really sucks), or I had just scored the first post-breakup interview with Tyga, who would pour his heart out to me.
Neither of those things came to fruition.
Instead, the interview went along as planned, with a very strict caveat from the publicist: “No questions can be asked about Kylie.” Bummer.
It’s hard to blame Tyga for his strict moratorium on all things Jenner. While the careers of his Young Money label mates Drake and Nicki Minaj have gone nuclear, Tyga’s has languished. Three years removed from his breakout albums Careless World: Rise of the Last King, and Hotel California, and with his only crossover hit, “Rack City” – the slithering earworm that made him a star – a distant memory, Tyga is in desperate need of a hit.
His last effort, the ambitious but misguided The Gold Album: 18th Dynasty, was savaged by critics and sold poorly, despite a major cosign from its executive producer, Kanye West.
As Justin Bieber can attest, nothing gets the media back on your side like a hit record, and right now, the media is not on Tyga’s side.
Tyga’s name, which stands for “Thank You God Always,” stems from his mom’s habit of calling him Tiger Woods as a child, after his boyish resemblance to the legendary golfer. Google his name, and what you’ll uncover is a series of scathing takedowns, criticizing the rapper for everything from Rack City XXX, the porn film he directed and acted in to the shameless way he flaunts the “barely legal” status of his girlfriend, in songs like “Stimulated,” in which Tyga brags “They say she young, I should’ve waited / She a big girl dog, when she stimulated.”
Then there’s the legend of how their relationship began, a soap so sordid, it makes an episode of Empire look like Sesame Street. According to TMZ mythology, Tyga left his fiancée, Blac Chyna, an ex-stripper and former Kardashian BFF, and their infant son King Cairo Stevenson, to embark on a relationship with the then underage Jenner. Chyna’s friend Amber Rose has said that Tyga “should be ashamed of himself” for leaving his woman and baby for “a 16-year-old who just turned 17.” Tyga meanwhile, has denied the allegations. “My son has given me so much more to live for,” he would say later.
Upon my arrival at the Hollywood studio, two hulking members of Tyga’s entourage form a human barricade and only recede when someone else on set identifies me as the writer. Inside, Tyga is stunting for the camera with a puffed up bravado that somewhat belies the current state of his music career.
He’s a prolific rapper, a workaholic really, but lately, his personal life has overshadowed his professional one, something that weighs heavily on him in songs like “40 Mill,” in which he raps “I don’t want to be famous / I just want to be rich,” while the song’s video concludes with the angsty protest: “Fame is the devil.”
“It’s a gift and a curse,” Tyga says about life in the limelight. “You can never really get used to people chasing you all day, but whether you’re an actor, a rapper, or an athlete, that’s the life you chose,” he adds. “You sacrifice your freedom.”
For Tyga, it was a sacrifice he knew he wanted to make as early as 12, when he began honing his skills in the bedrock of hip-hop that is Compton. “I recorded all my songs in my room, made beats on my own laptop, and I just did freestyles and never really played it for anybody but me and my friends,” he recalls. “Every day coming home from school it was all I wanted to do. I wasn’t doing homework, or going to the park to play basketball, or riding my bike. I just wanted to record.” He remembers sleeping in cars and handing out mixtapes in shopping malls and high school dances to whoever would listen. “I just really had faith,” he says. “I didn’t think about having number one songs, I didn’t know how I was going to get there or who I was going to meet on this journey, I just knew I wanted to make music.”
That maniacal work ethic has sustained Tyga to this day. It’s what separates him from his peers. Well that, and an outsize self confidence that’s never betrayed him, despite his recent career turbulence.
“Even though so many people are doing music, I still feel like what I do is not comparable. It can’t be duplicated. When you start looking at all the other people, that’s you losing your faith in what you’re supposed to do.”
The critical and commercial success of the Kanyes and Jay Z’s of the world have so far eluded Tyga, but according to the rapper, he’s just now entering his prime. “Everything that I’ve done to this point doesn’t even matter. When I hear ‘Rack City,’ it doesn’t even matter,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I’m only doing this to sit with the gods. There’s no other way I see it for myself.”
One of those gods he’s referring to is Lil Wayne, whom Tyga first met backstage at the 2007 VMAs (“I was starstruck”) and who would eventually sign him to his first major record deal. “He gave me the opportunity,” he says of his favorite rapper-turned-mentor. “He taught me a lot.”
Like Wayne, Tyga is a sartorial savant and takes pride in what he wears. “As a rapper, people look to you for culture,” he says. Tyga’s clothing line, Last Kings, is haute streetwear inspired by his love of ancient Egypt’s lavish aesthetic. (The Melrose Avenue flagship store looks like King Tut’s tomb got a Donatella Versace makeover.) “My clothes is all about the fit. The fit needs to be right.”
When our time ends, Tyga quickly exits, likely back to the gilded town of Calabasas, where the ultrarich commingle and where Tyga will plot his next move, in an ongoing effort to prove that there’s a lot more to him than who he’s dating — something I learned firsthand. All I had to do was ask.
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