The early videos he made with his Odd Future collective included, among other stunts, images of Tyler hanging himself and compatriot Earl Sweatshirt ripping off his own fingernail. 'Hey sir, sorry? I was just speeding? Around a corner? In a sports car? During rush hour? My bad.''ДЇour years ago, Tyler went zero to 60 in record time. 'We could've been exchanging information. 'That could've been a completely different reality just now,' he says. Got my adrenaline in for the day.' We ride on, and when we pass through the gate to his cul-de-sac, Tyler exhales. The previous attempts didn't faze me, but that time, I felt it. Were you scared?' He's asked me this a couple times throughout the ride, playfully testing my threshold, performing. Tyler brakes instinctually, swerving back to the right lane a few moments before disaster. The tires screech, losing contact with the asphalt, and a motorcycle and gray sedan emerge from around the hill, heading right toward us. My right side crushes into the passenger door as he increasingly hugs the oncoming lane. The car churns forward, growling, and Tyler swings a sharp left around the bend. I know when this dude is thinking about making a left turn before his blinkers are on.' 'The way I drive, I have to see three cars ahead. It gets kinda sketch out here,' he says, waiting for a minivan in front of us to veer off and clear his straight shot back down the slope. Trailer homes line the road a nearby scarecrow hangs from a tree branch by the neck. When he finds a bend of road sloped around a rocky hill that looks promising for a clean drift, Tyler plows up it, gets some distance, and makes a sharp U-turn. We swing to a dead-footed stop centimeters short of every rear bumper we face, and slingshot out from under every fresh green light. He mashes his checkered Vans into the gas and brake pedals with binary force. Still weaving across lanes, he grabs his phone and begins skipping through demos from his upcoming fourth album, which he's been quietly recording for the past year, and lands on a two-minute blitz of scratch verses and stampeding, jagged drums. He is 23, born Tyler Gregory Okonma in March 1991 in Los Angeles, and the stretch of the San Fernando Valley he now calls home is all mountains and dust, lizards and mansions, a $40 Uber away from the Fairfax skate shops he lurked as a teen. Suddenly, he's miming along to thick '70s soul, performing to his speedometer, which has climbed to 85.

He palms the wheel with one hand and thrashes to the music with the other, changing songs every 40 seconds. 'I really wanna fucking drift,' he says, shifting gears like he's in an arcade racing chair. Tyler, the Creator is tearing down Route 118 in an all-white BMW, blasting Death Grips.

Tyler the creator album cover