I agree that it’s misguided to criticize Billie Eilish for material created by Tyler The Creator. Consequently, I’m going to cut to the chase and defend Tyler. In the process, I will also be defending Mick Jagger for writing “Brown Sugar”, and any other performer/songwriter who is being criticized for saying bad things.

Each speech act gets its full meaning from the context in which it is spoken or written. Consequently, there are certain things it is OK to say in a performance that are not OK to say in any other social context. For example, you can say “put all your money in this leather bag, or I will shoot you between the eyes” if you are an actor in a movie. It is not OK to say that exact same thing if you are speaking to a teller in a real bank. No sane person confuses a movie actor with the character she portrays. No one is trying to cancel Anthony Hopkins for the things he said and did while playing Hannibal Lecter. Nevertheless, some people don’t seem to realize that singers and rappers are performers playing a particular persona, and they’re not just saying what they think. This is an understandable confusion, particularly when the performer and the writer are the same person. If the performer is gifted, and radiates the right sort of energy, she really can give the impression that she is just speaking from the heart.

However, many performers create personas that are designed to shock, and so they say horrible and forbidden things that they would never say in any other context. Mick Jagger has never enslaved anyone, or whipped any enslaved person, and he is neither the Devil nor a Street Fighting Man. He has probably never dated a factory girl, either. He shouldn't be canceled for pretending to be any of those things, anymore than Anthony Hopkins should be canceled for pretending to be Hannibal Lecter.

I was not familiar with Tyler the Creator before reading this article. However, judging from the lyrics at the link, he is taking us on a journey into his Id, showing the shadow side of his persona by free-associating his anger, lust, confusion, and fear in a style that reminds me a lot of both James Joyce and William Burroughs. This is what Poets were supposed to do, once upon a time, and he is doing it very well. This kind of truth telling was once the driving ideal of the arts, and we need to bring it back, albeit with some important changes.

In the mid twentieth century, Many of us believed that there was something like a moral obligation to acknowledge that a joke was funny, even when it was racist or sexist or cruel, or just disgusting. The ability to laugh at what were called “Sick Jokes” was seen as a kind of authenticity or integrity. It reflected the ability to own and acknowledge even the darkest parts of your personality. There are problems with that point of view, which lead to the hypersensitivities of the woke era. But we are still trying to find a balance between those extremes.

I talk about this transition here.

https://teedrockwell.medium.com/the-fall-and-rise-of-forbidden-language-bb0a27152b09