For the first time since the start of his rap career, Tyler, the Creator took the stage at the BET Awards. During the ceremony for culture’s biggest night, the California rapper performed hit his new song “Lumberjack,” which is featured on his new album, Call Me If You Get Lost.
The performance saw Tyler pull up on the stage in a light blue Rolls Royce before coming out the vehicle and battling with a wind storm until the song’s end.
Tyler’s BET performance comes on the heels of the release of Call Me If You Get Lost, which came out on Friday (June 25). The album is a collaboration between the Igor star and the legendary DJ Drama, who Tyler long admired before they worked together.
“Shoutout rap music, I love it,” Tyler said in a recent Instagram Live. “DJ Drama, I love you. What you did for rap — phenomenal. From all the Waynes, all the Dedications, from P the In My Mind Prequel mixtape, to Clipse for the We Got It For Cheaps, from Lupe mixtape run all the Farenheits, the Revenge Of The Nerds, to JAY-Z, to Andre [3000] to Westside Gunn for making me wanna just rap again.” He added, “I love it. I love rap. It changed niggas lives.”
“Normally in these types of situations, if I do a Gangsta Grillz with somebody, they compile their music together and hand it over to me, and then I’ll go in on my own without them and do my thing and return the finished product,” DJ Drama said of working with the emcee.
“With Tyler, it was a little different: I came in, gave him an abundance of things — even more than what I had originally placed — and just gave him enough material to choose from and layer it out.”
Call Me if You Get Lost — Tyler’s “most personal album,” according to a recent tweet — has become the biggest of his career thus far, earning an estimated 175,000 total album-equivalent units in its first week. Per reports, it is on track to be the No. 1 hit on the Billboard 200, becoming his second consecutive No. 1 album on the chart.
Watch Tyler’s performance below!