In the last month, Tyler Okonma has received a lot of buzz on the internet for his newly released album, Chromakopia. Okonma is notorious for his consistency of talent throughout his career, dropping an album every two years since 2009. Last year Okonma was expected to release an album but to everybody’s surprise the only thing he had released was a deluxe version of his 2021 album Call Me If You Get Lost.
As an Okonma fan, I was slightly disappointed, not that he had not released an album, but that he had broken his career-long streak of consistency and may not hold himself to the same standard. However, although he had broken a huge guiding factor in his albums, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative thing. Luckily this year he decided to stray from his roots even more and release Chromakopia, Okonma’s 8th studio album. Not only did he break boundaries in this measure, but he also decided to release this album at 6 AM EST on a Monday, which completely contradicts the norm in the Hip-Hop industry. This is monumental because most artists in this genre believe that to have a successful album you want people to be passively listening throughout the weekend so most artists release music on Fridays around noon EST. Okonma has expressed his disapproval of this system in a 2023 interview with Naurdwar at Camp Flog Gnaw saying “I think if you put music out during the week, man that commute to work, or that to commute to school. You really have that hour to really dive in and really listen.” said Okonma.
With every single one of Okonma’s albums, he creates an experience to throw the listener into and he portrays this through his rollouts and the music that he puts out. For this album, he puts on the persona of a masked character and released 5 videos before the release of the record that plays into the album’s theme. These videos were fascinating because they drew buzz and excitement for this album. The character Okonma displays in this album slightly alludes to a character in the book, The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, Chroma the Great. The character in this book is the conductor of color and uses instruments to provide color to the people. Okonma played into this recently during his performance at Camp Flog Gnaw. During his performance, Okonma conducts the crowd while they sing the newly released songs. We also see that the colors of the stage change throughout every song he plays, matching the sound and creating an experience past the music that people come to the carnival for.
Overall, the storyline that is created throughout this rollout has been extremely impactful. Okonma is creating an experience for his listeners to run through and analyze on top of releasing an album, it creates something special for his listeners to decipher. Knowing his audience and accommodating exactly what they are looking for is something that Okonma does extraordinarily well all while bending genre norms and being himself.
