Matt Annett

Beyond The Valley, 2019 – a raucous New Years festival that takes place a few minutes from my home. I’d forgone it for a few years already, trying to avoid the ticket cost and amount of effort it’d take to get a group of 18-20 year olds together with all the camping gear and alcohol-stashing techniques that the festival called for, but this one was different. Tyler, The Creator was here. I had a chance to see the man who opened the gates to my love affair with rap music when I was about 13. My friends and I would sit around on those weird sleepovers you have when you’re that age where you’re too young to drink, but old enough to want to stay up all night – we’d fill this time by sitting around and learning all the words to Yonkers. So here we are, that same group (many years later), on the night of Tyler’s performance, and we gain entry to the festival through a convenient hole in the fence like the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing-ninjas that we were. We get to the main stage, Tyler’s there (!!!) and he starts his set. We’re loving it, of course, but he’s in Igor-mode, and so the chances of him playing our jam, Yonkers (an 8-year-old song, at this point) seemed thin. Despite this, of course, we had to politely request our song, and so we did, much to the humor of our surrounding crowd-mates. And then, when that rattling beat actually started, I think I blacked out. I still get chills thinking about it. I saw Tyler perform Yonkers. Right there in front of me.