While the video for “Rella” could have taken its inspiration from lucid dreaming — with Odd Future members crashing through walls, slapping people, and transmogrifying into centaurs without consequences — “NY (Ned Flander),” which Tyler, the Creator (as “Wolf Haley”) also directed, feels like a nightmare: Claustrophobic, extremely dark, and quite possibly recurrent.
It centers around a character that we glimpse at the beginning of “Rella,” a man with a mustache, recliner, and a filthy little house. (This is Hodgy Beats.) But where “Rella” quickly turns surreal, with the man trading his mustache for a space warrior’s armor and enduring the quaking created by a large stripper’s gyrations, “NY (Ned Flander)” maintains a certain realism, with that same stripper consigned to a rap video inside of the man’s TV. Things do take a strange turn when we discover that the man’s toddler has Tyler, the Creator’s head, but he remains a baby in a fucked-up family — and the video ends with the promise of another doomed Odd Futurist to come, as daddy rolls over onto mama. This cycle of promotional clips (“OF Tape Vol. 2” is out March 20!) is starting to feel suspiciously like an allegory.