Is 2024 the year of millennial music icons confronting the unknowns of parenthood? Charli XCX sparked widespread conversations about the topic on “I think about it all the time” from the summer-conquering Brat, and now Tyler, the Creator addresses it on what feels like rap’s first Event Album of the year, CHROMAKOPIA. Tyler’s mother Bonita Smith is his guiding light throughout the album, and the song “Hey Jane” opens with her warning her son to “always, always, always wear a condom.” From there, “Hey Jane” (which is also the name of an abortion-related healthcare company) goes on to tell the story of an unplanned pregnancy between Tyler and a woman named Jane, presented as a conversation between the two of them; in the first verse, Tyler raps as himself, and in the second, he responds from the perspective of Jane. The whole thing takes place over a chilled-out, jazzy backdrop, produced–like the entire album–by Tyler himself, and there’s not a single hook in sight. It’s one of the album’s immediate standouts because of how deep Tyler dives into the subject matter, and the way he leaves you hanging on every word.

“Hey Jane, we got the news and I ain’t know what to do,” Tyler begins, and he quickly starts unpacking all the thoughts that have been racing through his head since he learned. He and Jane both grew up without fathers and he doesn’t want his kid to do the same. Their mothers would both be excited by the news. Jane has a couple good qualities she could pass on to their child. Once the pros have been weighed, he gets scared. “Ain’t in the space to raise no goddamn child/Hey Jane, I’m terrified, petrified/I don’t wanna give my freedom up or sanitize it/ This my fault, the results are justified.”

But then he catches himself. “But hey Jane, who am I to come bitch and complain? You gotta deal with all the mental and the physical change. All the heaviest emotions and the physical pain, just to give the kid the man last name? Fuck that.” This is all coming from a guy who probably would’ve made an off-color joke about the same topic when he and his Odd Future pals released their breakthrough mixtapes as teenagers, and that’s one of the prevailing themes of this whole album. Tyler’s gone from late adolescence to his early thirties in the public eye, and to say we’ve watched him grow would be an understatement. Juvenile shock factor was the name of his game in his early days, and since 2017’s Flower Boy, he’s been making a concentrated effort to rewrite his own narrative. Over a series of art-rap masterpieces–of which CHOMRAKOPIA already feels like the fourth consecutive one–he’s matured as both an artist and a person, counteracted past homophobic jokes with revelations about his own queer sexuality, and continued to challenge a multitude of preconceived notions that society has held about him. A song like “Hey Jane” would’ve been unimaginable from Tyler a decade ago, but CHROMAKOPIA reminds us that his most enduring constant is to leave us expecting the unexpected.

And perhaps the most unexpected moment of “Hey Jane” is when Tyler turns it around on himself and attempts to not just see but tell Jane’s side of the story. After admitting to the listener that he and Jane still hardly know each other, and telling Jane he supports whatever choice she makes, he takes on the woman’s perspective himself (rather than bringing in a woman to do so like Kendrick did on the similar but very differently themed “We Cry Together”). “I’m 35 and my ovaries might not reset/I don’t wanna live my whole life feeling regret/Damn, a feeling you can never understand/You just hope to god I get my period again.”

“Jane” goes on to reveal that she had already lost or terminated a pregnancy nine years earlier and doesn’t want to go through the same thing again. And if she keeps it, she says, she can do this alone. “I don’t need you to buy things, ’cause my needs don’t include your money and status… There’s too much on your palette, this is really traumatic for me. I can raise it by myself.”

The Jane verse rises and rises in intensity until finally the music drops out and it ends the same way the Tyler verse ended: “No pressure.” There’s no neat ending, we don’t find out the outcome of the story, and it leaves you with the same thing the song began with: the anxiety of not knowing.

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