“She,” Tyler, the Creator’s attempt at a love song, sounds pleasant enough: a soft, Neptunes-lite beat; second-person lyrics expressing the deep desire spurred by, as well as the inimitable beauty of, the subject at hand; an actual R&B hook, sung by Odd Future’s crooner Frank Ocean. But then you realize that hook is about a guy illicitly observing his beloved through an open window, and that the bits of straightforward romantic expression are laced with specifically articulated threats of violence, and that this is still a Tyler song after all. Appropriately, the new music video for the track (directed by Tyler himself under his pseudonym Wolf Haley) shoots for the same balance of sweet and deeply unsettling. On the one hand, Tyler breaks into the girl’s room while she’s sleeping at night and smells her underwear; on the other, his generally brazen display of affection — ultimately foiled by the police and Ocean, in excellent “Sabotage”-indebted costuming — does seem to effectively woo her over by the end. And, unlike in prior videos in the Odd Future filmography, no one eats any cockroaches and no one spits blood.
