One of the greatest things about music is its ability to transport, as though a brief but no less brilliant spell has been cast on the listener, uprooting them from life and into a vivid new place. Bob Dylan and his literary portrait of a surreal circus on "Like A Rolling Stone"; the leather-and- opioid-scented warehouses of 1970s New York as presented by the Velvet Underground; Parliament hosting a funky-ass disco on the moon. These works coalesce emotion, writing and imagery, then bring the listener into an environment. And they do so in a way that feels beyond sound, as though it's possible to use all the senses to experience the scenarios embedded in their music.

Rap is great at creating these environments too. Yet, for the most part, there can be a similar thematic: JAY-Z on the streets of Brooklyn, Kendrick or Ice Cube rolling down Rosecrans Avenue, OutKast cooking up in the basements of Atlanta, Georgia. Despite its brilliance, the genre can often be rooted in a dense, clogged-up city environment – and if not that, then a club. Increasingly there are anomalies (Chance's Colouring Boo_k; Kevin Abstract's _American Boyfriend; Lil Yachty and his sailing crew, et al), but, over his now almost a decade long career, Tyler, the Creator has created a unique space, one that is more akin to a film set than a piece of music. There's even a rotating list of characters – Frank Ocean and Syd, Chaz Bundick and Pharrell Williams, Coco O and Kali Uchis – who soak pigment into Tyler's backdrop with their own unique tones, making all the parts into a grand whole. The result: a paradisiac exploration of the outdoors.

Of course, Tyler isn't the first artist to use rap as a means to explore nature, or to use music as an aural reflection of it. "Bonita Applebum" from A Tribe Called Quest is touched with the trails of a jet-plane coasting at 36,000 feet, looking down on some hidden island. The video for Soul of Mischief's "93 til' Infinity" literally takes place next to a waterfall so beautiful it should be spread, double-paged, in National Geographic. Soulquarians – the neo-soul rap collective made up of Erykah Badu, Questlove, Talib Kweli and D'Angelo, among others – have several green-fingered compositions in their catalogue too. But Tyler, the Creator is different: his world exists in nature, yet it also involves skateboarding, doughnuts, polaroid cameras, streetwear. Cool shit, basically – kind of like what you might see in a coming-of-age film, but so fucking sweet.

As time passes and early albums Bastard and Goblin begin to fade into the distance, perhaps this world will become more prominent in the public's perception of Tyler, the Creator. It's one of bike rides into sunsets, treehouses, wearing a different colour each and every day (as he does with his GOLF line of clothing), exploring the world rather than throwing hours away on the internet, eating far too much sugar, being conscious and not wasted, bumblebees, afternoon adventures with a crush – or even doing nothing, except being still and outside. In a way, it's an ongoing exploration into the six-week summer vacation most of us think we can never have again, now we're old. But we can. As Frank Ocean once sang: "My cool summer never ends".

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