Another campaign to ban Tyler, The Creator from Australia

Grassroots activist group Collective Shout is again campaigning to stop US rapper Tyler, The Creator from touring Australia in September. The first time was in 2013.

The group battles against media content that it sees as misogynistic and encouraging violence against women.

In recent months, it tried to pull Zoo magazine off supermarket shelves and for Australian dancewear stores to stop stocking the product of US label California Kisses (CK). The latter was in response to its ad featuring three models aged 12-16 posing suggestively alongside the slogan ‘Pop That’, a reference to taking their virginity.

Collective Shout, which earlier also had a Snoop Dogg visit in its sights, wrote to Immigration Minister Peter Dutton to revoke Tyler, The Creator’s visa.

Its letter called for the ban on the grounds of the Immigration Department’s Controversial Visa Applicants whose activities, comments and presence would “propagate, vilify or incite discord in the Australian community or a segment of that community, or represent a danger to the Australian community or a segment of that community.”

It pointed out, “Tyler the Creator has received widespread media attention over the span of his career for misogynistic hate speech against women, as well as homophobia. He is renowned for his songs advocating rape and extreme violence against women, including murder, genital mutilation, stuffing them into car boots, trapping them in his basement, raping their corpses and burying their bodies.”

In 2013, Tyler, The Creator was allowed to tour and lashed out at Collective Shout member Talitha Stone at a Sydney show. He called her “bitch” and “whore”, among other things, a tirade that was filmed and posted online. Collective Shout maintains that the publicity over those comments led to his being banned in New Zealand in 2014.

Ironically, in a US radio interview last week, the rapper spoke about a May 2013 controversy in the States. An ad that he directed for Mountain Dew was pulled after a black scholar, Boyce Watkins, slammed it as "arguably the most racist commercial in history." It featured a battered woman identifying her attacker from an all-black police line-up and a talking goat. At the time, the rapper rejected that the younger demographic of all colours would not have seen it as perpetuating racial stereotypes.

In the recent interview, Tyler, The Creator remained unrepentant two years later. He said for a young Afro-American to be given the power by a major corporation to put across the black street experience to a mass market was a lost opportunity.

“For an older black guy — instead of congratulating me — decided to look at something negative from it and to just cut off any other opportunities from me opening the door, for even Mountain Dew for giving me a chance really saddened me. That broke my spirit.”