Tyler, the Creator asks, “Do I look like him?” during one of the most delicate moments from his 2024 record CHROMOKOPIA. The track landed quite hard when I first heard it. My own father died when I was too young to remember him, but my family often tells me that I remind them of him and carry myself like him. My father was not an ‘absentee’ in the way Tyler explores, but still I find myself slightly haunted by the idea of a man I never really knew. ‘Like Him’ puts that feeling into words.

Tyler sits with a version of grief that rarely finds its way into music: the confusion of not knowing someone who helped shape you. It is the ache that comes not from memories, but from the lack of them. This tune grapples with what it means to inherit a ghost.

“This tune grapples with what it means to inherit a ghost”

Tyler has long reckoned with the absence of his father in his lyrics. He shot harsh words towards him in the outro track of his debut album Bastard. In a 2014 interview with Larry King, and in various tweets, Tyler claimed that he was actually “stoked” that he did not have a father: “I just decided to rap about it to seem like I’m sad, but I’m stoked,” he said, adding online that his fans would “eat it up”. Yet, the continuation of this theme seems to counter that narrative of nonchalance. His 2013 track ‘Answer’ from Wolf speaks directly to his father in an aggressive yearning that he is too angry to express plainly. ‘Like him’ builds on this vulnerability, but does not necessarily direct his confusion towards his father, coming from a perspective which is evolved and more mature, where he has had time to process his feelings.

His delivery does the emotional work that most artists might write whole verses to express. Midway through the track, there is an ongoing moment where Tyler asks “Do I look like him?” but before the questions can settle, the thoughts are broken with an almost mumbled ad-lib –“like what?”. Here, Tyler captures the burden of being told that you “make expressions like him” even though you are not sure what “him” really means. The track also plays like a call and response. One voice is reaching out in longing, and the other undermines the question – highlighting the emotional whiplash of wondering about someone who was never there to begin with.

The beat itself shifts halfway through. The melancholy synths give way to a more stripped back, drained type of energy, as if mirroring the emotional deflation that comes when Tyler trails off: “Do I look…” He doesn’t even finish the sentence this time. There is a sense that he has stopped asking whether he resembles his father and started asking whether he is even supposed to look for him at all.

It is a song about the difficulty in finding resolution. In Tyler’s case, his father was absent, having left early in his life. In mine, my father died prematurely. But what ‘Like Him’ gets right is the way it evokes a specific kind of grief – the grief of absence without memory. How do you carry a loss that was never fully formed in the first place?

“‘Like Him’ speaks to people whose grief is not easy to name”

‘Like Him’ speaks to people whose grief is not easy to name. It is not about the sharp pain of losing a lover or friend, but explores the ache of what you never had the chance to feel in the first place. That kind of grief lingers quietly, in the background of your thoughts, in a space that is confusing and unformed.

For those of us who lost someone before we could ever really know them, Tyler’s question “Do I look like him?”, lands with the weight of many questions we never got to ask.