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“Coming to the UK is a privilege, and we expect those who come here to respect our shared values,” a spokesman for the UK’s Home Office told the magazine. “The Home Secretary has the power to exclude an individual if she considers that his or her presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good or if their exclusion is justified on public policy grounds.”
The decision appears to be based on two of his albums, “Bastard” and “Goblin,” that were released when Tyler was still a teen. Despite rocketing the Los Angeles-born rapper and his crew Odd Future to stardom, they were also widely condemned for their explicit subject matter.
But in the years since, the rapper has steadily pushed away from that reputation on the albums “Wolf” and “Cherry Bomb.”
Tyler’s manager Christian Clancy took to Tumblr to elaborate on the ban and included some of the Home Office’s stated reasoning:
“tyler has been banned from entering the UK for somewhere between 3 to 5 years per a letter from the secretary of state for the home department of the united kingdom. the letter specifically cites lyrics he wrote 6-7 years ago for his albums bastard and goblin – the type of lyrics he hasn’t written since… highlights from the letter include that his work ‘encourages violence and intolerance of homosexuality’ and ‘fosters hatred with views that seeks to provoke others to terrorist acts..’”
Clancy also noted that he and Tyler had visited the country several times over the past year, including last month for a special screening of “Napoleon Dynamite” with friends. And while he admitted being uncomfortable with some of his client’s earlier work, he was shocked that his evolution had been ignored.
“is he perfect? absolutely not. he’s a human evolving like the rest of us, and evolution is a process, not a light switch,” he wrote before adding, “I'm not defending his OLD lyrics. to be honest they make me cringe, but i stand beside him because of who he actually IS.”
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