FEATURE:
Spotlight
included Tierra Whack in my Modern Heroines feature. She has been on the scene for years and, to me, is an inspiration for so many people. Born in Philadelphia, she put out her debut album, Whack World, in 2018. It might seem like a strange time to spotlight her, as she has rumoured to be quitting music. That said, she put out a new song last week. One cannot really tell whether Tierra Whack is still coming back or whether she is thinking of leaving. I want to put her in this Spotlight feature as she is an incredible artist that many people will want to see a second album from. I will bring in a few interviews, as we get to discover more about Tierra Whack and where she is from. If you have not checked out her debut, Whack World, then do so. It is a collection of one-minute songs that are really fascinating. It is like a collage that is over in fifteen minutes. The audio-visual album is a unique treat that everyone needs to experience! This is what Pitchfork wrote in their review:
“Whack World puts forth a portrait of the good and the bad, the weird and the unremarkable, while plowing through insecurities. She uses vanity mirrors to magnify her features on a song titled “Pretty Ugly” and bursts out of a house several sizes too small on “Dr. Seuss,” as if to reflect that feeling of having outgrown your surroundings or other people’s expectations. With the walls closing in, she throws down a bit of wordplay in a helium-infused voice—“Look but don’t touch/I should just be celibate/You the type to sell out/Me? I’m trying to sell a bit”—before pitching into a warped slo-mo like she’s being smothered.
The triumph of Whack World feels that much more important given the music industry’s stubborn refusal to champion diverse portrayals of women in rap outside of hypersexualized stereotypes. There is freedom in the margins, and Whack has crafted a work that beautifully manifests her own vision on her own terms. The result is brilliant—from the length of the songs down to the exaggerated imagery. Though she springs from a rich stylistic lineage, her 60-second confections have few modern precedents. Short songs, while in vogue, serve a different purpose here: Where others stretch small ideas and repetition, thinning them out for easy absorption, Whack uses the time constraint to make her big ideas seem larger than the space they’re allotted. Like an evolution in real time, she gives just enough to complete the thought before she morphs and catapults you to the next one.
Whack World morphs into a clever exercise in economy and using only what you need. It’s a visual album prepackaged for optimum social media consumption; every tiny piece stands on its own without losing sight of the larger picture. At its core, though, Whack’s sense of humor—her captivating depiction of a black woman’s imagination—is an opportunity to celebrate an aspect of art that often goes uncelebrated, an opportunity for Whack to celebrate herself”.
I do hope that we get another release from Tierra Whack. She is such a compelling artist that, just now, is getting to the wider world. I feel Whack World put her on the map…though many people are discovering her as she has recently released Walk the Beast. She has put out a series of singles between the release of Whack World and now – including the excellent Unemployed (2019). These, like Walk the Beast, are three or four minutes in length. If there is another album, it might be more conventional and longer.
I am going to start with an interview from 2018. The Guardian chatted with Tierra Whack as there was a lot of hype and excitement around the release of Whack World:
“Whack – who says that’s her real name from birth – has been gaining buzz with Whack World, her newly released debut album that includes 15 songs with 15 accompanying videos, and each is exactly one minute long. It has drawn rave reviews and praise from some big names. Solange Knowles named her as a musician that excites her now – “She sent me a shirt that says, ‘Tierra Whack is my mom,’ and I wear it proudly,” Knowles told Billboard in March. Flying Lotus posted praise about her last fall and asked her to open one of his shows. And Whack will be opening for Lauryn Hill at the Philadelphia stop of Hill’s 20th anniversary tour for her masterpiece album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. (Whack says she loved “every single song” on the album. “That’s my idol. She’s the reason I do it.”)
Her success comes amid an unusual boom period for female rappers. Cardi B has been breaking chart records and currently has three songs on Billboard’s Hot 100, two of which are in the top 10 amid a sea of Drake tracks. (She’s also managed to give birth to a baby daughter in the same week.) Nicki Minaj has also seen continued chart success ahead of the release of her fourth album, Queen. And Pitchfork’s best new music label is increasingly being applied to smaller, up-and-coming artists such as Lizzo and CupcakKe. “I want more females to join in and get the shine, and I hope to be part of the reason,” Whack told the New York Times in June.
Though she recognizes the importance of women in rap at this moment, Whack doesn’t identify solely as a rapper. She’s constantly shapeshifting, both onstage and on her album. During Whack’s short set at Warm Up, she was wide-eyed and bouncing back and forth across a small stage beneath clumps of inflated animals suspended in the air, wearing a bright yellow T-shirt dress with a giant pink “W”, commissioned and designed by her friend Tatyanna Nance. Whack alternated between rapid-fire raps and heartfelt sung lines such as “I miss my dog”, with one hand extended forward to punctuate her words, and asking people’s names and demanding dancing or group shouts between songs.
Whack is undeniably a skilled rapper, but she doesn’t define herself as singularly a musician of that genre – or even a musician at all. She prefers to be called an artist and an entertainer. And that may be a reaction to the confines she felt as a developing musician. “Growing up people would tell me: ‘Yo, you only can do one thing. If you’re going to rap, just rap. If you’re going to sing, just sing.’ It boxed me in. But I just figured out a way to show everything. It’s like if you have a job interview, you want to present as many skills as you have. Your résumé.”
Even in interviews, Whack edges toward pushing the limits of her presented identity and which details matter – though she’s been quoted in other publications as saying she’s 22, she told the Guardian she’s 36. (A YouTube video of Whack rapping impressively on the streets of Philadelphia at age 15 in 2011 suggests 22 is her real age.)
Whack’s résumé as an artist began with a school assignment – she had to write and present a poem to her class, which was a big deal since she was so shy at the time. She wrote and memorized a freestyle poem. “I went up there and just presented it crazy. I was just talking about the weirdest things, just rhyming any kind of word,” Whack says. She felt it was the first time her friends and family really saw who she was. She immediately asked her mom to buy her some notebooks, “and I just started writing and writing”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Allen
Like so many artists, Tierra Whack has a really fascinating background and upbringing. It seems that a lot of violence and upheaval that she saw in a harsh Philadelphia neighbourhood turned her towards something creative and more spiritual. NME interviewed the rapper in 2019. We learned more about her childhood:
“The eldest of three siblings, Tierra Helena Whack was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a hard neighbourhood. “I grew up in the projects, 11th and Norris,” she says. “[It was] every man for himself. I remember seeing the guys on the corner, hearing gunshots. I guess a lot of people would say it was rough.”
In her childhood, Tierra had an obsessive inclination towards poetry and performance, turning her rhymes into raps under the moniker Dizzle Dizz. In high school, she and her crew petitioned their strict principal to allow them to perform a couple of songs from Sister Act 2 at a talent show. Tierra performed the famous “Joyful, “Joyful” rap verse, naturally – and they won.
When she was 15, Tierra and her mother were out driving and spotted the underground Philly music collective We Run The Streets. Whack’s mother encouraged her daughter to get out of the car and freestyle. Showcasing fierce talent, multi-syllabic flow and whimsical punchlines like, “I stretch my bills / yes my money exercise”, it was abundantly clear that Tierra was already a gifted MC – and one with killer bars like “used to be poverty / now I’m taking all your moneys like robberies”.
Tierra, though, seems to have little to no interest in fame when so many artists fish for clout as a means to survive. Her humility is sincere as she still grapples with her newfound stardom. “Who would have ever thought I’d be in London?” she screams. “Growing up, we only saw these places in movies. Like, you know that it’s real, but it doesn’t really hit you that you can go there, you can get a passport, you can go see these places in these movies, in these TV shows, you know what I mean?”
With no confirmation on a future album, audiences eager for a follow-up to ‘Whack World’ have, instead, been snacking on videos like ‘Unemployed’. In it, Tierra is a chef preparing a feast for her boss. The video takes a typically bizarre turn when Tierra’s main ingredients – potatoes – appear to be alive. Preparing a buffet of potato dishes – fried, mashed, baked – Tierra recognises that the potatoes are alive and seems to derive some form of pleasure in chopping them for her employers, who, themselves, are giant potatoes. This unusual cannibalistic video is made even more engaging by the haunting beats layered underneath her vicious bars.
With a staggering amount of self-confidence – “maybe it’s just because I’m a Leo,” she says wryly” – Tierra wants to reiterate that it wasn’t an easy path to get to where she is now, and that it took a whole lot of self-belief and discipline. Her rules for life? “Don’t step outside until you believe in yourself. Don’t get dressed in public. Get your shit together before you go outside.” It’s this incredible faith in herself that has also made Tierra start thinking about delving into other art forms. Inspired by Jordan Peele, in particular, and his most recent horror hit US, she wouldn’t mind making a movie: “He [Peele] is the perfect balance which I find myself to be: crazy, creepy and funny. That’s what I like. All horror movies, I laugh my ass off. I don’t think they’re scary.”
In a short time, Tierra Whack has received an incredible amount of praise from fans and critics alike. Anderson .Paak even compared her iconic artist Missy Elliot: someone Tierra thinks of as a role model. She accepts the term graciously, but concedes, “That’s a huge compliment, but I just want to be me. She’s one of my idols, but I’m just focused on being me. I appreciate all the compliments, but I’m working hard to really become a household name to change the world. I want to be Tierra Whack”.
I am going to wrap it up soon. There are two other interviews I feel warrant further exploration and exposure. It seems that everyone who interviews Tierra Whack gets a different experience. She definitely exudes loads of energy! DAZED got to witness her in good form when they spoke to her in 2019:
“I begin to ask about her reemergence onto the Philly scene, when Whack jumps in to ask if I’m using the pen I’ve been idly rolling between my fingers above an empty page. “Can I use it?” she asks, and I hand it over. She briefly accepts some paper, before deciding against it. “It's fine – that’s your notebook, and a napkin is cooler anyways,” she says, starting to doodle on the dark green tissue. I worry that she’s tired of my questions, but actually she begins to relax and open up (perhaps finally able to extract herself from a sense of ‘interrogation’ by retreating a little into the familiar torrent of her own imagination). Tierra Whack seemed to arrive fully-formed when Whack World catapulted her to a global stage, but she admits to feeling frustrated when people assume that her success came in an instant, erasing the struggle that came before.
What does she wish people knew about her life, pre-fame? “That I was homeless for three months when I came back (to Philly),” she says. “I lived out of storage, and from friends’ and family’s houses, because nobody really let me stay with them. It was rough.” She could have gone back to her mum in Atlanta, but she was desperately trying to make her music known, and Philadelphia was where she needed to be. How did she get through it, and come out the other side? “Music. Really just music,” she says. Coming from another artist, the answer could easily seem trite, but Whack is deadly serious. “I was doing really bad, but I just stuck with music and kept my job (washing dishes) the whole time,” she says.
From empathising with the existential dread of a potato in “Unemployed”, to deciphering the emotions behind the gleaming rictus grins in “Mumbo Jumbo”, it’s clear that Tierra Whack’s art works on levels beyond the zany, cartoonish surface. Though she describes the process of songwriting and generating music video concepts as if it were simply a case of plucking ideas from her brain like low hanging fruit, it is uncanny how Whack’s work seems able to tap into universal emotions, inviting a multiplicity of interpretations. I don’t mean to suggest that Whack is some kind of idiot-savant; but considering her inspiration mostly comes from the hyper-specific and apparently quotidian, she does have a mercurial talent for channeling the changing winds of contemporary culture through her free-associated streams of consciousness.
Whack has an energy that radiates like an aura. Not one of effervescent good luck, or head-in-sand enthusiasm, but a determination and humble belief in her ability to work hard and be great. “If I can make it through homelessness, I can make it through anything,” she says. As the accolades and industry cosigns pile up – from Missy Elliott, Solange, Vince Staples, Janelle Monaé, and more – Tierra Whack is determined not to lose herself in the shark-infested waters of fame. She remembers her Grammy nomination mostly when journalists bring it up, and has a healthy scepticism of shiny institutional trinkets. “If I get an award, that's cool. If I get nominated, that’s really cool. But I’m focused on creating art, having fun and enjoying life,” she says, handing me the doodled napkin as a parting gift. “I’m on my journey”.
To end up, there is a great interview from last year that is among the most current. I am not sure what Tierra Whack has planned for the next year or so and whether any quit rumours are substantial and will lead to her departing – let us hope not! This gal-dem interview shows that the sort of energy, playfulness and personality we hear through Whack World is embodied in its creator:
“Tierra’s presence also makes it clear that the brilliant, chaotic energy of Whack World is just who she is. In conversation, she leaps from topic to topic; presents long analogies; goes quiet, suddenly, disappearing into her own head; even provides deep narratives on things she spots on the street outside.
At one point, for example, we see a child helping her dad unload his lorry of Italian food, and Tierra is off: “Wow, she’s opening that big truck! You think she drove the truck too? Is she about to get in the back of the truck?? That box says, ‘Good pizza!’ – it’s probably bad. I kind of just want the box, not what’s inside. What do you think the next box says? A blank box? You don’t know what’s gonna be in there! Man, this little girl is really helping. I want to be her when I grow up. Wow. This is the best thing ever, this should be a movie. I hate olives so bad! I don’t like people named Oliver – it makes me really angry and I want to pull my hair out. She’s making a beat with the box, did you see her, did you see her? Watch out!”
Tierra is innately entertaining, from the way she tells ridiculous, exuberant stories to the way she poses for the camera. “I always wanted to be inside the TV,” she says when I ask about her childhood dreams, “I loved the TV so much, I used to sit in front of it like this,” – she mimes having her nose pressed up to the glass – “watching music videos and cartoons. I always wanted to be an entertainer.” But her desire to keep people smiling also feels conscientious. At one point I’m stumbling over my questions, apologetic, and she immediately points to a sign across the road: “‘You’re Beautiful’. Look, that’s a sign! I’m so happy to be here. You’re beautiful.”
Tierra talks a lot about “leading with positivity” – and at times it can feel a little starry-eyed and childlike. But, for all her references to not wanting to grow up, it’s not that she’s oblivious to the ugliness of the real world. Her songs delve into strange places of darkness, and in conversation she mentions moving from a project neighbourhood in South Philadelphia to a more affluent area with more white people: “I made white friends, and then their parents would be racist. I could just tell they hated my guts – you can feel when somebody is evil, and I think that is evil. I think everybody should love everybody”.
Let’s leave it here. Go and follow Tierra Whack and listen to Whack World if you have a spare fifteen minutes. Check out her singles and other work too. She is a mighty talent who I hope will continue and put out more music. Having released singles since 2018, I think that she has enough material for a full-length album. Both popular and underrated, I do feel there are a load of people who do not know about her. Maybe the brief and unconventional nature of the album did not draw in as many people as would like. Go and spin it. I will keep an eye out to see where…
THE amazing Tierra Whack heads next.
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