A multicoloured dog preserved by taxidermy, a shimmering sequined black coffin, Muppets commandeering a graveyard, psychotic grins paralyzed by dental appliances… In her songs and technicolour music videos, Tierra Whack gathers tragicomic images like flowers in a lovely bouquet—and then leaves them out to wilt and stink. She has a flair for pairing off-kilter nursery-rhyme flows with subjects like grief and suicide, often to humorous effect; in “Two Night,” a twinkling cut from World Wide Whack, her debut full-length album, which was released in March, she appends an offhand admission to a prospective suicide note: “But before I go / Gotta let you know… / I didn’t pay the light bill this month!”

“I’ve always been the kind of person to tell a really sad story and then start laughing,” Whack tells me one spring morning. “Maybe it’s a nervous thing, but it’s also that once you’ve been through the pain, you can find joy in it.” Sometimes your misfortune seems so bottomless that it feels like a cosmic joke. Sometimes you have to laugh to keep yourself from crying.

Born and raised in North Philadelphia, Tierra Whack (which is her actual government name, by the way) first turned heads at 15, when a video of her freestyling kooky non sequiturs on a street corner—posted by the Philly rap crew We Run the Streets—went viral online. “My flow’s all chocolatey, I’m guaranteed a record deal / On top near Lauryn’s hill / You whack, so imagine how Tierra feels,” she raps in a baby-pink knit and pearl earrings, oozing confidence far beyond her years. WRTS started managing her, and she quickly became the talk of the town in the local battle-rap scene (“I used to cry watching 8 Mile,” she admits) but soon grew bored of the form’s financial and creative limitations. She was young, there was pressure and she was feeling aimless, disillusioned and depressed.

Whack’s mother, always sensitive to her daughter’s darkening moods, decided to move the family to Atlanta in 2011, and it was there that Whack earned enough money working at a car wash to buy her first laptop, which she used to finally record her music. “It was time to put on my big-girl panties and show people who I really was,” she says. “They knew me as the neighbourhood emcee. But I wanted to be a household name.” Before, she’d been writing poems, freestyling over instrumentals and accidentally rhyming sentences in her homework assignments; now, she was writing hooks and bridges and oddball choruses, attempting the blend of singing and rapping that she’d fallen in love with as a child watching Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott on BET’s music-video show 106 & Park.

Eventually, she returned to Philly to pursue music in her birthplace. “I feel like she’s the new Missy, almost,” American musician, songwriter and producer Anderson .Paak told a reporter from Vibe magazine in 2018, a few months after the drop of Whack’s debut “audiovisual project”: the spectacular 15-minute, 15-song Whack World, which falls somewhere between a surrealistic conceptual art project and an enviably stylish mixtape. It starts as the sly wild-card dispatch of a clever trickster who is already a master of theatrical voices, spirals downward from a helium-induced pitch in “Dr. Seuss”—named for the children’s book author who inspired her rhyming schemes—and adopts a faux-country twang in “Fuck Off” to tell a potential lover that he reminds her of her deadbeat dad. In the video for “Bugs Life,” a song about her hunger for success and the joy of seeing her mother laugh, a single bee circles as Whack peels back her hood, revealing a face that’s half-swollen from anaphylactic shock: “Probably would’ve blew overnight if I was white,” she grumbles. Every 60-second track is a shiny, self-contained multiverse—life’s peaks and valleys projected through a kaleidoscopic lens. André 3000 took her to lunch, Hill asked if she’d open her Philadelphia tour date and she made fans of Beyoncé (Whack features on Lion King: The Gift, Beyoncé’s most underrated album), Solange, Alicia Keys and Missy herself. “I was the doorwoman at a condo in Philly at the time,” she says, “and sometimes people would walk past and be like, ‘Yo—what the hell are you doing here?’”

All her life, Whack had wanted to be an entertainer. “But I didn’t realize it was going to come with all this other stuff,” she admits. Cypher, a 2023 mockumentary directed by Chris Moukarbel about Whack’s rise to fame and fictional entanglement with a deranged stalker-fan, doubles as a critique of the absurdities of modern celebrity: the constant invasions of privacy, the immortalization of your every misstep, the world’s expectation that you have unimpeachable politics and the insatiable demand—from fans and journalists alike—for more of you. “Once you’re a celebrity, it’s almost like you’re not even human anymore,” she says. World Wide Whack is also exuberant and jewel-toned, but the darkness that once lurked beneath a technicolour surface is now totally exposed, with several songs (“Numb,” “Difficult,” “27 Club”) seeing the artist wading into the tenebrous corners of her own psyche and then flicking a switch and flooding the room with light.

 

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This album, though, is an archive of a troubled emotional landscape that has since been overwritten. When I tell Whack that we don’t need to get into a conversation about despair and suicidal ideation since it has already been explored so thoroughly on the album and in her other interviews, she seems genuinely grateful to not have to revisit old wounds. She’s glad the project is resonating with people, she says, “but it’s a bit frustrating to still be talking about suicide so much because I don’t want to psychoanalyze myself anymore,” and she’s no longer in the well she once found herself stranded at the bottom of. Plus, those inquiries miss the album’s patina of optimism, its braggadocious interludes (“X,” “Ms Behave”) and its moments of sheer, unadulterated fun; “MOOVIES,” for example, is a simple disco-pop track about wanting to be wined and dined.

Many artists of Whack’s stature would probably have traded their hometown for a sunnier, more-star-studded city by now, but Whack has no plans to leave Philadelphia. “It’s where my heart is—where it will always be,” she says. It’s also where her mother, whom Whack describes as “the flyest woman I know,” lives. She speaks of her mother as a kind of prophetic figure: She was the one who forced Whack to freestyle on that corner all those years ago and whose fashion sense came to inform her daughter’s own. In fact, the pair are planning to start a fashion boutique together—her main priority, it seems, for the next year.

Aside from that, says Whack, she’s been spending a lot of time behind the wheel, clearing her head and blasting Frank Ocean songs. (We both agree that he often sounds like he’s singing—and writing—from the driver’s seat.) She does some of her best thinking in a car, particularly at night, when it feels “like an apocalypse or something because the streets are so empty and it’s only me in the world.” She drives until the familiar parts of the city are replaced by parts she doesn’t recognize, which happens despite the fact that she’s lived there her entire life. It’s comforting to be reminded that there’s almost always more to see, more to know, more to understand—that sometimes peace of mind is just a spot at the end of a long road and all you have to do to find it is keep driving, driving, driving until the whole world and your old self have all but vanished in the rear-view mirror.

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, call or text the Suicide Crisis Helpline at 9-8-8.

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