The Many Sides of Tierra Whack

When Tierra Whack released her single “Shower Song” in January 2024, it grabbed and held my attention with its infectious, funky beats, its absurdly comical lyrics celebrating the virtues of singing in the shower, and its wildly eccentric music video showing Whack in a clown suit inhabiting a cartoonish, make-believe world seemingly of her own making. The song was a banger with an irresistible sound, and the video was delightful child’s play. I had the sensation that I was witnessing the appearance of an artist who was not cut from any mold I had seen before. 

That feeling was reinforced a couple of weeks later when Whack dropped “27 Club,” her second single and music video from her forthcoming album, “World Wide Whack.” This second track flipped the playfully celebratory mood of the previous single inside-out, by frankly addressing the heavy theme of suicide in a down-tempo, melancholy way. The video continued to show a clown-suited and wigged-out Whack in her Whack World, but now rather than a happy clown she had become the sad clown, channeling the sadness of everyone who has ever contemplated suicide or been affected by the suicide of another. “I can show you how it feels,” she warns in the opening lyric, “to lose what you love.” She holds up in front of her face a series of paper masks representing the happy faces we put on for other people, slowly pulling away and discarding them one by one as if to reveal the raw and uncontrived grimace of pain they hide. 

With this juxtaposition of wildly different moods and messages in those two singles, Whack announced herself as an artist who refuses to be easily categorized. One minute she’s playful and insouciant and upbeat, making you bop your hips and sing along in the shower, and the next minute she kneecaps you with a sad song addressing a painful theme that few artists dare approach.

The release of the full album “World Wide Whack” on March 15, 2024 further proved Tierra Whack’s range as an artist and her refusal to be easily categorized. Yes, she makes music in the genre of hip-hop (she has collaborated and toured with Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys, to name two influences), and yes, she raps (she got her musical start as a battle rapper in Philadelphia, and she can spit fiery rap lyrics with the best). But to say that Tierra Whack is a rapper or a hip-hop singer is like saying that Pablo Neruda is a writer. That is factual, but it doesn’t tell you anything of value. 

Perhaps this is not a poor analogy, though, because like Pablo Neruda, Tierra Whack is using language (in her case, language structured through performance in a particular musical genre) to make you feel and think more deeply. That is what poets do.

I have found myself listening to the 15 tracks on this album on repeat for three or four days now, and my “favorite song” on the album has already changed several times. While binge-listening to the album, I have been provoked to think many things and to feel a range of emotions. That is what art does.

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears,” wrote Oliver Sacks. “It is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ears.” Sacks wasn’t just making a casual observation or a nice turn of phrase; as a neurologist he extensively studied how music gets imprinted into a different part of the brain than other memories do, and the salvific power of music to restore joy and life when everything else fails.

Whack wields her music to do both things Sacks mentioned. She lifts us out of depression with upbeat grooves and rap-battle lyrics in tracks like “Shower Song” and “Chanel Pit,” and she moves us to tears in tracks like “27 Club” and “Difficult.”

And she makes us think. In “Burning Brains,” Whack seems to point the finger of blame at an ex-lover whose constant complaints and dissatisfaction caused her untold misery, but I wonder if she isn’t talking about herself. Anyone who has spent time in meditation and mindfulness is familiar with the treacherous contours of the mind and will recognize their own restless and insatiable ego here:

Drivin’ me insane

All you do is complain

Headache, my brain, mass explosions

Soup too hot, ice too cold

Grass too green, sky too blue

Ha, ha, ha

You’re never satisfied (satisfied)

Whack is no stranger to the struggles of the mind, and in several of the tracks on this album she speaks obliquely and sometimes overtly to mental health issues and the challenges of living. In “Difficult,” she captures the spirit of depression:

I can’t sleep, I can’t eat

I feel small, so petite

I act strong, but I’m weak

Ha, ha, ha, ha (livin’ is difficult)

I was born to survive

See the pain in my eyes

I been stressed and deprived

Ha, ha, ha, ha (livin’ is difficult)

It’s part of Whack’s genius and appeal as an artist that she inhabits both spaces with equal authority: she shows us her vulnerability and sadness and dares to explore forbidden topics like suicide and depression, then she turns around and spits fiery lyrics, rap battle-style, about smelling like Chanel while she’s in the mosh pit.

“World Wide Whack” is Tierra Whack’s first full-length album. She released a previous, more experimental project, “Whack World,” in 2018, with a range of songs that were each one minute in length and were released first on Instagram, shaped by and for the world of social media. Some of those tracks would get a hot groove going and then end abruptly at one minute, leaving you hanging and wanting more. With the new album, Whack has delivered more and has emerged as a more mature artist who has things to say. She is conjuring into existence a mini-universe — Whack World — full of bright colors and clowns and music and wigs and bold fashion statements, and she is inviting us inside to share in all the poetry and sadness and laughter and beauty and tears of a human being's inner life.

The Way

by Dennis Hunter
January 7, 2020
San Carlos Retreat Center
Delray Beach, Florida


"The Way"

The way the hummingbird seeks out
the color red, tasting the nectar
of flowers, its tiny heart beating
twelve hundred times per minute.
The way the green grass feels
on the soles of your naked feet.
The way the spider's web is built
of filaments almost too fine to see,
the shocking symmetry
of its architecture, the way
it bends and stretches, holding
to the branches as it twists
in the breeze: its strength
arising from its flexibility.
The way the sound of the water
flowing from the shower head
changes pitch when
the water becomes warm.
The way the warm water soothes
your naked and fragile body.
The way water, softest substance
on earth, also carves valleys
in the stone, eroding mountains
and reshaping the beaten earth.
The way the seed dropped by the tree
carries inside the genetic code, the DNA
for creating a whole new tree.
The way the code remains locked
inside the seed, until the seed
is convinced to extend roots
down into the beaten earth,
and offered water and sun from above.
The way the new tree will bear red flowers,
seducing the local hummingbirds just as its
ancestors have always done.

On How to Be

by Dennis Hunter

January 5, 2020

Be like the water of the lake:

Calm and steady, but fluid,

reflecting the clear sky above.

Let the cool morning breeze make ripples

Across your surface and pleasant goosebumps on your skin.

Watch the ripples come and go

without disturbing the nature of the water.

You do not need to climb down in the lake

with the alligator and the catfish,

and try to smooth out the water's wrinkles

with your hands, like a bed sheet.

Be like the sky above,

clear and bright and open,

the low Florida sun beaming across it,

warming your bones and reflecting

on facets of the rippling water like glittering jewels,

inviting the trees and the grass to stand up straighter,

to reach higher, towards the life-giving light.

Here, there, a cloud dots the sky, lingering,

passing across the open expanse.

The sky doesn't mind.

You do not need to stand up

and wave your arms at the clouds,

gesticulating like a madman, trying

to chase them away.

Only stay. The way the lake stays,

ripples not disturbing its deeper stillness.

Only stay. The way the sky stays,

holding space for clouds to come and go.

Only stay, the way the sun stays,

bringing light and life to each part

of the turning world, this part then that part,

each corner waking and sleeping, sleeping then waking again.

Each new day that breaks is an invitation

to root down in stillness like the water

and to stretch open in welcoming like the sky,

to both root down and stretch open like the trees and grass.

But look, now. You stood up too fast,

and startled the catfish

in the muddy shallows at the water's edge,

where she had come, like you,

to warm her scales and blood

in the morning sun.