The visual curiosity of television called to Tierra Whack at a young age. “I was glued to the TV. If it wasn’t cartoons, it was music videos from Missy Elliott to Ludacris, Busta Rhymes and Eminem. They were my favorite people to watch,” she said last week at LiveWIRED, the 30th anniversary event for WIRED held at The Midway in San Francisco. “It just drew me in. I’m like, ‘I want to be like them. I want to be in the TV.’”
In the years that followed, the Philadelphia-born rapper made good on her girlhood ambitions. An experimentalist with a taste for the Black avant-garde, Whack broke onto the music scene in 2018 with Whack World, a 15-track, 15-minute-long mini-album brimming with invention and whimsy. Its release—acclaimed by fans, critics, and veteran music artists like Flying Lotus and Erykah Badu—was unlike anything else at the time: a twisting, playful trip through Whack’s jamboree of a mind. It was a concept immaculately primed for a generation of digital natives raised on Instagram and fluent in the transitory nature of social media trends (each song was capped at one minute apiece).
Speaking with WIRED’s design director, Alyssa Walker, about the comforts and challenges of creativity, Whack explained how the genesis of her artistic process often begins with a visual. “I have to see something—whether it’s an image, a color, a pattern. Just anything. I just have to feel [it], and then I start to form this almost movie clip in my head,” she said. “Because everything I’m doing, it has to be a movie, it has to be a film.”
Tierra Whack performs at LiveWIRED in San Francisco.
Photograph: Kimberly White/Getty Images
Whack’s most recent music video, “Chanel Pit”—the first taste of new music from the artist since she released a trio of EPs in 2021 that flirted with the boundaries of rap, pop, and R&B—finds her in familiar territory: embracing the surreality of her imagination as she raps over plinkling production and glides backward through a car wash. “I was just doing what I felt. If I want to be a rockstar today, I’m going to be a rockstar. If I want to be a blues singer tomorrow, that’s what I’m going to do,” Whack said of her process early on and how it has evolved, making clear what few limitations she puts on herself. As for “Chanel Pit”: “My first job was a car wash, and I always wanted to go through.”
Whack is the subject of Cypher, a narrative documentary directed by Chris Moukarbel (Gaga: Five Foot Two) that follows the artist’s early rise in North Philadelphia from internet poet to global rap star. The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, ultimately turns inward, transforming over its 78-minute runtime from memoir into a meta-commentary on the perils of celebrity. With Whack as his muse, Moukarbel interrogates the consequences of visibility. What is the price of fame, and does it come at too high a cost?
Cypher is a portrait of Whack as only Whack could envision: surprising and mischievous, singularly sharp in how it unfolds, infinitely questioning our understanding of Whack as an artist with an eye toward the future. “A lot of artists put themselves in a box. We don’t even know what a box is,” she said at LiveWIRED. “You can always expect the unexpected from me.”
