In 2018, before it was possible to tell six-hour sagas over the course of several 10 minute TikToks, social media’s foremost mirco-video app was Instagram. Instagram videos could only be a minute long back then, and Tierra Whack made expanse from this limitation in Whack World, a surreal and shiny music film that ran 15 minutes long, stringing together 15 music videos for 15 songs that were each just 60 seconds. It was genius and it was heralded as such, launching Whack’s career as a well respected rapper.
In the crevices of Whack World’s cartoonish video sets and songs were contemplations on death that have colored bits of her work ever since. “Pet Cemetery” wasn’t just a song about a dead dog, but one about a slain friend; “4 Wings” wasn’t just about a favorite meal they shared, but her life without him. She tallied a life of losses on “Heaven,” and homed in on her grandparents’ death on “Cutting Onions,” both songs from a trilogy of EPs she released in 2021. Now, her debut full-length album, World Wide Whack, is anchored in her own mortality. The single “27 Club” got straight to the point. “I can show you how it feels,” she starts before listing various isolations. “It ain’t really hard to convince you/Lookin’ for somethin’ to commit to?,” she asks before bellowing “Suicide” with the full, unglamorous force of a middle school theatre kid.
A recent interview with Vulture revealed this was not an artful allegory. “I planned to end my life at 27,” she said. “I’m 28 now, so I made it through. I’m figuring it out.” One of the things that makes World Wide Whack such an impressive feat, cementing her distinct reputation as an artisan, is that she fleshes out the dark corners of her interior life while maintaining the technicolor impishness that’s been her hallmark. At a time when it often feels like artists can break through with barebones music and personas, Whack walks the tightrope between minimalism and maximalism without wobbling.
In the run up to the album, Whack disseminated a playbill to fans and colleagues that spells out a concept that also emerges in the vibrant videos for “Shower Song” and “27 Club,” and a funhouse website she designed that mirrors an early 2000s kids’ game: World Wide Whack is a sad clown character whose visual world Whack built out with artist Alex Da Corte. They’ve pulled together a slate of references – Yoruba traditions, American pop art, Black American extraction – to narrate her endless loop of ambition, suffering, and survival. But you don’t need to know all those references to feel something: the imagery surrounding the album is melodramatic, but her rapping inside it is anything but.
Tierra Whack’s early identity came from freestyling, and World Wide Whack maintains the kind of curt, jabby anecdotes that would come off the dome, whether she wrote them first or not. “The devil offered a deal/ Bitch, I just signed for a mil,” she croons on “Mood Swing.” “How’d I make it this far/Long sleeves cover scars,” she says on “Numb.” “And he really hurt my feelings,” she offers plainly on “Imaginary Friends.” “When I grow up I want to hang from a ceiling.” A barrage of couplets like these fuse together into straightforward chapters in the story; waking up, dressing up, cooking up, getting her hopes up, and giving up.
Her rap style and World Wide Whack’s buoyant production make sure its heavy themes don’t weigh it down; instead, the beats build her character. The twilight R&B of “Mood Swing” gives it maturity, the songs’ splashy, tittering high hats reimagined on a song called “Burning Brains” where she seems like her own worst enemy. The sound of stately R&B returns on “Moovies,” underscoring a grown-up search for love in the form of a great date, hoping some salvation will come of it. The militant drums of “Ms Behave” raise Whack’s stakes early on, even more than her warning, “Watch who you call your foes, watch who you call your friends.”
She inhabits each sonic setting with varied vocal textures, too–a gooey, nasal droll in the childlike “Imaginary Friends,” barely parted lips in the lethargic “Numb,” and her unconvinced droning of “You can’t let it get you down/We all got issues” in “Difficult” (a song that literally repeats “living is difficult”). All together, these approaches make World Wide Whack perversely fun, a disorienting merry-go-round of despair and uplift, rather than a linear path to victory or failure. Tierra Whack didn’t end things at 27, and neither does her album. “This is the essence [of] the record: the cycle is what Whack goes through in a day, and she’ll do it again tomorrow,” her playbill says, leaving room – really, expectation – that living stays difficult but doesn’t kill her, even when it comes close.
