Tierra Whack –real name, not a pseudonym– who was born and raised in the North of Philadelphia (United States) in the nineties, started writing poems in primary school which she then turned into raps, and as a teenager, she started to become well-known in her hometown under the name of T Dizzle. At eighteen she moved to Atlanta with the idea in mind of leaving this hobby behind, even though, funnily enough, she chose a city that’s considered to be one of the hip hop Meccas where rappers like André 3000 or the collective Migos gained their fame. There she worked at a car wash shop for a year and thanks to the tips from rappers that brought in Ferraris and Maybachs, she saved up enough money to buy a laptop which she then used to start recording songs under her real name. After a very needed break to reevaluate her musical viewpoint, she went back to Philadelphia and dropped Whack World in mid-2018.
TIERRA WHACK AND THE BRILLIANCE THAT IS WHACK WORLD
Tierra Whack more than a rapper or a singer is an artist from head to toe who has managed to create her own imagery with Whack World, a visual album that doesn’t deal with genres, in which she presents fifteen singles that last a minute each. And with each song and video, most of them being totally surreal and heavily loaded with humour, she builds worlds that make up a universe that reflects how the precious and peculiar mind of Tierra, the next best new artist of 2019, works.
If Travis Scott released his album Astro World, –with a wonderful cover that looked like some kind of futuristic circus, shot by David Lachapelle– which he managed to turn into a music festival of the same name last summer in Houston, Tierra Whack has Whack World, an album that cannot be summed up in one sentence, nor just an experience, as each song and video builds different worlds that make up a whole universe. The album tackles many ideas and concepts at the same time, it doesn’t have a running thread and there are no interludes between singles, all of these elements manage to show how Tierra’s mind works. Also, each single lasts sixty seconds, which is the maximum running time of a video on Instagram.
Whack World stands out for its visuals, that are absolutely surreal in some cases, and for its colourful videos with a great sense of humour (in one of the clips Tierra narrates a story through her nails’ designs), which perfectly complement the music by taking the lyrics of the songs in a very literal way. For example, in Bugs Life Tierra appears to show her face, now deformed after being attacked by insects –she’s extremely allergic to bug bites and she’s terrified of them– and in Hungry Hippos, she’s actually dressed up like a hungry hippo –exactly, like the board game. But Tierra Whack’s brilliance doesn’t end there.
One of her most striking videos is Pet Cemetery which, as the title suggests, shows a pet cemetery. The song, which is fairly lively and cheerful, takes the point of view of a young girl who misses her dog which just passed away, and who’s asking herself if the dog has ended up in heaven. But, actually, the lyrics talk about the death of her friend, the rapper Hulito, and she uses the figure of a dog as it is a homophone for ‘dawg’, which is a slang term that means friend. And that’s because Tierra Whack doesn’t take life too seriously, she has a great sense of humour and does whatever she pleases. With Whack World, she breaks every kind of barriers when it comes to genres and formats. What will she be doing next?, by mixing hip hop, pop, R&B, and its format, with a visual album, but not only that. Tierra Whack is neither a rapper nor a singer, she is an artist, from head to toe.
