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“Can I rap for you?”
A student yelled from the auditorium seats at John Bartram High School in South Philadelphia, his voice cutting through Tierra Whack’s surprise guest speech.
Without hesitation, she waves the student forward. He leaps on stage and begins freestyling as his classmates pull out their phones. The interruption was worth it. The boy is met with applause from his peers and parting words from Tierra. “I’m getting money out here. I bought my mom a house,” she says sternly. “I did that by doing exactly what you just did; getting up and rapping. You gotta be ready at all times.”
The stop was one of five for a day of giving, sponsored by Vans, during which $10,000 checks were donated to support Philadelphia high school music programs. Before the drive to the next destination, one of the school faculty members approaches the van. He tells Tierra about the student she selected from the crowd. “He has a rough story,” he pauses. “That meant a lot to him.”
She absorbs his words before responding with standard remarks of gratitude. Just moments before she entered the building, the Grammy-nominated rapper, singer, and songwriter was worried that no one would know who she was.
In the car, she reflects. “It’s a really good feeling to finally be considered a somebody.” She raises her phone, and the lock screen is a picture of singer Kelis with a bright red, curly pixie cut. Tierra, who has credited the “Milkshake” songstress as one of her inspirations, is also donning red hair, in a slicked-back low bun. She’s cozy.
Someone from Tierra’s team is fumbling with the aux cord while attempting to settle on a song selection. Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” starts playing by accident. “Ah, there we go,” she says in a relaxed state. Next up is “Ex-Factor.”
“Turn that up,” she says.
Tierra Helena Whack was three years old when the record came out. She’d spend time with the Lauryn Hill classic later on in life. The song didn’t teach her about love and heartache then, she explains, but it did teach her new vocabulary: “Reciprocity,” she sings. “When I heard that word, I looked it up!”
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was one of the first albums Tierra’s mother bought for her. She remembers studying the lyrics, liner notes, and photos, living in it. She remembers a similar moment to this one, while driving to last year’s Grammys and hearing Hill’s “Lost Ones” playing in the car.
“I just [started] crying,” she says. “Then I was like, ‘You know what, put on some 50 Cent. We gotta get gangsta.’ Because I don’t be crying; I be chilling.”
Since bursting onto the scene in 2017, Tierra has been working. In May 2018, she released her debut studio album, Whack World, and was heralded by critics as the next major rap artist. In Tierra’s 2018 FADER cover story, writer Rawiya Kameir called her “the poster child of a kind of post-clout-era artist.” Tierra’s single "Mumbo Jumbo" went on to earn her a best-new-video nomination at the 2019 Grammy Awards, and last year, she was among the handpicked few to be featured on Beyoncé’s Grammy-nominated The Lion King: The Gift album. Now, her 2020 tour is starting and a new album is in the works.
But before the critical acclaim, there was hood fame.
In 2011, then known as Dizzle Dizz, the 15-year-old appeared in a freestyle video produced by Philly’s underground music collective, We Run the Streets. Tierra and her mother happened to be driving by while they were shooting, and her mother spurred her to get up and rap. “She circled the block real slow and she gave me that time. I didn't really give her an answer. But a mother knows her child.” Tierra got out, busted a freestyle, and impressed a small crowd of men who had gathered around. The virality of the video is what first put Tierra on the map in the Philly circuit.
Tierra went on to become a vocal major at the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia before finishing up high school in Atlanta. She was one of few Black students in a predominately white graduating class, a dynamic that put her in a position she couldn’t run from.
With some difficulty, she and her friends persuaded their principal to let them perform a rendition of the finale number from Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit for a school showcase. Tierra fittingly took on Lauryn Hill’s rap verse from the film; it was an undertaking that could not have come to form without a young Tierra’s ambition. Though she couldn’t foresee that she would go on to tour with her idol years later, that experience helped cultivate a part of her that would anchor her career and life.
“I knew that I was a leader. If my people felt a way, I would go speak on it,” she says. “I was the class president. I can't look weak to the people. I knew I had to lead. If they feel this way, I have to make sure I go to work. I felt like Malcolm X or something,” she says jokingly.
The teachers in one of the schools she visited during her Vans tour kept telling to her that one of the staff members, who taught her back in the day, wanted to let her know that she was proud. The gesture, Tierra believes, is more of an effort to smooth over old tensions — and an apology. Last year, she ran into her former principal, who she says was equally unsupportive of her back then. Now, they too are suddenly proud of her.
“I just let it go. I knew what it was then,” Tierra says. “She might just feel bad about it now…. That stuff can eat away at you. I hate to say it, and it may sound selfish, but I kind of always knew that I was gonna get there, and I just feel like, ‘I told you so. I succeeded. I’m doing everything I wanted to do.’” Tierra knew who she wanted to be from a young age; she wasn’t a directionless youth who intimidated people. Her favorite teacher once told her she was an “alpha-female,” a phrase Tierra would spend most of her formative years decoding.
The same part of her persona that was once a repellent in the past makes up her magnetism now in what can often feel like an increasingly mundane music industry. The suffocating, authoritative nature she experienced in school, she does not in the music industry.
“With this generation, they’ll do something for one or two years and be like, ‘Oh, it’s not working. I give up.’ And they get depressed.” She brings up a relative who once asked her to check out a few videos he made. She didn’t watch them, unsure if he was serious about the industry. “I get offended, almost. I’ve been doing this for so long. Don’t play with it,” she says. “I’m not gonna give you advice and have this real conversation if you’re just gonna drop it tomorrow.
“I'm starting to feel old,” she says. At 24, she’s been working on her craft for the better half of a decade, writing every day. “You can't put time on creativity. I looked up and I was already eight years in.”
Tierra lived with depression as a teenager. Writing was a way for her to ward off her insecurities and welcome her power. Her mother gave her the confidence to prepare her for her career. Tierra was gaining notoriety in the streets of Philadelphia, but she saw freestyling and battle rapping as financially and creatively constricting; she wanted more.
“There were times where I would say raps to her and she would say, ‘No, that’s corny. Go write something else. That’s whack, that’s not it. I would be so hurt. But when that pen got fire? ‘Oh yeah, that’s hot.’ My mom is just a cool-ass mom,” she says.
Her mother was the one who elected for a move to Atlanta, where Tierra finished school, worked, and began recording music. She returned to Philadelphia on her own with new music and the same old appreciation for her hometown.
There hasn’t been any rapper from the city to reach superstardom since Meek Mill’s rise to fame nearly a decade ago and Lil Uzi Vert's parlay into popularity a few years back. Before him, there was the iconic run by State Property, the Roc-A-Fella Records rap group from the early 2000s composed of Beanie Sigel, Freeway, Peedi Crakk, Oschino, Omillio Sparks, and the Young Gunz. Before them, there was Cassidy, and the “illest pitbull in a skirt,” Eve. Before her era, Black Thought led The Roots to become Philly’s most-renowned rap acts.
“We had a great moment in hip hop,” she says. “I watch all those music documentaries… I just watched Hip-Hop Evolution and they didn’t give Philly no love. It’s like we don’t count, and I hate it. We’re so close to New York and Atlanta… It’s like the middle child; don’t forget about us.”
In her rise to fame, Tierra has befriended and caught the attention of almost every one of her idols, including Solange, Erykah Badu, Andre 3000, Lauryn Hill, and Meek Mill. Though she’s a beloved member of the celebrity-musician community, it’s her community back home in Philly that she values most.
“Girl, I’ll fight somebody over Philly,” she says. “I like being the underdog. I like the work. I like the responsibility. Y’all ain’t doing it, so I’ma do it.”
Tierra’s long-term mission is to build Philadelphia’s music industry infrastructure. She wants to use her money and time to turn the city into a viable hub for fostering and retaining talent— making space for local artists uninterested or unable to relocate to Los Angeles, NYC, or Atlanta. It’s a lifelong passion project that she thinks about every day.
“It’s my dream to just have a bunch of people in one room who all get along, and we're doing things, teaming up, to just make something bigger and better.”
Tierra is regarded as frolicking freely in her own makeshift universe, but she is very much grounded and intentional. She recalls a time when she contemplated taking her old freestyle videos offline in an effort to curate her career as opposed to erasing her past. But she reneged, seeing the value in letting people see every piece to the puzzle.
The thing about Tierra Whack that makes her such a standout artist is her ability to distort the real world into her very own Whack World. In her eyes, all of the isms that plague her and society still exist — they’re just in her periphery.
“I feel like I'm living a dream, and I am,” she says, turning to her team in an epiphanic state and reiterating the trite phrase that she’s managed to find new meaning in. “It doesn’t feel real.”
The past year saw the emergence of a conversation centering the rise of women in rap, where multiple female rappers experienced popularity and acclaim. But what has remained is a static industry formula for a particular kind of success that’s been assigned to women in rap.
“I used to hate being the only female on lineups and stuff. I love unity in any shape or form,” she says. “We can have something in common. When I see these girls that have different styles [than] me, I’m praising them. I’m trying to be the best me; I’m not trying to be better than anybody else.” She adds, “When you're solid with yourself, it shouldn't matter what anybody else is doing.”
Tierra has been heralded for her individuality but is also cognizant of the importance of representation, in an industry that often discourages women with darker skin tones.
“I recognize [that] I am dark. I remember being younger and being teased for my skin being darker. My mom, she just was always there like, ‘You have to love yourself.’ Seeing Lauryn [Hill] and then seeing Missy [Elliott] — they were making it. I don't think Missy was like, ‘I'm going to be a dark girl making it.’ I think she just did it. You just do it… If I could change [colorism in the industry], that would be really nice.
“It’s not my focus, though. I just want to do what I feel inside and make it work to the best of my ability and whatever comes with it, comes with it. I can’t change how I look. That's how I showed up, in my dark skin. I dress kind of cool. Either y’all gon’ take it or not.”
Tierra sees how colorism is deeply entrenched in the entertainment industry. In hip hop, the female rappers who make it to global superstardom, historically and as of late, are often light-skinned. And how female rappers, regardless of complexion, who stray from the standard sex-focused femme-fatale formula for success often end up categorized as “alternative.”
Tierra is aware of these concurrent issues, but her idea of success doesn’t align with the industry precept for female rappers based on those qualifiers. She doesn’t deny that these systems are pervasive — Tierra combats them by showing up, as herself, the way she chooses.
In her Funk Flex–approved Hot 97 freestyle, she raps over a Busta Rhymes track: “I’m representing for the Black people. I’m Beanie Sigel, Andre meets The Beatles.”
Tierra Whack is an amalgam of those figures and more — from Lauryn Hill to Missy Elliott and Kelis to Dr. Seuss — but she doesn’t present as an epigone of her influences. “I studied so many greats. I'm like a sponge,” she says. “[If] I take a liking to something, I'm going to want to pick it apart and build it up again. All my idols, all my favorite artists, I'd say all of them, you put it in one big pot, and then you have Tierra Whack.”
Her kaleidoscopic music and visuals paired with her chameleonic appearance may strike a passive listener or viewer as colorful and quirky, but it takes a type of meticulous calculation and consistency to produce the sonics and visuals Tierra presents to the world. She’s carefree, not careless.
She is working on new music while working on herself and doesn’t see the value of growing as an artist if it comes at the expense of maturing as a person. “I'm trying to just keep growing,” she says. “We're not gonna be here forever, but we have to create something that lasts forever.”
She writes all of her lyrics, hooks included. (Though, her mother lent a hand in the hook for her 2019 track "Unemployed"). She studies and practices often, but there are elements of what she does that she believes comes naturally. She’s part autodidact, part student.
“I swear I feel like I got lucky. I just be doing something like, ‘Here, look what I made,’ and then everybody will be like, ‘That’s so crazy!’ I liked it myself, but I didn't think it was going to [be successful]. That might be a little bit of low self-esteem. Deep down, I still do have low self-esteem. I just try to just stick to what I know and perfect it.”
At the same time, she’s still learning her voice. But Tierra doesn’t feel the pressure people place on artists like her to tone down or over-explain why she’s different. “Everybody that’s on my side is on my side and they let me do whatever the f*ck I want to do,” she says with a laugh. “Being able to express whatever you feel or see — that’s freedom.”
Credits
Photographer: Camila Falquez
Art Director: Emily Zirimis
Producer: Leah Mara Productions
Stylist: Shirley Kurata
Makeup: Camille Fleming
Hair: Jamilah Curry
Set Design: Danielle Selig
Manicurist: Yuko Tsuchihashi
Director of Photography: Andrew Daugherty
Video Editor: Hannah Pak
Top look: Area Blazer, $1,550; Top stylist's own; Gaviria earrings, $250
