She’s a muse to Beyoncé, a champion of Lego and raps about her imaginary friend – but behind the whimsy is a street-hardened MC confronting grief and depression
• This article contains discussion of suicide
There’s a video of Tierra Whack filmed when she was 15, dressed in dull pink knitwear on the corner of a Philadelphia street, surrounded by older guys smoking weed. “Rapping is my destiny / Especially for these hysterectomies who be testing me / You deaf to me / You’re not hearing what I’m sharing like an uncaring parent …” Words pour out of her in an a cappella freestyle to camera, more performance poetry than rap, voice morphing from one persona to another – one of those mic-drop, jaw-drop moments where you see a new star gather light in real time.
Twelve years later, and the knitwear is bright and expensive, she’s a muse to Beyoncé and has become one of the most singular rappers and singers in America. Her 2018 debut album, Whack World, felt like a piece of performance art with 15 multi-genre tracks each exactly one minute long; her feature film last year, Cypher, flipped the tired fly-on-the-wall music documentary format into a satirical horror movie about conspiracy theories and selling out. While many rappers align themselves with luxury brands, Whack did a campaign with Lego, and her brilliant second album, World Wide Whack, out this week, shows off that whimsy on songs about an imaginary friend, dates at the cinema and singing in the shower. But it is also devastatingly honest about her experience of depression. “I’m 28 now – I was supposed to kill myself when I was 27,” she tells me in the London offices of her record label. “But I decided to keep going.”