On a two-year-old episode of Ebro in the Morning, Tierra Whack admitted she was “very bored” with rap. By “bored” she didn’t mean that “there’s too much music about pussy and guns” shit that seems to come up any time a rapper sits in a podcast chair; what she was feeling had more to do with burnout. She was struggling with how to stay hungry amid the expectations and demands, from fans and labels alike, that come from life as a professional rapper.
Whack didn’t have to think about any of that back on 2018’s Whack World, her stylish and offbeat 15-minute debut mixtape that made her an internet darling almost overnight and got her the kind of music industry respect that made dinner with Jay-Z and text exchanges with André 3000 and showing up on Beyoncé’s Lion King soundtrack possible. Whack World didn’t exist because the release schedule said it should exist. The tape was born out of the same competitiveness that made her a name on the Philly freestyle scene as a fast-rapping teenager with witty punchlines and a near Slick Rick-ish knack for switching between moods and characters. It had the urgency of music she had been trying all her life to make, and when it worked she had to figure out how to run it back.
To light that fire again on WHACK’S MUSEUM, Tierra Whack spins back to her battle rap roots for a full-throttled put me in your barbershop top fives record. Unlike her last couple projects, there’s not a lot of high-concept goofiness, nor the dreamy singing that made her stories seem like warped flashbacks. WHACK’S MUSEUM does feature her trademark concision: Over 27 minutes of lots of rapping about rapping, she flexes her cartoonishly imaginative wordplay and gets off her GOAT talk with enough scatalogical wisecracks to make mixtape Wayne shed a proud-father tear. It seems to come as easy as scrambling eggs to her. “Cruella de Vil ’cause I’m comin’ for my spot, dog/You whack without H, so that means you a knockoff” rolls off the tongue effortlessly over the East Coast grime of “Wiggidy Whack,” while animating her flow like prime Missy. On that same track, she calls the money of her hip-hop foes “Columbus Short” and drops in a classic “you ain’t shit, you doo-doo,” both of which would be cheesy jokes if anyone else said them, but make a delightfully wacky and unserious take on dickswinging clichés when it comes from her.
It’s not groundbreaking, but sometimes nothing hits harder than Jerry getting Tom’s tail stuck in a mouse trap or Bugs Bunny stuffing Yosemite Sam inside of his own big hat. WHACK’S MUSEUM might be basic and overreliant on Griselda-core traditionalism (there’s a bunch of seedy Conductor Williams beats), yet it’s sort of comforting to hear her collection of low-stakes bars easily imagined as little cartoon strips. “Just bought a Mini Cooper/And I drive it like Andretti,” she raps on the breezy “Siren,” probably while hanging out of the sunroof in one of her Ms. Frizzle outfits. The image of her attending the Webby Awards with Philly rap great Freeway also gets a kick out of me. The way she quick-sprays quips like, “Get the cheese like my grandma grits/You replaced like my grandma hip” throughout the laid-back “Candle Wax” feels intimate and silly at the same time. At the end of “Brazilian Wax,” which has this lush soul sample that reminds me of 9th Wonder’s work for Little Brother, she squeezes in her beefs with the hip-hop manosphere while still keeping the mood light.
If the mixtape were any longer, I might accuse Whack of going through the motions, but fortunately it flies by. I do sense some of that boredom, though, especially when she makes half-assed attempts to spark conversation: “I would win more if I chose to put less on,” she raps on “Totem,” which might have a hint of truth to it but is low-hanging fruit. I won’t get on that line too much because otherwise “Totem” is the kind of track that brings the most out of her right now: one where she gets to be a bridge between generations of Philly punchline rap. Here, backdropped by flashes of mechanical drill drums, she has fun with the faded flows you could find on modern Philly street rap posse cuts. Then, over the blaring choir sample of “Two Fifteen,” her no-fucks-given attitude could fit next to some vintage State Property goonery. These moments aren’t showy; they won’t make for good podcast segments. But it’s the regionally specific pocket that’s snapping Tierra Whack out of the funk and pushing her into a new phase that doesn’t feel like it’s chasing the singularity of Whack World.
