On World Wide Whack, Philly-born rapper Tierra Whack examines her complicated and at times contradictory feelings surrounding her rise to fame. The album’s brief opening track, “Mood Swings,” sets the tone lyrically and sonically, as Whack’s verses about her friends’ and family’s concerns about her mood swings are juxtaposed with a mellow beat.
Whack exudes a newfound confidence and braggadocio throughout WWW, sometimes rapping from the perspective of a character. She delivers exaggeratedly low-pitched ad-libs a la Playboi Carti and Travis Scott on the industrial-sounding “Ms Behave,” the titular persona of which is seemingly designed to conceal Whack’s struggles with mental health from those around her.
That façade, however, immediately begins to show cracks on “Chanel Pit.” “I am the shit you smell,” Whack says, and the disgust with which she regards herself is palpable. This could be seen as a nod to the countless hip-hop artists who’ve made use of a good shit joke, but here the joke is directed at herself—and she’s only half-kidding.
Tracks like “Numb,” “Difficult,” and “27 Club” delve even deeper into Whack’s troubled psyche. The latter in particular details the stranglehold that depression can have. But while these topics are quite heady, both the beats and Whack’s delivery are consistently laidback, almost calm. (In the case of “Numb,” though, her slurred vocals mirror the song’s portrait of addiction.)
Whack is too skilled a lyricist to give in entirely to the maudlin clichés of the tormented artist. On “27 Club,” for example, she compares the act of suicide to the athletic drill of the same name, as if a mythologized burning out were preordained: “When the world seems like it’s against you/When your friends and family forget you/It ain’t really hard to convince you/Looking for something to commit to?”
Still, it’s obvious that the very real difficulties of life as a public figure weigh heavily on Whack. On “Accessible” and “Imaginary Friends,” she reveals how uncomfortable she is being so accessible to people and dealing with “friendships” that can turn sour almost overnight, respectively. On the latter, she specifically worries that her friends are “banking on our downfall/Take me to Wells Fargo,” a deceptively humorous refrain about how wealth, or money more broadly, can cause relationships to fall apart.
A few tracks on WWW radiate the positivity and good humor that made 2018’s Whack World such a delight. “Shower Song” is, you guessed it, a loving ode to the joys of singing in the shower, while “Moovies” finds Whack in a playful mood as she muses about a lover who refuses to take her to the movies. WWW may be a candid and sophisticated analysis of the dark side of fame, but it’s also eminently entertaining and occasionally funny, and it (re)establishes Whack as one of the most creative rappers in the game.
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