Steve 'Flash' Juon“Bet you ain’t heard no flow like this.”
Some albums are made from a yearning to express oneself creatively. Some albums are made to address frustration with society and the world. Some albums are made just to get a bunch of weird ideas out of your head. Some albums are made just to prove a point. Tierra Whack’s “Whack World” manages to be all of these things at the same time. Let’s start with the latter one first. Whack wanted to prove the point that an entire album could be done in 15 minutes. She succeeded. Every single one of these 15 tracks is only a minute long. It feels like that joke about how short rap songs are now but this is definitely not a joke.
Tierra Whack got her first taste of fame as a freestyle rapper from Philadelphia named Dizzle Dizz, but after moving around a bit in her young life and dealing with both depression and an estranged father (not entirely unrelated) her style evolved. “Not yo’ average girl” raps Whack on “Hungry Hippos,” with a video (or “visualizer” if you prefer) that showcases her unusual tendencies. If there’s such a thing as being a post-Odd Future rapper, I’d say Whack fits that definition. She sounds like an emcee who embraced the idea that there are no rules any more.
So we’ve seen she can make a point, and she can get her weird ideas out, but when she says “you remind me of my deadbeat dad” on “Fuck Off” we also see her frustrations being vented. That’s how you deal with depression. Bottling up the things that bother you only leads to self-hatred and/or destructive tendencies. Even if she only has a minute to get it out — mind you that’s her own self-imposed limit — she still manages to express her feelings fully. I respect the hell out of that.
And what about that creative yearning? Well you see that clearly on songs like “Fruit Salad” when she says “you can’t define me/I don’t need nobody.” The accompanying video both celebrates and playfully mocks the idea of physical fitness, but when accompanied with her lyrics, it’s clear she doesn’t “define” her body for anyone but herself. If you’re going to get fit, that’s the way to go about it. When you do it for yourself and not for anyone else, you can do it for personal improvement and not other people’s standards of health and beauty.
With all these compliments I’ve paid Tierra Whack it would be easy to assume “Whack World” is a slam dunk. That’s true. I thoroughly enjoyed the album… but I have to be perfectly clear that “album” is a stretch. It’s ironic to talk about fitness in the context of an album shorter than any length of time I’ve spent at the gym, right? I could listen to this “album” four times during one workout. This is just my opinion (as all reviews are) but I think I’d like “Whack World” even more if she wasn’t so dead set on proving her point. Longer songs where she can really expand on her ideas and expound on her beliefs would be much more satisfying. This is 15 snacks when what I really wanted was one full meal.