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  • Tierra Whack Takes Her Mask Off

    Tierra Whack Takes Her Mask Off

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    Photo: Camila Falquez for New York Magazine

    In the video for her new song, “27 Club,” Tierra Whack appears in her customary setup: a surrealist world splattered with bright colors and filled with weird characters. At what seems to be a pep rally from an alternate universe, Whack wears a silver garment that looks like a cross between a choir robe and a clown suit. As a melancholy melody starts to play, she cycles through a series of animated masks — one with running eye shadow, another with subtle clown makeup — before she reveals her actual, downcast face. “I can show you how it feels,” she sings, then drops an octave, “when you lose what you love.” As band members and cheerleaders dance joyfully around her, she tells a story of disillusionment and loneliness, of how thoughts in isolation can make you feel so invisible that the people close to you can’t even recognize when you’re hurting. Those thoughts lead to an unsettling conclusion in which, on the song’s hook, Whack repeatedly chants the word suicide.

    “I’m surrounded by all these people cheering me on, but it’s wearing me down,” Whack says, explaining the concept to me. “I’m trying to go through the motions because things are happening in my life but I’m still supposed to push through as a public figure.” It’s the morning after Valentine’s Day, and we’re at Yowie, a boutique hotel, shop, and café on Philadelphia’s buzzy South Street that feels straight out of one of her music videos. Owned by Whack’s friend Shannon Maldonado, it’s arrayed in bold colors and has quirky home goods for sale: Harry the Peanut candles, mini ceramic houses that store palo-santo sticks, and John Waters posters. Whack herself is dressed as if she’s about to break out into one of her dizzying rhymes, rocking a bright-green Issey Miyake pantsuit and fiery-red hair. She called the song “27 Club,” she says, “because I planned to end my life at 27. I’m 28 now, so I made it through. I’m figuring it out.”

    The story of “27 Club” is a far cry from how the multifaceted Philly native first came into the public eye with her breakout 2017 single, “Mumbo Jumbo,” and then 2018’s Whack World, an audiovisual spectacle featuring 15 one-minute-long songs accompanied by stunningly inventive music videos. Generally, Whack’s work resembles off-kilter Sesame Street episodes with creepier concepts. The video for “Mumbo Jumbo” depicts a twisted trip to the dentist in which she leaves with a horrifying, permanent Joker-like smile, but the song’s contents don’t reflect any of that eeriness, mainly because there aren’t any discernible spoken words. Songs like “Hungry Hippo,” “Cable Guy,” and everything since, like “Only Child,” have been soulful, kooky Pop Art communicated through lullaby-esque melodies and buoyant raps. It never gets too dark, even when she shows flashes of sadness. But the past few years have forced Whack to confront some buried traumas, and the new music reflects that.

    “I came up kinda rough. My mom was single, working many jobs. It sounds like the story is so common, but it’s my life and it’s personal to me,” she says. “Then I find this hobby: me writing poetry, then rapping. Then I realize I wanna make this my thing.” When she was 15, her mother spotted members of the We Run the Streets crew, a local rap collective, walking around the neighborhood and told Whack to spit something for them. In a moment now memorialized on YouTube, a young Whack — then going by Dizzle Dizz — raps confidently, “Stop and see, my flow is all chocolaty / I’m guaranteed a record deal / On top near Lauryn’s Hill / You wack, so imagine how Tierra feel.”

    The video went viral, and We Run the Streets became her management team. Local radio stations invited her to freestyle; in one of the more popular videos from that time, she raps for Meek Mill at Philly’s Power 99 FM. Even before the otherwordly big-budget videos, you can see her penchant for humor and free expression in these early efforts: Wearing brightly colored wigs, she contorts her voice for dramatic effect and sways her body to illustrate punch lines, stylistically reminiscent of artists like M.I.A., Rye Rye, and fellow Philadelphian Santigold. “My mom used to always dress me in bright colors. I would stand out,” Whack remembers, laughing. “In school, everybody would have the navy-blue thing, and she would get me bright red and orange.” But despite the virality of that work, she didn’t love her Dizzle Dizz persona. “Everyone was happy for me, but I wasn’t happy. I just felt like I was selling myself short,” she told The Fader back in 2018. So she moved to Atlanta with her mom for her last year of high school and sharpened her skills quietly before returning to Philadelphia and going by her government name.

    Photo: Camila Falquez for New York Magazine

    In 2017, with renewed confidence, Whack uploaded “Mumbo Jumbo” to SoundCloud; she signed to Interscope that same year. It changed her financial situation immediately. “I’m thinking I’m about to have to get two jobs and figure it out,” she says. “God sent me the perfect blessing.” The advance she received couldn’t have come at a better time: Some months earlier, her stepdad had thrown her out, and she was unhoused for three months, splitting time between friends’ couches and a storage unit she could barely afford. Two days before her 21st birthday, she found her grandmother unresponsive. It was the first time she had encountered a dead body.

    Meanwhile, her fame was ratcheting up. Whack World dropped the following year and received rave reviews. Lauryn Hill invited her to open at a tour stop in Philadelphia, and André 3000 became a mentor. In 2019, Beyoncé enlisted Whack as a featured artist on The Lion King: The Gift album. Whack seemed primed for a career in the tradition of eccentric rap stars like Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, and Ludacris — more-than-capable lyricists with imaginative visual identities who offer mainstream appeal. But instead, Whack went fairly quiet. Rather than make a full-bodied follow-up to Whack World, in 2021 she released a few three-song EPs (Rap?, Pop?, and R&B?) that  didn’t inspire much conversation. Late last year, she put out Cypher, a sort of autofiction documentary that captures her life as a rising rap star but takes a turn when she encounters a crazed fan. But she didn’t release an actual album.

    The reason, Whack says, was that her depression had finally caught up to her and she started having suicidal thoughts. “I was at a breaking point.
    I was looking for a reason to do it. But I was too cowardly to do it myself,” she says of her ideations. “As this next level of success is coming to me, I’m like, I don’t feel like I deserve this. But I worked so hard to deserve it.” (She bangs the table with every word for emphasis.) The stillness imposed by the pandemic helped. “It was like a gift and a curse because I was running,” she says. “When I finally had time to sit down, I was overwhelmed, but I knew I had to find a way out of this. The discipline of having to sit still and sit with your thoughts, I needed that.” She started seeing a therapist and doing more physical activity: playing basketball and riding her bike. Luckily, Whack World paid her bills even when she wasn’t producing more music. “Whack World is my hugest blessing because I was surviving off it for years — like, up until now,” she says. “Everything opened up: sync placements, shows, different branding deals. People were on me. It fed me for six years. That’s unheard of. That’s how I know I made a classic.”

    She seems to be in a better headspace these days. Her life now consists of a routine she loves: going to her favorite smoothie spot; checking in with her mom, who lives close by; and hitting the gym to clear her mind. She’s committed to her hometown, too. “I don’t wanna be nowhere else,” she says. “A lot of my friends be tryna shit on Philly, and I tell them to shut up. They’re ready to take their next check and get out of here. I’m like, ‘What is so wrong with the city?’ ”

    Despite Whack World’s success, it doesn’t technically count as an album, according to the rapper’s contract with Interscope, so World Wide Whack will be her official debut. The 15-track project feels like a burial of Whack’s former self. Remnants of that other person are still there: the playfulness, the world-building, the commitment to experimentation. But there’s so much more self-reflection going on. On the album’s intro, “Mood Swing,” Whack sings beautifully about anxiety and the need to try new things, as her therapist suggested during the pandemic. In “Two Night,” she talks about dealing with feelings of abandonment by her biological father, whom she also briefly dismisses (“You remind me of my deadbeat dad”) in Whack World’s “Fuck Off.”

    Whack in the “27 Club” music video.
    Video: Tierra Whack/YouTube

    She collaborated with the Philadelphia-based visual artist Alex Da Corte to direct three videos for the project, including “27 Club.” They met in 2019 when Whack accompanied a mutual friend to one of Da Corte’s invite-only rehearsals for a performance. “We’re both in Philly, and we’ll send each other music or images of art and stuff,” Da Corte says. Each video represents a time of day: “Shower Song,” which incorporates techno-pop elements, features two-dimensional stop-motion graphics filled with a palette of primary colors to symbolize the morning; “27 Club” references late-’90s videos from the MTV countdown-show era; and in the soon-to-be-released video for “Two Night,” Whack plays a balloon floating through the city’s skyline before the crowd revolts, throwing stuff at her. At the end, night falls, and she’s flattened until the next day, when the cycle repeats.

    The music for “27 Club” took much longer to complete than the other tracks on World Wide Whack because of the vulnerability it required. Whack says there were  times when she would go to the studio, record six songs per session, and still leave unfulfilled because she couldn’t get that one song done. An unlikely source of inspiration — the 2021 documentary Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James — set her free. “It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen,” she says. At some  point in the film, the focus shifts to the Mary Jane Girls, a group the Buffalo music legend helped put together in 1979. Previously unaware of them, Whack paused the film and started to do some light research.

    “That night, I got in the car and played their song ‘You Are My Heaven,’ and it did something to my body. It gave me chills. I’m like, Yo, I wanna make something like this,” she recalls. A few weeks later, at a studio session in Atlanta, her producers finally figured out the perfect way to channel that song’s energy: “We were in a dark room with a blue light. The vibe was already there. They found the right drums, then I said, ‘I can show you how it feels.’ I did not know the song would be about me attempting to kill myself, but it came so easy. I cried, and I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been trying to say.’”

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    Lawrence Burney

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  • Outdoor Dining Is Doomed

    Outdoor Dining Is Doomed

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    These days, strolling through downtown New York, where I live, is like picking your way through the aftermath of a party. In many ways, it is exactly that: The limp string lights, trash-strewn puddles, and splintering plywood are all relics of the raucous celebration known as outdoor dining.

    These wooden “streeteries” and the makeshift tables lining sidewalks first popped up during the depths of the pandemic in 2020, when restaurants needed to get diners back in their seats. It was novel, creative, spontaneous—and fun during a time when there wasn’t much fun to be had. For a while, outdoor dining really seemed as though it could outlast the pandemic. Just last October, New York Magazine wrote that it would stick around, “probably permanently.”

    But now someone has switched on the lights and cut the music. Across the country, something about outdoor dining has changed in recent months. With fears about COVID subsiding, people are losing their appetite for eating among the elements. This winter, many streeteries are empty, save for the few COVID-cautious holdouts willing to put up with the cold. Hannah Cutting-Jones, the director of food studies at the University of Oregon, told me that, in Eugene, where she lives,  outdoor dining is “ absolutely not happening” right now. In recent weeks, cities such as New York and Philadelphia have started tearing down unused streeteries. Outdoor dining’s sheen of novelty has faded; what once evoked the grands boulevards of Paris has turned out to be a janky table next to a parked car. Even a pandemic, it turns out, couldn’t overcome the reasons Americans never liked eating outdoors in the first place.

    For a while, the allure of outdoor dining was clear. COVID safety aside, it kept struggling restaurants afloat, boosted some low-income communities, and cultivated joie de vivre in bleak times. At one point, more than 12,700 New York restaurants had taken to the streets, and the city—along with others, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia—proposed making dining sheds permanent. But so far, few cities have actually adopted any official rules. At this point, whether they ever will is unclear. Without official sanctions, mounting pressure from outdoor-dining opponents will likely lead to the destruction of existing sheds; already, they keep tweeting disapproving photos at sanitation departments. Part of the issue is that as most Americans’ COVID concerns retreat, the potential downsides have gotten harder to overlook: less parking, more trash, tacky aesthetics, and, oh God, the rats. Many top New York restaurants have voluntarily gotten rid of their sheds this winter.

    The economics of outdoor dining may no longer make sense for restaurants, too. Although it was lauded as a boon to struggling restaurants during the height of the pandemic, the practice may make less sense now that indoor dining is back. For one thing, dining sheds tend to take up parking spaces needed to attract customers, Cutting-Jones said. The fact that most restaurants are chains doesn’t help: “If whatever conglomerate owns Longhorn Steakhouse doesn’t want to invest in outdoor dining, it will not become the norm,” Rebecca Spang, a food historian at Indiana University Bloomington, told me. Besides, she added, many restaurants are already short-staffed, even without the extra seats.

    In a sense, outdoor dining was doomed to fail. It always ran counter to the physical makeup of most of the country, as anyone who ate outside during the pandemic inevitably noticed. The most obvious constraint is the weather, which is sometimes pleasant but is more often not. “Who wants to eat on the sidewalk in Phoenix in July?” Spang said.

    The other is the uncomfortable proximity to vehicles. Dining sheds spilled into the streets like patrons after too many drinks. The problem was that U.S. roads were built for cars, not people. This tends not to be true in places renowned for outdoor dining, such as Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, which urbanized before cars, Megan Elias, a historian and the director of the gastronomy program at Boston University, told me. At best, this means that outdoor meals in America are typically enjoyed with a side of traffic. At worst, they end in dangerous collisions.

    Cars and bad weather were easier to put up with when eating indoors seemed like a more serious health hazard than breathing in fumes and trembling with cold. It had a certain romance—camaraderie born of discomfort. You have to admit, there was a time when cozying up under a heat lamp with a hot drink was downright charming. But now outdoor dining has gone back to what it always was: something that most Americans would like to avoid in all but the most ideal of conditions. This sort of relapse could lead to fewer opportunities to eat outdoors even when the weather does cooperate.

    But outdoor dining is also affected by more existential issues that have surmounted nearly  three years of COVID life. Eating at restaurants is expensive, and Americans like to get their money’s worth. When safety isn’t a concern, shelling out for a streetside meal may simply not seem worthwhile for most diners. “There’s got to be a point to being outdoors, either because the climate is so beautiful or there’s a view,” Paul Freedman, a Yale history professor specializing in cuisine, told me. For some diners, outdoor seating may feel too casual: Historically, Americans associated eating at restaurants with special occasions, like celebrating a milestone at Delmonico’s, the legendary fine-dining establishment that opened in the 1800s, Cutting-Jones said.

    Eating outdoors, in contrast, was linked to more casual experiences, like having a hot dog at Coney Island. “We have high expectations for what dining out should be like,” she said, noting that American diners are especially fussy about comfort. Even the most opulent COVID cabin may be unable to override these associations. “If the restaurant is going to be fancy and charge $200 a person,” said Freedman, most people can’t escape the feeling of having spent that much for “a picnic on the street.”

    Outdoor dining isn’t disappearing entirely. In the coming years there’s a good chance that more Americans will have the opportunity to eat outside in the nicer months than they did before the pandemic—even if it’s not the widespread practice many had anticipated earlier in the pandemic. Where it continues, it will almost certainly be different: more buttoned-up, less lawless—probably less exciting. Santa Barbara, for example, made dining sheds permanent last year but specified that they must be painted an approved “iron color.” It may also be less popular among restaurant owners: If outdoor-dining regulations are too far-reaching or costly, cautioned Hayrettin Günç, an architect with Global Designing Cities Initiative, that will “create barriers for businesses.”

    For now, outdoor dining is yet another COVID-related convention that hasn’t quite stuck—like avoiding handshakes and universal remote work. As the pandemic subsides, the tendency is to default to the ways things used to be. Doing so is easier, certainly, than coming up with policies to accommodate new habits. In the case of outdoor dining, it’s most comfortable, too. If this continues to be the case, then outdoor dining in the U.S. may return to what it was before the pandemic: dining “al fresco” along the streetlamp-lined terraces of the Venetian Las Vegas, and beneath the verdant canopy of the Rainforest Cafe.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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