Deciphering Tierra Whack’s “WAX PAPER”
On her first solo single in two years, the Philadelphia rapper turns a Conductor Williams loop into a two-and-a-half-minute homophone barrage and makes the punchline the whole job.
None of “WAX PAPER” will hit you until a second listen. First time through, it’s a brag, it’s a threat; it’s only on the rewind that you catch the second meaning, which was, right there, all along, nestled inside the same sounds. Tierra Whack writes for the rewind—a Conductor Williams beat piled high with couplets where a single word pulls double duty, the insult underneath hiding until the rhyme spits it out. If this is the type of energy we’re getting on WHACK’S MUSEUM (releasing on Juneteenth), we’re in for a masterpiece.
A majority of the threats are tucked into punchlines. “Bodies in the basement” kicks off a rhyme where the body count stays under the small talk, and the moment of real hurt comes when she translates the violence to rapping: “Wonder why I don’t rap much/‘Cause when I rap, somebody’s bound to get wrapped up.” Rap becomes wrapped up, the word for a corpse in a tarp, so the reason for her silence and the thing she’s ready to do to any aggressor rides the same sound. Seconds later, a similar sickness gag applies: “I’m so sick, I really think you should mask up,” sick read as both unwell and unassailable and the mask as both shield and source of contagions.
She names her rhyming engine: “Sharper than a shark tooth, Whack God, I’m Doc Seuss.” Tooth becomes Seuss, and she crowns herself with the only writer whose entire job description was rhyming.
These softer, emotional moments are rare, kept at the absolute briefest. “Since my brother was in the placement, this disrespect was blatant,” offers a familial detail, then moves on before we can consider the backstory. Her mother receives a single quoted line, “Once you make it, don’t end up like Yazz the Greatest,” a directive passed down and left with no follow-up. The poverty makes one appearance as the raw facts: “We was poor, chicken broth,” wedged into a bar about breaking free. All this passes over the surface, and the bragging snaps shut on it again.
The threat behind it all doesn’t negate the earnest, almost plaintive: “I just want my credit, man, I promise I don’t need cash.” Money is a thread that runs throughout, from the “all about the Benjamins” of the hook to the dentist bars where the braces on her mouth serve as a proxy for the plaques on a wall she believes she’s owed. She claims to work “for the culture” then stands by as her name is omitted, “like it was hard to pronounce,” and the two-faced bars all point back to that simple fact. The hurt is the only line that stands without its double meaning.