Tierra Whack’s Labor Of Self-Love, From Car Wash To Critical Mass

On a sun-baked intersection of Ponce de Leon Avenue, a street named for the Spanish colonizer whose false claim to fame was discovering the fountain of youth, sits one of the most conspicuous cultural attractions in Atlanta. Mister Car Wash may be the busiest destination of its kind in a Southern capital where car washes are outnumbered only slightly by churches and chicken wing stops. It also happens to be the location of a pivotal pit stop in the rapid rise of one of hip-hop’s brightest new stars.

Five summers before Philly native Tierra Whack reinvented the music video with Whack World — the ADHD-friendly audiovisual project of 15 60-second songs that made her 2018’s darling of innovation — she could be found soaking up suds in that same corner lot. This was her first job, the detour in Whack’s origin story on her way to shifting the culture with 15 minutes of Internet magic. In a sense, the car wash wound up being the springboard to her future.

Now she’s so far gone that the biggest award show in the music industry can’t even keep up. When the Recording Academy nominated Whack in the best music video category for the 2019 Grammys, most fans naturally assumed she’d earned the recognition for her groundbreaking debut, Whack World. She had not. (Even Wikipedia got it wrong: At press time, the first graph of Whack’s wiki entry still read that Whack World received “a Best Music Video nomination for the 2019 Grammy Awards.”) Instead, her Grammy nod is for “Mumbo Jumbo,” the avant-grotesque loosie of a music video released in October 2017 that introduced Whack’s deranged sense of humor and earned high praise from her earliest celebrity adopter, Solange Knowles.