It’s Wednesday, you probably do got a job, and you definitely got sh*t to do.
Despite the name of this track, so does Tierra Whack.
If you don’t know who she is, please allow me to introduce you to this young woman who is unquestionably one of the best female rappers in the game right now.
The lazy listener might toss her into the “mumble rap” category, but they’d be wrong for a few reasons—even if one of her videos does literally feature her rapping with a dentist’s spreader in her mouth. Tierra speeds through her verses, but every word she raps is precisely articulated, which only makes her talent that much more jaw-dropping. And pigeon-holing her into mumble rap is silly when Tierra makes it nearly impossible to categorize her music at all. Songs like “Link” and “Dora” are adorable examples of Tierra’s rap-singing, but “Dr. Seuss” is more like bizarrely pitched and scaled spoken word. So what is Tierra Whack?
Certainly not “Unemployed,” that’s for sure.
She’s such a brilliant and prolific artist, she’s even been featured several times in Vogue for her creative approach to fashion and music.
Perhaps her bold expression in both arenas is rooted in how much she HATES couch potatoes.
“Unemployed” opens with Tierra working as a lowly chef in a kitchen hoarded with potatoes. And she destroys them all, turning each into a different potato dish, as a poor defenseless little spud watches her. It’s pretty hilarious until you realize she’s not really getting anywhere. Those potato piles aren’t decreasing, and she’s revealed to be serving them up for cannibalization by “ACTUAL” couch potatoes.
(Yeah. It’s just as weird as it sounds.)
But all of this is Tierra’s big metaphor: couch potatoes are people eating away at themselves. And instead of becoming one of them, Tierra reminds herself and the couch potato haters that she’s “gotta job [she’s] gotta do.”
“But Tierra, aren’t you just feeding the couch potatoes, literally and as an entertainer?”
I’m so glad you asked. Watch “Unemployed” carefully, because when you do, you’ll notice that both Tierra’s chef hat and… ahem assets… get bigger throughout the video. Even though she’s feeding this monster, her own ego gets bigger and she’s most certainly eating. The video’s adorable, hilarious, thoughtful, and terrifying all at once.
THAT’S how I’d describe Tierra Whack.
And honestly, if you watch it for NOTHING ELSE, the screaming french fries at the end are well… *chef’s kiss*