The visible curiosity of tv known as to Tierra Whack at a younger age. “I was glued to the TV. If it wasn’t cartoons, it was music videos from Missy Elliott to Ludacris, Busta Rhymes and Eminem. They were my favorite people to watch,” she stated final week at LiveWIRED, the thirtieth anniversary occasion for WIRED held at The Midway in San Francisco. “It just drew me in. I’m like, ‘I want to be like them. I want to be in the TV.’”

In the years that adopted, the Philadelphia-born rapper made good on her girlhood ambitions. An experimentalist with a style for the Black avant-garde, Whack broke onto the music scene in 2018 with Whack World, a 15-track, 15-minute-long mini-album brimming with invention and whimsy. Its launch—acclaimed by followers, critics, and veteran music artists like Flying Lotus and Erykah Badu—was not like anything on the time: a twisting, playful journey by Whack’s jamboree of a thoughts. It was an idea immaculately primed for a technology of digital natives raised on Instagram and fluent within the transitory nature of social media tendencies (every track was capped at one minute apiece).

Speaking with WIRED’s design director, Alyssa Walker, in regards to the comforts and challenges of creativity, Whack defined how the genesis of her inventive course of typically begins with a visible. “I have to see something—whether it’s an image, a color, a pattern. Just anything. I just have to feel [it], and then I start to form this almost movie clip in my head,” she stated. “Because everything I’m doing, it has to be a movie, it has to be a film.”