Rapper Tierra Whack remixes music documentaries with Hulu’s “Cypher”

The primary quarter-hour of rapper Tierra Whack’s movie Cypher has all of the makings of a conventional music documentary.

We’re given the backstory of how Whack went from writing and performing poems at school to the beginnings of her hip-hop profession after a video of her freestyling on the streets in her hometown of Philadelphia went viral. We see Whack’s fast ascension within the business with main artists equivalent to Rihanna, Meek Mill, and Billie Eilish cosigning her abilities, in addition to the discharge of 2018’s Whack World, her debut album with 15 one-minute tracks and spellbinding visuals that seize her distinctive artistry.

Cypher, at the moment streaming on Hulu, units up Whack’s early years with a watch towards the place she plans to take her profession subsequent. Nonetheless, the “documentary” takes a tough left flip when Whack is approached by a stalker who warns her that an Illuminati-like group is out to make use of her musical items for nefarious causes.

And so begins a sequence of unsettling occasions that will have the viewers asking, What precisely is Cypher all about?

In recent times, we’ve seen the discharge of a slew of music documentaries, together with Billie Eilish’s The World’s a Little Blurry, Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana, Olivia Rodrigo’s Driving House 2 U, and plenty of others. Cypher, written and directed by Chris Moukarbel (Gaga: 5 Foot Two; Banksy Does New York), has been described as a fictional pseudo-music documentary, subverting what we’ve come to anticipate from an intimate, behind-the-scenes take a look at an artist’s life to create a commentary on trendy superstar tradition.

“I used to be nervous so much to start with as a result of it’s my first time appearing with a script,” Whack says. “Chris [Moukarbel] was like, ‘I requested you to do that as a result of I would like you to be you, so no matter feels proper to you that’s what we would like.’ And that’s what I did. We had been impressed by The Blair Witch Challenge—typically issues would occur that we didn’t plan however then we might simply go together with it.”

Moukarbel had a normal thought of what he wished Cypher to be however was on the lookout for the appropriate artist to collaborate with. He related with Whack in 2019, a yr after she dropped her debut album, and shortly discovered his “good accomplice.”

“She’s the sort of artist who likes to mess with style and go on a creative journey—and that’s what this venture meant for me in quite a lot of methods,” Moukarbel says. “It’s taking part in with the standard format of a music documentary, which has develop into extraordinarily common the previous few years, the place we get to bait and swap [audiences].”

Cypher reimagines the music documentary as a way of spotlighting cynicism inside the music business, the pervasiveness of superstar tradition, and the rising perception in conspiracy theories. In line with a study printed in 2022, roughly 59% of Individuals agree that individuals are extra prone to consider conspiracy theories in comparison with 25 years in the past. However as you would possibly’ve guessed by now, unraveling conspiracy theories in Cypher is way from simple.

“I like issues to have an ambiguity. I did need it to really feel like not solely was Tierra probably a part of one thing greater, however that she was probably pulling the strings,” Moukarbel says. “I appreciated the concept she was probably manipulating me and the movie manufacturing into making one thing that helped her obtain her final objective, which was to ascend inside this secret society.”

Artists together with Beyoncé, Katy Perry, and Ariana Grande have used documentaries and live performance movies to present their followers in-depth entry to their artistic course of and who they’re outdoors of their career. In Cypher, there are glimpses of reality into Whack’s life and profession. And the truth that mentioned reality is delivered as an experimental “documentary” says extra about Whack’s creativity as an artist than any behind-the-scenes movie of a live performance or music video may.

“Traditionally, documentaries had been handled like journalism. We’ve discovered that not solely had been they not that, however they don’t must be that. I believe that you may inform a real story that isn’t essentially in regards to the actuality that’s on the display in the way in which that fiction does, even when what you’re seeing isn’t literal,” Moukarbel says. “Individuals are on the lookout for the aesthetic of realism and the aesthetic of reality.”

Whack has established herself as a genre-bending artist, one who can’t be constrained to a single type or aesthetic, and it definitely reveals in her music and storytelling. To that finish, Whack notes that she desires to proceed pushing the boundaries of her artistry to forge her personal lane in music and past.  

“I don’t slot in wherever,” she says. “I simply wish to proceed to problem myself on daily basis. I by no means wish to get comfy as a result of being comfy is boring. I’m at all times on the lookout for a brand new journey, a brand new process, one thing to sort out, and it simply retains me rising and retains me hungry. . . . On the identical time it retains me humble as a result of I’m studying new issues.”