Music

MARVIN x TiaCorine: When it comes to creating, the 32-year-old rapper isn’t afraid of going against the grain.

TiaCorine is a shapeshifter. It’s been difficult to pin her down over the years we’ve crossed paths. That’s perhaps the reason it always takes a moment for us to reconnect, pinpointing timestamps of our past encounters with hairstyles and clothing. Days after the release of her third album, the delirious and wonderfully chaotic Corinian, we’re both sporting black shaggy mullets.

There are other subtle changes I’ve noticed following her over the years, mainly her voice getting lighter and the infectious joy that radiates when we speak on the phone today. It’s clear that rapping grounds her, and one can’t fault her for feeling the pressure after signing a major label deal with Interscope in 2022. But for Tia, it wasn’t pressure to perform, but rather pressure to protect what she had built.

After finding virality with her earworm “Lotto” in 2018, the North Carolina native could’ve fallen into the abyss of TikTok purgatory, doomed to the same fate as Sisyphus, hoping for another hit. But she’s a hustler, and when she burst on the scene she was juggling a fast-food management job with motherhood, school, and music dreams. Tia placed her faith in divine timing, building up her fanbase with strategy rather than immediacy.

It’s that patience that rewarded her for the release of Corinian, released this October — three years after she signed her deal — and featuring Saweetie, Flo Milli, and Wiz Khalifa. She filled the lull with a 2022 remix of her Southern-tinged breakout hit, “FreakyT,” with Latto. Tia also hit the road with modern Memphis rap savant Key Glock, soon after enlisting him as one of the features on her excellent 2024 EP Almost There, a cheeky foreshadowing of what was to come. Hundreds of millions of streams later, Tia doesn’t flinch when using the word “mainstream” to describe herself. It’s a badge of honor to commemorate how hard she’s worked and the pride she feels knowing that she hasn’t changed.

For the uninitiated, it can be confusing to see what has made the 32-year-old rapper one of the buzziest names in music right now. Half the fun is in getting to know her. She’s an unabashed nerd, littering her visuals and lyrics with anime and video game references. Her social presence is chaotic and colorful; sometimes you can catch a foot photo if you’re lucky. Tia represents the disarming and radical vulnerability reminiscent of the golden age of social media before everyone became aware of its permanence. 

Corinian wraps up the trilogy crystallized in Tia’s head before these new worlds opened up for her, and it synthesizes all the parts that make her whole. Her delivery is slick, punchy, and limber as she switches between deliveries, going from cartoonish to cutesy to gruff. She reappropriates the braggadocio of her male counterparts, comparing herself to 50 Cent on baddie anthem “Pretty,” and crudely demanding anal sex on the JID-featuring single “Backyard.” Half of Tia’s beauty and appeal comes from her willingness to challenge the conventions of femininity and what’s expected of her as a woman, as an artist, and at the intersection of her Blackness. 

TiaCorine reiterates multiple times she’s reached her final form, but I sense a tinge of hesitation in her voice. But at her Brooklyn album release party in October, I watched a packed crowd hanging onto her every word, feeling their animalistic instincts take over as if they had heard the album a million times over. It seemed like evidence that TiaCorine’s forms are endless. At least I hope so.

Your new album Corinian is chaotic as all hell. What was your motivation going into this album?

The album is wrapping up a trilogy, so it’s always been a journey. It is so chaotic because that’s how my mind is. I have so many different parts of me, so I never wanted to limit myself to one thing. I wanted to make it more mainstream. Whenever I drop something, a lot of the comments had been “I can’t understand you” or “You’re rapping too fast,” so this time I tried to simplify it but not lose the bars.