Taking an offbeat Estonian road trip with the iconoclastic rapper.

The artist, whose real name is Tomas Tammemets, was born in Kopli, a working-class neighborhood in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. His childhood was a lonely one, spent without many friends and hating high school, which he dropped out of without any formal qualifications to pursue graffiti and dance. As a teenager, he consumed a cultural diet of Eminem, Nas, Jim Morrison, Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé and Quentin Tarantino, learning early on the power of art that’s made to shock you. In many ways, an isolated youth laid the foundations for his bizarre artistic world, which is completely self-sprung from the perspective of an outsider—patchworking these early influences, references from the trashier sides of American culture and a proud post-Soviet flare.

Importantly, his music and everything else he does is for other outsiders, too: a means of connecting with weird kids and left-field minds just like him. This ethos has shaped his two studio albums, Euroz Dollaz Yeniz (2014) and ¥€$ (2018), with the latter launching him to transatlantic renown. Across these earlier records and his most recent singles “Zuccenberg” and “Racked,” both released in 2021, Cash’s sound is completely unique. The rapper marries wry satirical lyrics with influences from trap, hip-hop and hardcore, balancing it all with his own Eastern European idiosyncrasies.

Cash’s visual world is even more extreme. He’s best known for his viral videos—half of which come slapped with a “sensitive content” warning—in which he has previously superimposed his own face onto a vagina, walked down dining tables dragging monstrously huge testicles and transformed into a group of creepy performing children. In recent years, this outlandish visual identity has seen Cash migrate to the worlds of fashion and art. Most notably, a friendship with design demigod <a href="https://www.goat.com/brand/rick-owens">Rick Owens</a> has brought to life several unlikely projects, including a <a href="https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/article/the-pure-and-the-damned-opposites-attract">2019 exhibition in Estonia</a> which showcased Owens’ designs alongside nightmarish paintings, sculptures and a display of Cash’s own sperm. Part of Cash’s genius is that he strikes a balance between poking fun at fashion and being a fan.

It’s an approach which in 2022, between legs of his first global tour and designing a sex toy with streetwear label Kappa, saw the artist stage a series of mischievous stunts at a number of fashion events—from lifting weights while sitting front row at Paris Fashion Week to cosplaying paparazzi at the Balenciaga show. These displays, while obviously funny, also serve to highlight the absurdities of the fashion world, and in particular its stiff social mores and proclivity for celebrity worship. Positioning himself as an outlier shaking things up from within, Cash knows exactly what he’s doing—and he’s having fun with it, too.

Here, the artist invites us into his universe with a personal photo story set in Estonia. Interpreting the issue’s theme of adventure through his surreal lens, we see Cash lurk outside monolithic churches, visit brutalist casinos and pump iron in abandoned gyms. “We wanted to be outside and in daring scenarios,” he tells us via email. “The idea is introducing ‘newness’ into the historic. Estonia is an old country, but it’s seen as super contemporary because of its digital achievements, so that it makes the impression of a new place. The contrast is found in the color and rather freakiness of the looks, as well as photoshopped surreal retouch details. It is a visual collage: style juxtaposed against landscape.”
This poetic exchange and the captivating photos it yielded are evidence of a complexity in Cash that is easily missed in the fanfare of his absurdist presence. While on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/tommycashworld/?hl=en">Instagram</a> he plays with constructs of gender, celebrity and modern consumer culture through a comic hellscape of characters—fleshy centaurs, cursed Ken dolls and a Lamborghini-driving delivery guy, to name but a few—offline and off the record, he’s a thoughtful and soft-spoken individual who approaches everything he does with intention. Look closely enough and you’ll spot this depth in the images that follow, where between scenes of eeriness or base humor something resembling vulnerability pokes through.
Discover this story and more in GREATEST ISSUE 07. Shop the magazine <a href="https://www.goat.com/apparel/greatest-magazine-issue-07-brent-faiyaz-multicolor-gr07bf">here</a>.

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