On the Rise: CHIKA

On the day I speak to rapper CHIKA, it’s two days before she’ll walk the red carpet to the 63rd Grammy Awards ceremony. Far from preoccupied, she spent the morning on Twitter discussing her just-released record... and asking for pet advice.

“I’m high, we’ll talk about the EP tomorrow. Right now help me pick out a new piscean (fish) homie. i have a tank and no friends.”

Underneath, fans are suggesting the kind she should get, showing off their own fish, while others are still on the subject of congratulating her on EP – the sublime, soulful Once Upon a Time. “It’s scary,” she says of the EP release. “If you spend a year painting something and you haven’t shown anybody, it’s like the big reveal. You’ve seen it so much and you’re proud of it, but it’s like, ‘Oh, wait. I have people to show this to.’ And it’s gonna be open to any comments and any standing criticism –– and it’s always gonna be scary to drop music. But this in particular, with the week being so big, it was just like, that much more intense.”

Those who go from listening to CHIKA’S rich hip-hop to scrolling through her social media will spot it: there is honesty all around. On her various platforms, the twenty-four-year-old has talked about her mental health and imposter syndrome – a feeling you can almost understand when you consider how, in just a year, she has gone from releasing her debut EP, to a Grammy nomination, NPR’s TinyDesk, and starring in Netflix’s Project Power.

It was arguably CHIKA’s unfiltered approach to rap that got her noticed. Born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama Jane Chika Oranika was blessed with the ability “to speak and communicate well”, and began writing songs at the age of nine before she found her way with poetry in her early teens. To simply read poetry over music like a spoken word artist “didn’t make sense unless I was rapping,” she told Apple Music in a recent interview. “So I was a closeted rapper, confident in it until I showed it to the world. And it wasn’t an easy transition internally.”

That cautious nature was tested when, in 2018, a diss-video she made towards Kanye West – around the same time he was supportive of and even held a meeting with former President Donald Trump at the White House – went viral.

In the video, “A Letter to Kanye Omari West,” CHIKA raps over West’s “Jesus Walks” and delivers a sharp diss, pointedly voicing the disappointment that caused many to squeeze their knuckles at West (“We thought you could fill a void/ You a puppet/ You looked at all your fans and said Fuck It”). The diss launched the rapper into the mainstream: she made a cameo on Sarah Silverman’s I Love You America, and, a year later, performed a piece on Kimmel about Alabama governor Kay Ivey’s bill to make abortion unconstitutional in the state in nearly all cases. (Since then, the bill has been temporarily blocked.)

Whilst social media was part of her come-up, there were detractors. The Kayne piece garnered stans to descend on her – and recently she found herself being criticised for immortalising her Grammy nomination with a tattoo. Does she find it hard sharing online because of the anonymous comfortability people tend to enjoy?

“For some people it may be. I feel like there’s a human thread that ties everybody together and that we can all relate to, and being a person blessed with a voice that’s far-reaching, I’m super interested in exploring what that human-thread is. And part of that is honesty. And I know a lot of people hide behind their anonymity and feel comfortable because you have people online who dog on you if you say something wild and personal – but they’re not gonna walk up to you and ask you about it.”

“People just want you to feel how they feel. I think people find a lot of community in if they dislike something – or like something, there’s positives, too – and it’s a bandwagon thing where it’s like, ‘Oh, finally, there’s something someone dislikes that I don’t like’. And because we’re so suppressed as people, they feel very empowered to be as honest about how much they hate things – when in actuality, you don’t have to tell me. It’s fine for you to hate anything. But the internet…” she pauses. “I feel like it’s a very bittersweet thing. It makes people feel seen – whether that’s a hateful group or a supportive one – and yeah, people being upset is not foreign to me.”

Luckily, those few hateful groups didn’t blunt CHIKA’s honesty. On her first EP Industry Games, it’s tapped into not just one song, but over the course of its twenty-minutes. As its name suggests, there is a focus on her newfound navigation of the industry, in which she recalls the time she met Jay-Z, the tension between being able to afford Balenciaga shoes whilst battling mental health problems, and the fact that “your fave rapper got hella hits but come in sixth for writers credited.” There is no longer a need to feel like a “closeted rapper”: each time, her flow is tight and commanding, whether it is delivered at the casual pace or a thrilling tempo.

At one point in our interview, I wonder aloud how it is so easy for her to recite in the way she does. She admits, “It’s not just me being able to like, wake up and do this whole thing. I remember on Industry Games, I had posted in January –– a year before the EP came out – me rapping it and I remember there’s lines that I was like, ‘How am I gonna say this?’ But because I was so driven to make it sound like how it did in my head, I was just rapping it over and over and over. Like there’s definitely experience that goes into it but it’s mostly just loving the music so much that I want to be able to perform it well. To the best of my ability.”

When I ask her after Industry why there was a desire to make another EP, instead of, perhaps, an album, this same dedication is present in her answer. “I make so much music so regularly and so many concepts float around in my head,” she says, “but my album –– that’s my debut. I skipped the mixtape phase of being a rapper, so with these EPs it’s like finally having official music out. But my debut album, that’s so much of a statement and such an undertaking that I wanna take my time on it and make sure that my first official, literal album is something that isn’t just a spur of the moment because people want music. I care about my legacy and I think that when it’s time, it’ll be time.”

For now, it is the time for her second EP, Once Upon A Time, which – at least to the listener – sounds like the culmination of lengthy personal reflection. In her own words, it retells fairy tale stories that typically those of brown skin were not featured in. “That’s why it’s called Once Upon A Time,” she says. “Because it’s a reimagination of fairytale stories and things like that.”

On opener, “FAIRY TALES.” there is a chorus of collegiate-like trumpets played, before CHIKA’s voice cuts through, telling: ‘Fairytales are stories with lessons and allegories that tell us about the world that could be / But I see no mention of bad shorties or niggas sippin on forties / No heroes inside a book look like me.” On “HICKORY DICKORY,” a track with bumping instrumentals, there is a nod to the Disney character, Cinderella’s “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo” in the reoccurring lyric, “Hickory Dickory Dock / This Shit a Bibbity Bop.” And then there is the two-part track, named after the Disney princess: “Cinderella Part 1 and Cinderella Part 2.”

On the first of the two tracks, the rapper remixes the classic’s famous royal ball scene. As CHIKA notes that the clock has reached ten and that there are only two hours left of the party, her eyes catch “Cinderella” – who she describes as a “Lil' mama thicker than the grip up on a pen.” In part two, it’s the last few minutes before twelve, with the clock now chiming, and the rapper delivering the warmest of serenades amidst lyrics of “doesn’t matter if I’m icy.” Whether they eventually get together is not revealed, but their potential fate echoes through the remaining tracks: “FWB,” which yearns for lust without love, and “Save You,” where her Cinderella ends up with someone else.

Between the Grammy nomination and the new record, CHIKA’s profile has exploded. The hardest part about all this, she admits, has just been adjusting. To become a different person and “just growing up and having to do that in-front of the world. It’s not hard in a way that’s like, a burden but it’s one that’s definitely a learning curve and a blessing at the same time.” And it is easy to see why. She is everywhere – and one could argue it’s because of her honesty. It has been with her since the very beginning, and I suspect, it will be there too, in this year that she calls “a time for exponential growth.”