By Kennedy Nyavaya
The local hip-hop sphere is a hard hat area for female artistes who have to juggle between making good music, unfair judgements and scanty resources, emerging rapper Tashamiswa “Zoe” Musarurwa, popularly known as Tasha, has said.
In an interview with Standard Style, the 22-year-old opened up about how she has had to endure constant judgements and the fabricated notion that she is of loose morals for choosing the genre.
“I deal with judgement every single day, especially from other women in the (music) industry,” Tasha said.
“Where I think we should be uplifting each other, they are more of trying to pull me down or trying to change me to another genre.
“It is even hard to find someone to date, nobody wants to date me because everybody thinks I am this anomaly, this outspoken girl with very little self-worth, which is the complete opposite of what women in [hip-hop] music are.”
According to the artist, it is baffling that women are receiving the hard end of the stick yet when it comes to men, “a lot of things are seen as acceptable.”
Born in Greenwich, England, the Chitungwiza-bred musician started rapping at 15 years before officially kick-starting her career in July 2018 when she released a track titled Crew.
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Unlike many who pursue music solely for personal gains, Tasha has pledged her talents to rewrite the rules of the game first.
“I am aiming to create an industry where females feel safe to make music and participate, we don’t have enough females in the game because of this stigma against women in music especially women in hip hop. I want to change that perspective,” she said adding that she will not rest until “everyone is given a fair platform”.
Snippets of the lyricist’s latest songs including Wraps featuring Tulk Munny have been doing rounds on social media of late in what could be a timely reintroduction of her career, which, by her own admission, took a hit from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The lowest point in my music journey was between last year and this year like the whole pandemic period. Everything has been extremely hard…it has been a very dark time for me because I wasn’t able to make any money or record and drop as regularly as I would like to,” she said.
However, Tasha said she was ready for a comeback starting with the release of her second extended-play (EP) titled King of Harare in the build up to her debut album scheduled to drop soon.
Turning to the trendy topic about Zim hip-hop royalty and crowns, the multi-talented musical instrument player said she was gunning for the King status.
“Every female that raps wants to be the queen, but I do not want to be the queen, I do not want to move around the chess board a million times, move diagonally or left and right like a queen on the chess board.
“I just want to make one move and its checkmate, I want to be the king to the queens, I want to be a girl called King. I want to be the King of Harare.”
