Tag Archives: Silvana Imam

Get Hooked on Niña Dioz, Mexico’s First Out Rapper

From MicahTron to Dio Ganhdih, the queer hip-hop scene has recently exploded.

The newest arrival is the spitfire Niña Dioz, a rapper who hails from Monterey, Mexico. She just moved to the US and released a hit music video for her song Dale.

However, although she now lives in LA, her heart belongs to Mexico. She holds the notable, and perhaps dangerous, honor of being Mexico’s first openly lesbian rapper.

When she was a child, her inspiration came from many different sources. She sat in front of MTV for hours at a time, watching everything from Beasty Boys to Missy Elliot to the Fugees to TLC.

She said in a recent interview, “It really blew my mind!” One of the most awe-inspiring experiences was when her friend brought a Dr. Dre album back from the US in 2001. When she wasn’t marveling at the marijuana leave on the cover, which she called “artwork,” she was listening to Metallica, Madonna, Cypress Hill and Nirvana.

When she entered the rap scene on her own terms, she didn’t face much blowback or bullying for being a woman, but her sexuality made men uneasy. Men felt territorial about a queer person encroaching on their heterosexual machismo culture. That’s why Dioz is Mexico’s first rapper, male or female, to be openly gay.

Since coming out, Dioz feels more open about herself and more determined to create safe spaces for people like her. “Where I’m from,” she says, “women are getting killed just because they’re women. It’s necessary to keep fighting for equality, and I can use my music as a tool.”

She has some advice for young women hoping to follow in her footsteps. This could apply to any queer woman trying to break into the arts:

  • Do the music (or art) that is real to you.
  • Be unafraid of being different.
  • Don’t worry about what other people say.
  • Dream big and remember that everything is possible.
  • If you love it enough, it will become a necessity.

While she’s in the US, Dioz will be touring, so catch her at a concert hall near you. Get connected with her music here.

Lesbian Rapper MicahTron Makes Sex-Positive Rap You Can Dance To

Rap is no longer a boy’s game. Queer newcomers like Young M.A and Silvana Imam are flipping traditional heteronormative, misogynistic rap on its head.

MicahTron, a queer woman who makes sex-positive trap music, is joining the ranks.

MicahTron’s raps go hard. You can play her music between Tyga and Sage the Gemini without skipping a beat. In “Your B Chose Me,” she brags about stealing a man’s girlfriend over a steady eighth-note Club Clap that will have you popping. In “Hillary Clinton,” she asserts her sexuality and her power (mixed with a few puns about counting her “bills”).

Although MicahTron has yet to put out an official E.P., her extensive discography is growing by the day.

MicahTron has been making music since she was young. When Missy Elliott interrupted the rap game in the 1990s, MicahTron realized that as a masculine-of-center queer woman she could make it just as big as Missy. Later, she traveled to Berlin to study performance art, and opened for groups such as Grammy-nominated neo-soul collective The Internet.

MicahTron doesn’t shy away from discussing sex, gender and power. Her contemporary Young M.A has been criticized for being misogynistic, and some of MicahTron’s lyrics could be coded the same way. However, MicahTron never claimed to want to revolutionize rap music. Her desire has always been to carve out a space for women within existing hip-hop movements.

Should rappers such as MicahTron be more aware of the way in which their music seems to perpetuate misogyny? Yes.

However, because she is a woman, her music also serves as a reclamation of female sexuality – as a woman, she can enjoy the bodies of other women. As a woman, she can choose to offer her body for consumption by other women. She can simultaneously own women while allowing herself to be owned.

What critics call misogyny seems to be a system of consensual dom/sub encounters, the type that male rappers have endorsed for decades, consensual or not.

Check out more of MicahTron’s music. Watch her hit song “Bumper” below.

Check Out A New Album from Swedish Lesbian Rapper Silvana

Silvana Imam is a fiery lesbian Swedish rapper who rhymes about feminism, immigration and sexuality. Her motto? “I just write the truth of me.”

Rap helped her define her identity. Half-Lithuanian and half-Syrian, she often felt like an outsider as a child even though she looked white. Because her parents spoke only Lithuanian and Arabic at home, Silvana’s Swedish suffered.

She turned, surprisingly, to American rap music. Perhaps Silvana connected with it because these artists rapped about being colored outsiders on the fringe of mainstream society, just as Silvana was. Perhaps she connected with it because African-American rap was the furthest thing from her mostly-white Swedish community and Silvana needed an escape. Or perhaps she just liked the way it sounded. She started with Xzibit, the Fugees and Nas, and only later added Swedish rappers such as Petter.

The Fugees’ music taught her about the transformative power of socially conscious rap. Silvana finally had a framework for understanding and expressing the problems of the world, which influences her work to this day.

If you think it’s too late to start your own rap career, take heart – Silvana didn’t start rapping professionally until she was in her twenties. She had to fit in rap around her difficult psychology coursework in university. Despite the scheduling difficulties, she soon finished her first mixtape, Requiem. Her first album, IMAM, followed to widespread acclaim. Her second album, Naturkraft, debuted in 2016.

Her lyrics include incendiary lines such as, “Go kiss your f—ing Swaztikas,” and “We are the new Stonewall Revolution.”

In a recent VICE interview, she discussed her relationship with rap, what it’s like to win Sweden’s Artist of the Year 2016, and the widespread success of her latest album, Naturkraft.

She told VICE,

Everything I do is political. Society made me political – I’m a lesbian, a feminist, and an immigrant. We have a saying in Sweden: once you see political structures, you can’t un-see them.”

Sweden has responded well to her political music. She’s won several Swedish Grammies, including Lyricist of the Year, Best Live Act of the Year and Artist of the Year 2016. She was the first Swedish rapper to ever win Artist of the Year.

Listen to one of her most popular songs, Tänd Alla Ljus, which discusses capitalism and depression, below.

Then read more about Silvana and pick up your own copy of Naturkraft.

Queer Feminist Rapper Silvana Imam Is A Progressive Voice In Sweden’s Hip-Hop Scene

Originally born out of spoken word poetry where its performers would recite their words to a beat, it’s fitting that rap music is often used for far more than people rapping about how many houses they’ve got, how many bottles they ordered at the club or how many chains they have swinging around their neck. Very often it’s used to speak up and speak out about the oppression and hardships that people face.

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Wise to this use of rap music, is queer feminist rapper, Silvana Imam, who is incredibly outspoken about the mistreatment of people in her home country of Sweden.

Take, for instance, her performance at a protest that called out a neo-Nazi group who had recently attacked an anti-racist demonstration. At the rally she performed her track Tystas Ner and with lyrics like “Nazis sitting in parliament” that were pointed barbs towards to the political party the Swedish Democrats, Imam says that she received…

“a lot of threats from people affiliated with SD.That shit scared me … I still receive hate on the Internet for being a feminist and anti-racist. I’m like, this is what you have to put up with for being a freedom fighter?”

Not that a few hundred hateful comments on Twitter are going to shut Imam up because as a lesbian, a feminist and as someone who regularly speaks out against racism, there’s lots on her mind that she needs to get out there. Take her EP När Du Ser Mig • Se Dig for example, where she calls out the gender binary (“gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original”), notes racial discrimination in the workplace (“15 million people in the world are called Mohammed but whose name do they want to see on the CV?”) and cries out for change like the unapologetic feminist that she so proudly is (“the patriarchy must be overthrown”).

More: ‘Sisterhood of Hip Hop’ is Back, And So Will Out Rapper Siya

Other lyrics like “take the cake and throw it back at him, Anna-Mae” where she calls out her fellow rappers (this lyric is in reference to footage of Ike Turner aggressively shoving cake into the face of Tina Turner, Anna Mae being her real name) may cause offense but Imam never treads lightly in her music and that’s part of her appeal.

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On the social commentary of her lyrics, Imam also explains that:

“I’m a conscious rapper, I write songs about my life, and since I write through a lesbian-immigrant-woman’s perspective, it’s labeled as “political.” I’m letting people know how fucked up the world is through my art. This is about my life and my own survival in this patriarchal and anti-democratic world. A woman who writes love songs to other women causes immediate chaos in most peoples’ minds? That is something you should question. and not whether I’m political or not.”

We can’t argue that, as Imam’s words are more important than the question of her political leanings and we look forward to hearing more music from her when her second EP, Jag Dör För Dig, drops sometime this Spring.