The Hip Hop African

Sho Madjozi whose real name is, Maya Christinah Xichavo Wegerif. Sho was born in 1992 in Limpopo, South Africa. She is a South African rapper, singer, songwriter, actress, and poet. Madjozi incorporates the Tsonga culture through her music and public image. The type of music she makes is Hip hop music, Gqom, African popular music, and Afropop. She is also currently signed to Epic Records. She has had a very decorated career as she has many awards such as the BET Award for Best New International Act in 2019, the South African Music Award for Newcomer of the year in 2019, the South African Music Award for Female Artist of the year in 2019, 2021, and South African Music Award for best tradition in 2021. The song I will be reporting on in this post is called “Chale” by Sho Madjozi. from research I was able to learn that the word “Chale” is a form of Ghanaian Pidgin English slang and the word means Dude or Homie but it can also signify either disappointment or agreement. In the song, she would rap her rhymes in her native language which is Tsonga which is a regional language in South Africa. Her chorus goes “You wasn’t there when we were shooting in the gym, back then when the money wasn’t coming in, click-click, Sho Madjozi, can I have a pic?”  It is easy to see that she is some type of influenced by Drake because in 2012 Drake said that same exact line in a song called “Stay Schemin” with Rick Ross and French Montana. To me, it seems that now that she has become this high-level public, people who didn’t help her get to where she is at maybe showed signs of hate and doubt as well. It seems like they want to act as if they were there supporting her the whole way through and she not letting it slide because she remembers how hard it was for her to get to this point. Personally, I have NO IDEA what she is saying in the actual song because it is not in my language but the video was high energy and everyone in the music video seemed to be having a lot of fun. The narrative of women for the longest time was that they had to make soft singing music. This is not the case more and more women are showing how good they rap and each of them has different topics they rap about. There are many people who wish they would just back to singing and soft voices but in my opinion, a certain type of music shouldn’t be able to be untouched by a person just because of their gender.