Biography

CHIKA is a self-christened truth-teller, and she’s never shied away from that role — or the challenges that accompany it. The 26-year-old Alabama-born singer-songwriter and rapper caught the attention of a particular pocket of the internet when she began uploading her freestyles to social platforms like Instagram in the mid-2010s. With an immense display of creativity and, most of all, opinion, she was championed early on by hip-hop greats Snoop Dogg and Diddy and, later, President Barack Obama, who included her 2020 song “Crown” on his regularly anticipated Summer Playlist that year. But, after facing down a series of sociopolitical uprisings and a pandemic, CHIKA and the career she had spent years building were disrupted before she had a proper chance to take off.

CHIKA’s current view of the music industry is admittedly different from the dreams she had at the beginning of her artistic journey. Born Jane Chika Oranika to Nigerian parents in Alabama, she and two of her older sisters formed a musical group called Angels of Love. With influences washing in from gospel artists like CeCe Winans and Ron Kenoly alongside secular artists like Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, CHIKA credits her household as a place that introduced her to varied musical offerings. As she grew older, she discovered contemporary artists like T-Pain and Outkast, and explored her musicianship further in extracurricular activities like theater.

CHIKA’s initial EPs, 2020’s Industry Games, which earned her a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and 2021’s Once Upon a Time, featured her asserting her voice and position within the music landscape, combing through her thoughts and presenting the most salient among them as fan-favorite inspirational tunes. Songs on both projects have racked up millions of Spotify streams, including the worship-adjacent “Crown,” the sly yet confident “Songs About You,” and the motivational anthem “Hickory Dickory.” Describing her current sound as “violently me,” CHIKA massages together her own fusion of hip-hop, pop, gospel, soul, and theatrical influences. “It’s very real,” she says. “And it can get gritty at times.”