Alyona Alyona, a 27-year-old Ukrainian rapper who has taken her own country by storm, now continues to generate buzz in American media.
Just over one month after she was profiled by U.S. Vogue, the musician has been featured in the New York Times, as part of a story on Europe’s 15 “most important acts, musically and socially, right now.”
“One of Ukraine’s few female rappers, Alyona Alyona spits lightning-fast flows – and zero expletives,” the newspaper’s contributor Josie Thaddeus-Johns writes in the feature published on May 22.
The story followed the final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 with the newspaper aiming to highlight European music that “is more than just the glitz of Eurovision.”
The New York Times compares Alyona Alyona to Azealia Banks, the U.S. rapper and singer who started releasing her music on the MySpace social media platform in 2008 before her singles went viral and she received the NME and Urban Music Awards.
Much like Banks, Alyona Alyona became famous after her music video “Rybky” (“Fish”) released in October 2018 went viral. On April 8 she went on to release a debut album “Pushka” (“Gun”) that became a hit in Ukraine.
Alyona Alyona, whose real name is Alyona Savranenko, is one of the few female rappers performing in Ukraine today. She is from Kapitanivka, a town of 2,000 people in Kirovohrad Oblast, located 200 kilometers south of Kyiv.
She also raps in her native Ukrainian, a language that had been less popular among rappers until the EuroMaidan Revolution, the popular uprising that drove Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014.
“I want to rap about everyday life, in my own language,” Alyona Alyona told the New York Times.
Read more about Alyona Alyona in the Kyiv Post’s profile of the rapper.
