A Conversation with Isatta Sheriff: Advocating For The Recognition of Black Women Within Music

In this ‘Inspirational Women’ series, I sit down at ease with Isatta Sheriff, and talk about all things concerning intersectionality, the music community, and Lauryn Hill’s indestructible influence. Isatta becomes a beacon and an advocate for Black women who are underrepresented and not heard within the industry; As the East London rapper, presenter, and entrepreneur is renowned for her profound, honest, and hard hitting lyrics. I tell not only a tale and also a journey of well earned success, but a tale where the morals of perseverance and strength through adversity showcase how any woman, but specifically underlining Black women, can achieve milestones like Isatta.

For Isatta, 2006 was when she cast her first stone in the music industry. Tower Hamlets birthed the esteemed genre of Grime, allowing artists such as Isatta to embrace an environment where music evidently ran through her veins. "I started on pirate radio, and I was doing bars in the bedroom, tryna follow those in the limelight, like those that featured on RiskyRoadz. Its culture was and is all we had. It was a way that we could speak to each other. When we were young, a family friend drove us to the infamous Basement and let us do our stuff from 2am-6am because the good ones got the good slots." This wasn’t a platform that was known to be 'underground'... so many well-known musicians and artists contributed to this scene and wanted to share such visions with the world. On commercialised platforms, we see that ‘Stepney Tale’ (2018) is the first of songs that defined her moment of properly emerging to the scene that she currently powers through today. That track reflects how the vast socio-economic conditions restrict the choices of many people who come from Tower Hamlets, as this borough is known to be the poorest in London. Experienced and still experiencing such shocking gentrification, Isatta shunned her views on her solely-produced album, "The Kind of Biography," using the musical technique of double time rapping. This technique is known to be Isatta’s signature; heavy beat, heavy flow, and a surreal 90s essence

Sticking with the 90s, the 25th of August 1998 marked a breakthrough within the female hip hop world. Lauryn Hill’s "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" instilled such inspiration and insightful thoughts for listeners around the globe to decipher. For Isatta, "This is a 23 year old woman who is giving very profound messages with amazing lyricism and writing." The lessons that she taught are still parallel to today." Relating to the skits and topic of intersectionality within the album, it led her to replicate another masterpiece named "The Miseducation of the Insta Generation." Championed by Kenny Allstar, Charlie Sloth, and Clash Magazine, the success matches its musical labour, as musical deconstruction was done to an intricate degree, and several hours were spent trying to curate this project. "Her album is very structured in four sets of three songs thematically. I see those themes everyday and also, having been a teacher, I saw those discussions through the skits on the album too. With this, I workshopped the conversations that Lauryn was discussing and addressing that were coming to life. With the artists that I chose for the album, I asked them to dig deep too, by looking down to the similes and the instruments used." The 10-track project has been put forward by her own established female led label, Doctored Sound, who has previously been signed as a major label artist and consults for 0207 Def Jam and The Rap Game UK.

Inspiring and developing a new generation of talent comes from experiencing hardships yourself. Being a woman within our neoliberal and multicultural society today means that you face sexist discrimination such as the pay gap and mistreatment within industries. But how about being a Black woman? Talking about the music industry, Black women have historically and currently been misused as a voice as their presence in the industry has been misheard. This misuse tends to happen when artists use the intersection of feminism, class, and racism to proclaim their sense of ‘wokeness’ rather than consciousness. "I purposefully chose dark skinned women because a ‘lighter hue’ is used on us

within the industry. I experienced this because I was making music, but I wasn't really benefiting. The fact that people are seeing now that I can make a profit off of music, being a darkskin woman, I have to teach others that they can do the same as me, despite me having to go through the phase of being self sufficient". Created by Kimberle Crenshaw,

Black feminist and civil rights advocate, intersectionality is a term which embraces the representation of marginalized groups globally; intertwining with age, race, class, and gender. With the use of identity politics and academia, there is the aim of greater inclusion and equality. Combining her love for academia and trying to understand the structure of the music industry, Isatta carried out her Master of Arts thesis on this topic, with the hope of being an inspiration to Generation Z through an intersectional limelight. Research was even extended to America to grasp and articulate more about the systemic concept of why it has taken people just like Isatta years to set up her business and work in corporations despite the way that she has been treated.

Her recent single ‘Will They Try’ with Koralle opens up more of the discussion about the exploitation of Black women in hip hop through a UK perspective. It is an overture for her upcoming EP, "Eat the Kiwi Skin," due on September 23rd, and making music on her own terms, for herself and for the people. "Many people outside our intersection do think that we may go on about these topics, but we need to be the ones that advocate for it, as many people need to be aware of it because we are tarnished with stereotypes. Listen to the words despite your ethnicity... Countless Black female singers and songwriters in music have become uncredited in the U.K to the general public. " Spiralled with the soulful aura of the saxophone and her signature rap flow, it's candid and straightforward to understand why advocating takes place.

“This is the most important track on the EP as it addresses the exploitation of Black women in hip hop, and the exploration of hip hop in general. We have started to talk about the countless Black female singers and songwriters in dance and hip hop music who go uncredited in the U.K, and I wanted to extend the conversation with Black female rappers and explore the racial politics and misogynoir connected to this."

There's no doubt that we're excited to see where and what Isatta does next and how many other women follow her footsteps. The future is female, inclusive, and hopefully easier for those of the intersections to breakthrough into the musical and also creative industries. The barrier that restricts them, has to be eradicated through campaigners and advocates like Isatta, because how else would we claim to have an environment or scene that's truly about culture? We should start to hear the unheard women that contribute to the music that we love and share, but also acknowledge that being a Black woman doesn't lessen the abilities and competencies that they have in whatever sector they venture into.