After feeling pressure from labels to be a “pop star”, Tkay Maidza says she feels like she’s found a style that’s entirely her own. The 19-year-old rapper, who still lives at home with her parents in Adelaide, describes her direction as “weird”, and she feels grateful – if a bit taken aback – that it seems to be resonating with people.
More dates in Melbourne and Sydney were added to her MOB national tour earlier this year after the first batch sold out. The success she’s had in the past 12 months alone feels surreal, she said before her set at Splendour in the Grass late on Friday afternoon.
“It’s cool when people like you for who you are, and it’s really scary at the same time, because they think they know you, but they don’t really … they know a part of me. But it’s cool that they’re accepting me.”
Her track Switch Lanes took the final spot in Triple J’s Hottest 100 poll in January (and would not have made the cut had Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off not been disqualified), and she opened for Charli XCX in May. Guardian Australia’s Everett True was impressed: “The Adelaide rapper twists and turns her way through her complex word mazes with a supple and sinuous ease,” he wrote. “Damn, she’s good.”
Maidza says she has learned from experience to resist pressure from labels, after initially being swayed by the potential of a contract. “When I was working with a couple of labels to begin with, I was like: “Just sign me, I’ll be whatever you want me to be”, and then I realised I don’t want to do that.”
“In the beginning, I was like, ‘I don’t mind being a pop star, and being all crazy’ … I just wanted to do music, and then I just found myself. Now when people are like, ‘You should make huge pop songs’, I’m like, ‘what do you mean?’ I’m just going to do what I feel like. If it happens, it happens.”
She says her process of “being silly in my room and writing whatever I feel like” did not fit some labels’ approach to making an album. “It can be really hard when you sign with labels, because they want you to tick all the boxes: you have to be weird, you have to have all your pop songs, you have to have every aspect to make the album.”
Maidza is now signed to Dew Process, a Brisbane-based independent label owned by prominent Australian music entrepreneur Paul Piticco, whose company Secret Service organises Splendour in the Grass.
It is Maidza’s second time at the festival after she replaced Lykke Li last year, who pulled out due to health problems. This year she is sharing the bill with Azealia Banks, an early inspiration to whom she’s now frequently and favourably compared. She was introduced to the notoriously outspoken rapper by a schoolteacher.
At the time, Banks’s pairing of rap with house music inspired her to look beyond boundaries of genre. “It just inspired me to be weird. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing, basically.”
Guardian Australia is a sponsor of the Splendour Forum
