Meet Alemeda, the East African Pop Rocker Taking on an Iconic Rap Label
On the second-to-last day of her first New York Fashion Week, the young singer Alemeda is dodging bees on the rooftop of a hotel in the Flatiron District while we try to talk about some very big news for her. Alemeda is 24 years old. She’s Ethiopian, Sudanese, and American; she’s a December Sagittarius, and she’s Top Dawg Entertainment’s newest artist. After a whirlwind year for the label, which included celebrating its former star Kendrick Lamar’s victorious rap battle with Drake, an impeccable mixtape from its last newbie, Doechii, and the commemoration of 20 years in the game, Alemeda joins TDE as something it’s never had before — an artist whose primary genre is rock.
“I tried every single genre, and I wanted to gravitate towards the one that I felt the most comfortable in, the easiest,” says Alemeda, who only began making music in 2019. She’s signed to TDE in partnership with Warner Records, which has a longer rock track record. “I love it, because it’s so easy, and on top of that, there’s such a scarcity of women who look like me doing it. I feel like I have a point to prove because even now people will keep trying to put me into the R&B [box]. People will actually go as far as say alternative R&B, and it’s like, at this point, just punch me in the face. It’s the worst.”
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Alemeda spent her childhood back and forth between Phoenix, Arizona, to which her mother immigrated, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, after spending time at a refugee camp in Djibouti. Alemeda, born Rahema Alameda (with an A, not an E — she switched out the letters for her stage name to make it easier to find online), describes her mom as a strict Muslim who kept her away from most pop music. Her mother, she explains, was a reluctant U.S. immigrant, deciding to come to the country at her sister’s urging after the man she was married off to at 13 years old died. Her mom avoided having to marry his brother by coming to the U.S. However, she worried that the move would mean her kids would lose touch with the traditions she revered back home.
Though she was sheltered, Alemeda watched a lot of Disney Channel while growing up, and programs like Hannah Montana and Camp Rock shaped her taste in pop punk. Yet she never saw herself in Miley Cyrus’ shoes, especially since there weren’t really girls like her among the Disney starlets. “Especially as Black girls, especially as dark-skinned Black girls, we’re just so used to not seeing ourselves,” she tells me. “I feel like we’ve all just been so desensitized to it that we just kind of give up in our heads.”
Now, Alemeda writes quippy rock bangers that her breathy voice makes sound deceivingly gentle. She’s actually quite cutthroat, like on “Post Nut Clarity,” where she tells a guy, “You was talking freaky like you was going to show out/I started losing interest I started to zone out/You was fucking liars, thought that I should let you know.”
Her new EP, FK IT, features recently released songs like “I Hate Your Face,” “Don’t Call Me,” and “Already Dug Your Grave.” The font on the album cover is a play on the Ge?ez script used in Amharic, her mother tongue.
As a teen, Alemeda made friends with some kids in Phoenix’s music scene who begged her to record with them. When they finally “dragged” her to a studio, she says, she had a lot of fun at first, making therapeutic songs on beats from YouTube. One of the early songs she shared on TikTok, called “Ain’t Fast Enough” (which she has since wiped from her profiles), had some success, particularly with East Africans like her. “All the Somali people and Ethiopians were making videos because there was a line that I had in the song that was like, ‘My skin’s dark like cinnamon’ or something like that,” she says. “All the dark-skinned women were making videos with it. It was very cute.”
After high school, Alemeda somewhat aimlessly enrolled at Arizona State University. She had been kicked out by her mom right at the end of high school. “She had put me into an Islamic school, hoping for me to start wearing a hijab and just be a better Muslim,” Alemeda says. “I wasn’t ready for it at the time. I was working multiple jobs, and it was just really frustrating. We would get into these fights every day. She’s like, ‘I’m not going to talk to you until you put on your scarf.’” After a particularly big blowup, Alemeda says her mom threw her clothes out and changed the locks.
Alemeda was working graveyard shifts at the airport, filing maintenance reports for American Airlines, when “Ain’t Fast Enough” made its way to Moosa Tiffith, TDE’s co-president. She hadn’t even heard of the label at the time, but a mutual friend of theirs, another Ethiopian, reposted it, and Tiffith saw. (“Ethiopian people, they’re all connected,” Alemeda adds. “They all know each other all over the world.”) Tiffith reached out to her, but she says their communication fell off as he pivoted to focus on ScHoolboy Q’s 2019 album CrasH Talk. Alemeda was desperate to leave the airport and even Arizona behind.
“I texted him, and I was like, ‘Yo, I could literally fly in tomorrow.’ He had me fly into a ScHoolboy Q video shoot. He was interested, but I feel like he wanted to step back and watch my social media, but I kind of was like, ‘Nah, I have a horrible living situation. I got to get the fuck out of here.’” Tiffith and Alemeda have been working to mold her into a professional artist since then, including vocal lessons with legendary coach Willie Norwood. “This is going to sound really crazy,” she says when I asked her how she developed her voice. “Brandy’s father trained me.”
Here, Alemeda traces more of her unique path, including developing her own relationship with Islam, leaving family behind in humanitarian crises, and what being on a label with SZA and Doechii means to her.
Tell me about being a rock artist on what’s primarily a rap label. You said in another interview that you’ve worked to cull your own collaborators because it’s so new there.
When I found my sound — making indie music because that’s the music I grew up with — the first thing I realized was that I had to learn how to produce because a lot of these songs aren’t just a couple of little sounds on a keyboard. These are well-produced songs with layers and layers of guitars and drums. So once I learned how to produce, I started really working with musicians who actually play instruments. Once I found those types of people, it just got really easy. TDE definitely also helped me find some people, too, once I realized what I needed.
You’re now the third woman on the label. What have your relationships with SZA and Doechii been like?
Well, SZA’s obviously very busy, but they’re all great. We’re all very different: three different women doing our own sound, our own thing. None of us makes each other’s exact music, genre-wise. I feel like it’s inspiring.
One of the things I really love about TDE [is] like, Oh, you guys fuck with dark-skinned women. That’s so fucking cool. All the women on the label are Black women that are darker. Even though me and [SZA] are two different shades, I can still look at her and see myself in her.
In this interview you did when you were back home in Ethiopia, you tell the host that you’re signed to Top Dawg Entertainment ahead of this official announcement. Did anybody hit you up like, “Excuse me? You’re on TDE?”
You know what? I kind of had a feeling that no one was really going to watch the interview because it was long. If people did see it, they didn’t say anything. I was like, “Oh, I’m in Ethiopia, and I might as well say it now because I don’t know [that] I’m going to get this chance again.”
You know what’s crazy? The place that we filmed was very monumental, one of the first clubs in Ethiopia. Unfortunately, because of a whole bunch of government and civil issues that are happening right now — I’m not even joking — literally four days after we did that interview, the government tore down the building. They crashed it down with bulldozers.
Wow.
So I’m glad I said it there and then in that time and place. What I felt was no one was going to see it and I think I was right with that.
I got to know your music a few years ago when you were 21, and now you’re almost 25. Do you feel different?
When I tell you outside of music, my brain has turned on for the first time this year. When they say the whole, “your frontal lobe doesn’t develop until 24, 25,” that shit’s so real. Because I was so stupid, the way I viewed shit was just so dumb, and now I’m just like, “I can see through anything.”
Is there something that you’ve learned or you’ve done recently that made you think, “You know what? I wouldn’t have thought about it that way when I was 21”?
You have a great song called “Guy’s Girl” about a friendship that fell apart. Was that about a relationship that happened in the past three years too?
Yeah. I had a friend that was very male-centered. We were very opposite in that sense. I was anti-men, all men should be locked up before proven innocent, you know what I mean? And she would put her boyfriends or whoever she was talking to before her friendships. I didn’t care about it; I was like, “Oh, no, we love each other. We’re friends.” Over time, it got to a point where she would put me in dangerous situations, and I’m like, “Damn. This is not good.”
So much of the music you’ve released so far is about heartbreak in one way or another. Why do you think that is?
I think it ties into growing up and understanding things better. I was so naive. I viewed the world in such a happy-go-lucky way. You know when you look at people for their potential and not for what they really are in that moment? I was that person in people’s lives who would try to get them to be better, but you can never force anybody to do anything. There were a lot of lessons I had to learn, trying to be that person that carried people. The heartbreak is in realizing hard truths.
You mentioned that your mom wanted you to be a better Muslim, and at the time, you weren’t ready. What’s your faith like now?
I’m still Muslim. I take all the good things like praying, and I do Ramadan. I do everything. I just have some things that I don’t agree with when people mix culture and religion and use it as a tactic to control women. That was the biggest thing with me and my mom. Every religion has good in it, and it’s like, why not lead with that? But I was never good with control, and I was never good with people not explaining things to me. It was just culture. I had to go find [my faith] on my own.
You were also raised between Ethiopia and the U.S., going back and forth pretty frequently as a kid. Did you ever feel pushed and pulled, or did that feel normal to you?
It did feel pushed and pulled. I remember just absolutely dreading—You know, African parents, they do this thing where they kind of trick you. They just say, “Oh, no. We’re not staying. We’re just going for a couple of months.” And then now you’re there for seven months to a year, to two years. It’s a thing they do. Somali people have a name for it when you’re finessing your kid into going to Africa. Sometimes they tell their kids they’re going somewhere fun, like, “Oh, we’re going to Disneyland.” And you end up in Africa.
When you were growing up in Arizona, did you have a big East African community?
We had a huge Ethiopian [community] and I grew up with every Muslim – Bangladesh, Pakistani, yeah.
When you went back to Ethiopia recently, you performed with another Ethiopian-American singer, Berhana, and you made a short documentary. Why was that important to you?
Especially with this announcement, I wanted people to really know who I am, not just listen to the song and make assumptions. I wanted them to understand where I come from. I really truly feel like somebody like me was not supposed to be in the situation I’m in right now. Even my chances of coming to America were so slim. If one thing had changed, I would’ve been in Ethiopia right now. If my mom’s husband didn’t die in Ethiopia, we would’ve still been there.
She only came because they were trying to force her to marry another man, his brother. You know what I mean? I feel a lot of imposter syndrome because I’m like, “I’m really not supposed to be here,” [but] I feel like I do have a unique story. I don’t meet people who have [had] the same childhood as me, so I just want people to understand my background more than anything.
There’s so much suffering in East Africa right now, like a humanitarian crisis in Sudan, while Ethiopia is still reeling from civil conflict and the repercussions of it. Does that affect you and people close to you?
We constantly get phone calls. It’s weird right now. It’s so expensive. People can’t afford anything. Two people in the documentary have died since then.
Two people in your community or your family members?
My family members.
Oh, I’m so sorry.
Yeah, no, it’s okay. But the state of the country is so fucked up right now that you can’t do anything. We’re all sending them money back every month. We’re hearing about financial issues and health issues. We all had to literally just pay for a $7,000 surgery for my mom’s sister. It’s just a lot of us in America coming together and honestly taking care of people we don’t even really know sometimes too.
One thing my mom always tells us is the moment she came to America half her income would go back to her family in Ethiopia. It means so much to her, and I feel like we all have understood that and taken part in that. I try to keep in contact with them because I have family in Lebanon, [too]. Some of my Sudanese family are in Lebanon. The southern part is getting bombed; airstrikes are hitting it. It’s stressful, honestly. All I can think about is somebody being hurt right now.
You’ve said before that your mom hasn’t heard your music. Has she now?
No.
Do you have other members of your family, like cousins, aunts, or uncles that are excited for you though?
My siblings and my cousins have heard my music. They congratulate me whenever I achieve things. It’s really just my mom and a couple of other people that I don’t really engage with on that.
Does anything about now being a professional artist make you nervous?
A little bit, but I feel like because I’ve had the time to really develop, I feel really at peace. I’m ready for anything. I’ve worked on my vocals, I’ve worked on my producing skills, I’ve worked on my songwriting. Even working on my performances, I feel like I’ve gotten to a point where I think I’m way more of a great performer than before.
I’m really confident now. Before, I was really, really, really insecure about a lot of things. I’m not too scared, but I do feel [pressure] just because everyone on the label is so fucking talented. But it’s fine. I’m mentally prepared for it.
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