Korean rapper Mirani talks hip hop as a female artist, a Doja Cat collaboration and the pressure she feels to succeed
- Mirani shot to fame on reality competition series Show Me the Money in 2020. Her success left the rapper a bit burned out – something her first album reflects
- She is taking the time to adjust the way she thinks – this year, she’s focusing on having fun and dreaming of future collaborations, such as one with Doja Cat
Mirani is one of the hottest rappers in Korea today. The secret to her success? “Not sucking,” she says with a laugh.
Mirani, who fell in love with hip hop after her older brother introduced her to the genre, went to study fashion at university, where she joined a hip-hop club and had the chance to write her own songs.
She took a break from her degree to focus on music and has not looked back. Now she has to figure out what comes next.
“I released Uptown Girl one year after Show Me the Money ended, so it talks about what I felt while trying to adapt to the changes in my life,” Mirani tells the Post over a video call from Seoul. “Kind of like a diary that I wrote.”
Uptown Girl is an album blending hip hop, pop and R&B, and full of the singsong raps she is known for. It’s reflective at times and exuberant at others – pretty much where the rapper is right now herself.
“Things are a bit different from what I thought it would be like while earning money and doing what I love,” she admits. “There are difficult things, such as the pressure to persevere, and I wanted to do better so I’m a bit burned out from it.
“It’s been the biggest kind of pressure I’ve felt. Because of that, it wasn’t just happiness that I put onto the album.”
With so much attention early on in her career, Mirani says she is trying to readjust her mindset. Rather than putting pressure on herself to get another hit, she’s focusing on furthering her career and moving her musicality and artistry along, regardless of success.
“There’s endless questioning: ‘Oh, I want to do good again. I want to do something cool again. What can I do to do that?’”
“It’s my career, not a hobby,” she says, “so I’m trying to remind myself not to take music [and charting] so seriously. If I do what I did to get hit after hit of the same kind, I will be tired and not be able to continue my music career.
“So right now, I’m focusing on doing what I can do and trying to meet people through my music.”
It’s partially because of this that Mirani works with so many collaborators and why she wants to work with more. By developing who she is and trying out new things now, she can develop a way “not to suck”.
“I think that for music to not suck, each artist needs to have their own colour and really know what they want to do and want to say. So when they do that, it feels more natural and feels like they’re wearing their own clothes. And I think that’s just really cool.”
Mirani isn’t the only female hip-hop artist making waves in Korea, but the scene is still one dominated by men.
“If it were a bit more female dominant, I may have had an easier time,” she admits. “But I went to all-girl schools for much of my life, so being in any male-dominated industry at all was a bit of an adjustment at first.”
While her first album was something of a post-Show Me the Money diary, Mirani has some thoughts regarding what future songs could be about.
“I’m interested in the theme of love,” she says. “I think that there aren’t a lot of female hip hop artists nowadays that write about love, so it could be fun to write about it from the female point of view, and how it is to be [in love] in your 20s.”
Fun and “not sucking” are the things that are important to Mirani right now. At the same time, she is focusing on making her career as full of longevity as it is hits – hard to do, she admits, when the world feels at a standstill but time continues to pass.
“Right now, I’m just focusing on my forward-thinking mindset,” she says, “and enjoying what I’m working on and who I’m working with.”
