From kindergarten teacher to the biggest rapper in Ukraine, that's the story behind alyona alyona (real name: Alyona Savranenko) whose latest LP ПУШКА won the YUNA Music Award for Best Album last year. (That's like a Ukrainian Grammy.)
Savranenko has always been a hip-hop fan since hearing Coolio's “Gangsta’s Paradise” at the age of 12. “It changed my world,” Savranenko told Vogue Magazine last year. “When you write a regular song, a pop song, you have only a few lines. In one line there are only a few words and it is such little information. So when you rap, you can say a larger, more interesting story in longer lines. So I began to rap to tell more stories.”
In fact, one of the things that makes alyona alyona so unique is that she raps about relatable everyday things. “I speak about myself and about people who I know, who are next to me, normal Ukrainian people and young people,” she says. “I speak that people need to accept us as we are and need to believe in us and let us do what we want to become and do what we want. I talk about how we become tired of telephones, and how we want to run away somewhere where we can play music. I talk about how I moved and left our homes and we are sad and miss our homes. Normal things.”
But one thing she'll never do in her raps is talk about sex, drugs, or booze, just in case any of her young former students are listening. “The kids go crazy whenever they see me, and tell me they've seen me on TV,” she told The Independent. “But deep down I’m just the same, simple village teacher I always was.”
