This Fiery Alt-Pop Song Is A Warrior Cry For Women Everywhere

Dutch-Zimbabwean artist Rina Mushonga drew on Greek mythology to write “Ata|antA.”

January 24, 2017
This Fiery Alt-Pop Song Is A Warrior Cry For Women Everywhere Yoji Moniz

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Atalanta is a uniquely strong woman. Bending gender stereotypes, she's an athletic and powerful hunter with no interest in getting married. Still, as is the way for most women in Greek mythology, she ends up getting a pretty raw deal: she's tricked into marriage by a dude named Hippomenes, and eventually turned into a lion. But her enduring legacy is one of female power, and that's the story that Dutch-Zimbabwean artist Rina Mushonga drew on to write her new single "Ata|antA."

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"Ata|antA" follows her 2014 debut album, The Wild, The Wilderness, which was released in Europe when Rina lived in Amsterdam, and has the same densely layered, propulsive quality. Written and produced in her new home of Peckham, south London, the song strides forward on a marching beat while insisting, "I'll get up, I'll get up." "I was inspired to use Atalanta in this song partly as a symbol of independence and power," Rina explained in an email to The FADER. "I guess also because I was kind of frustrated by how these things were taken from her, even though she was so strong and capable. I kept thinking, if she’d just been left to do her own thing...you know?” Listen exclusively below.

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This Fiery Alt-Pop Song Is A Warrior Cry For Women Everywhere