Asha Omega wants to remind you of your power - Chicago Reader (2024)

Asha Omega releases her debut studio album, The Star, on Wednesday, November 27. A follow-up to her first major project, the 2023 EP Alkhemy, it cements her place as a key new figure in the Chicago hip-hop scene.

Though her rap career is young, the 26-year-old doesn’t move like a rookie. The 13 tracks on The Star are produced by pillars of the Chicago hip-hop scene, among them DJ Hustlenomics, who was instrumental to Chief Keef’s rise in the early 2010s, and OnGaud, who contributed to Mick Jenkins’s breakout 2014 mixtape, The Water[s].

Asha hasn’t just started to venture into music. She’s reclaiming a path she chose years ago—a decision validated as early as 2018, when veteran Chicago rapper Phenom handpicked her to be one of seven students in an all-woman class at his Emcee Skool—a six-month curriculum he’d just introduced to teach aspiring MCs.

Asha created the momentum she has today through a long period of self-healing, and her music reflects the answers she found along the way—answers she wants to share with the world. The years between her studies with the Ladies of Emcee Skool (as Phenom called them) and the release of Alkhemy tested her strength and endurance. “My depression was in hell,” she says.

“I was very distracted. I was in a terrible fucking relationship—like, the worst,” Asha laments. “If I would have went to jail and told the story, they’d be like, ‘I understand you, sister.’”

Asha Omega, an east-side resident, was born Jordan Asha Smiley in Harvey, Illinois, and spent the first several years of her life in Chicago Heights. She says that growing up she “always felt alone,” in part because her mother had her at 35 and constantly had to be away for work. “So I just had a lot of emotions that sat to myself for a very long time about everything: Life, my dad being gone. I’ve been assaulted. Shit like that skewed my vision of myself and my worth and the meaning of life,” she says. “Realizing it now, I was depressed as a child.”

Asha says it wasn’t until she implemented the healing practices she’d learned in college that she began transforming into the person and the rapper she’d always wanted to be.

“I think I learned a lot of that my freshman year at Clark, even just reading [Paulo Coelho’s novel] The Alchemist—that shifted my mind,” she says. “When I got back here, I had to relearn it again.”

What came from that relearning was the vulnerability of her writing on Alkhemy. “I left that relationship, and on my mama, the next week, I did the photo shoot,” she says. “And on my mama, the next week, I uploaded the project.”

The process was cathartic for Asha, she says, because as a kid she didn’t have the space to express herself this way. “I was writing from—especially Alkhemy, even on this new shit—what I needed to hear. Because if I’m feeling this way, I know damn sure I’m not the only person feeling this way.”

Asha also used her listening event for The Star, held at Miyagi Records on Saturday, November 23, to help people enduring their own dark times. Admission was free, but she asked that everyone bring a donation of toiletries, kitchen supplies, or cleaning products for Deborah’s Place, a nonprofit supporting Chicago women experiencing homelessness.

For Asha, the purpose of The Star is to help people see in themselves what’s already there. “I feel like my calling is to be a mirror,” she says. “I am naturally inclined to be a reminder that your light deserves to take up space. We are worthy of the discipline to make our dreams come true.”