Tatar rap star premieres video for first song in English

Tatarka, a hip hop project of YouTube blogger Irina Smelaya, has premiered Pussy Power, its first video in English.

Like Tatarka’s previous work, the song was produced with Smelaya’s husband Ilya Prusikin of the band Little Big, who has been dubbed the Russian Die Antwoord. The video features Smelaya and a group of women wearing 90s-style boxy trouser suits, and Smelaya says that power-dressing is there to communicate the message of power and feminism. She also notes that the production crew for the video was all-female.

According to Smelaya, the song was written in English due to the fact that there was an international interest in the project. At the same time she says the project is not going to abandon rapping in Tatar, for which it was initially famous – the upcoming album will be both in Tatar and English.