[Image: Wikimedia Commons]
South Africa is in serious need of a new international export that can uphold our cool culture and undo all the kuk (for lack of a better word) that Elon Musk has been raising in the last while.
It’s a lot of pressure, but our popiano sensation, Tyla, can handle it!
“I know I can do it all,” the 23-year-old star says in the interview with British Vogue, as she graces the cover in all her Saffa glory.
“Viral lyrics, infectious dance routines, showstopping fashion… In the blink of an eye, South African superstar Tyla has skyrocketed to take the crown of music’s most intoxicating new mononym,” the illustrious magazine writes of her.
Guys, this is a huge deal! Tyla – full name Tyla Laura Seethal- is still basically a baby and she is already on the cover of one of the world’s most famous magazines with words that make her sound like a goddess that had an “extraordinary blink-of-an-eye catapult to world domination”.
“You know when you’ve always felt like you’re destined for something? That you’re going to make it one day? But then when it actually happens… It’s like something you can’t explain. It doesn’t feel real,” she says in Vogue UK.
Look at her go!
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If you can’t quite place her (for whatever heinous reason), she is the singer whose 2023 megahit ‘Water’ received more than 10 billion views on TikTok alone. Her other famous songs include the reggae-infused ‘Push 2 Start’ and the Tems collaboration ‘No 1’.
Tyla has had a full-throttle year that saw her infectious mashup of pop, R&B, Afrobeats and, of course, amapiano – a style of house music that originated from the SA townships – get the world dancing at her (perfectly manicured) feet.
British Vogue continues to sing her praise, listing all that she has achieved in her flame-hot career.
If 2023 was her big breakthrough, then 2024 was the year Tyla went full superstar mode. She snagged the Grammy for Best African Music Performance, making history as the youngest African artist to win one.
A month later, she dropped her self-titled debut album—which, as of now, has racked up over 1.5 billion streams.
Then, in October, she hit the Victoria’s Secret runway in New York, rocking a sparkly fringed bustier, tiny shorts, and, of course, the iconic wings. She performed alongside Cher and Blackpink’s Lisa while fashion legends like Adriana Lima, Tyra Banks, Candice Swanepoel, Ashley Graham, Joan Smalls, and Doutzen Kroes did their Angel thing.
“Props to my mum!” Tyla says, smiling widely in response to me lauding her catwalk strut. “She taught me how to walk.”
The Magazine notes that from the outside looking in, “Tyla’s rise to fame has been nothing short of phenomenal, seemingly exploding out of nothing and nowhere”. Except Tyla has always known:
“Since I was little, when anyone asked me what I wanted to become, I always said, ‘I’m going to become a singer,’” she tells me, a determination in her voice, in between delicate mouthfuls of pap, boerewors sausage and chutney, a quintessential South African meal she cooked herself as part of her Vogue video shoot and packed up for the car ride.
Honestly, it’s the accent for me, but also how she hauled Maize Meal out of her zebra-print bag!
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At least she managed to climb out of the controversy around her race. A 2020 TikTok video, in which she proudly described herself as “a coloured South African” resurfaced in 2023, sending the internet into a vitriolic meltdown, particularly within the Black community in the States as they see the term as a racist slur, not quite understanding that in South Africa it is considered a racial identity.
“I’ve explained it a lot of times before, but people took that and put words in my mouth. They said a whole bunch of things that I never said and ran with it. If people really searched, they’ll see that in South Africa we had a lot of segregation. It was bad for a lot of us. They just classified us. And that just so happens to be the name that the white people called us. They chose to call people that were mixed ‘coloured’. And I’m not gonna lie, it was hard because all my life, obviously I knew ‘I’m Black’ but also knew that ‘I’m coloured’. So when I went to America and people were like, ‘You can’t say that!’ I was in a position where I was like, ‘Oh, so what do I do? What am I then?’”
Eish.
Definitely head over to Vogue UK to read the full interview and check out her fantastic fashion shots. She’s a woman of wonder.
[Source: Vogue]
