The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2023 - Issue 33

Samantha Morgan welcomes R&B singer Ashanti’s return to music and is fascinated by her early introduction to dance and singing. bitemusicceleb W hen Ashanti Shequoiya Douglas came into this world, her computer specialist parents with backgrounds in entertainment wanted to announce her arrival uniquely. “I couldn’t find a birth announcement sufficient for how I felt about my child, so I made my own up,” her mother, Tina, told MTV. “It had all kinds of musical notes and said she would be a dancer. We said, ‘Dancing to the boogie-woogie beats of the lyrics written by her dad.’” As a child, Ashanti was groomed to follow in her dancer mother’s footsteps. She studied dance at the Bernice Johnson Cultural Arts Centre in southeast Queens, New York and began dancing at three. “I did tap, jazz, modern, ballet, African, everything,” she told Music & Media. The young dancer performed at Carnegie Hall and Apollo Theatre in New York and danced in the 1989 Disney television musical film Polly . Her mother initially didn’t realise her daughter could sing. “Singing was kind of accidental,” the artist revealed to MTV. When she was 12, her mother told her to do chores and turn off the radio. As she worked, Ashanti sang to herself. “[My mom] comes storming down the steps: ‘Didn’t I tell you to turn the radio off?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, that wasn’t the radio. I was singing.’” Amazed by her rendition of Mary J Blige’s ‘Rem- inisce’, Tina entered her in a few talent shows, which she won. Less than two years later, Ashanti signed her first record contract with Jive Records, but it didn’t continue as the artist wanted to write her songs, and the record label didn’t like the idea. When she was 17, she moved to Atlanta to work with Noontime, a subsidiary of Epic Records, but the partnership soon ended, and she returned to New York to finish her high school studies. Despite the disappointment, Ashanti said she learned a few things in that experience. Her third attempt scored her a meeting with Irv Gotti, CEO and co-founder of rap label Murder Inc through her manager. Although the label had a street thug edge and Ashanti was a sweet- faced honour student singing R&B, her mother told People , “She looks innocent, but if there’s something she wants, she’ll get it.” Influenced by Mary J Blige, Ashanti wanted to fuse her