Ishawna

Ishawna was born Ishawna Smith on September 29, 1986, in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in a Christian household. Multiple profiles describe her as precociously musical, saying she wrote her first song at age six. She entered the music business through the Alliance, the dancehall crew fronted by veteran deejay Bounty Killer, who took her under his wing early in her career.

Her early collaborations with Demarco and Elephant Man built her an underground following, and she gained wider traction after signing with Josef Bogdanovich's Downsound Records around 2013. It was "Equal Rights," released in April 2017, that made her a national talking point: the song directly addressed oral sex and argued for reciprocity between men and women, a subject widely treated as taboo in Jamaican popular culture. Several radio selectors declined to play the song, and her mentor Bounty Killer publicly condemned the record. The song nonetheless found significant support, particularly among women, and was later reframed by some commentators as a feminist anthem.

The Bounty Killer–Ishawna tension resurfaced publicly at Reggae Sumfest 2022, when Ishawna performed "Equal Rights" using a life-size cutout of Bounty Killer, an act widely read as a direct jab; Bounty Killer walked out of the venue and publicly called the stunt an act of "desperation," and Downsound Entertainment issued a public apology to Bounty Killer. On the collaborative side, Ishawna also built a version of "Equal Rights" sampling Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You," for which she obtained direct clearance from Sheeran. She signed with the New York hip-hop label Payday Records in September 2023.

Ishawna is widely characterized as a leading voice of the post-2010s generation of female dancehall artists willing to explicitly center female sexual agency and pleasure in her lyrics. The sustained public argument over "Equal Rights" is frequently cited as a case study in how dancehall functions as a public forum for debating sexuality, gender, and respectability in Jamaica.