Alabama native Chika makes a minor on-screen appearance in the new Netflix thriller “Project Power,” but to hear the filmmakers tell it, her impact on the project is far greater than that cameo might suggest.
“Project Power” comes out Friday, and in a summer without summer blockbusters it seems to have a shot at drawing the interest of moviegoers starved for supercharged action. It’s set in a New Orleans grappling with a wave of chaos sparked by the mysterious drug Power. Take a dose and it might kill you -- or it might give you five minutes to wield superpowers fit for the X-Men or the Justice League. Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt star as investigators trying to get to the people responsible for putting Power on the street, and Dominique Fishback stars as the young dealer working with them.
Chika is a Montgomery native who first made a name for herself by repeatedly dropping rap clips that went viral on social media. In the last year she has moved on to releasing her first major-label EP and attendant opportunities, such as a noteworthy appearance on NPR’s “Tiny Desk.”
In Mattson Tomlin’s screenplay, Fishback’s character Robin is an aspiring rapper, and that’s what opened the door for Chika’s involvement. Filmmakers needed a lyricist who could tailor material to the character; according to information provided by Netflix, it was Foxx who brought Chika to the attention of directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman.
“Jamie Foxx saw my Instagram and saw me rapping and thought I was dope and he wasn’t incorrect,” Chika said, in Netflix production notes. She thought the directors were crazy when they reached out on Instagram, but she liked the script and hit it off with Fishback.
“Dom and I just meshed really well and I could see her personality come through,” said Chika. “It made it a lot easier for me to write the songs pretty quickly because I could tell how Dom already had a connection to her character and would want Robin to to say X, Y and Z. So the songs were just organic and came forth the way they needed to.”
Chika contributed raps performed by Robin during the film and a song performed by Fishback during the end credits. Her cameo puts her beside Robin as a high school classmate.
“I’m not a huge musical guy,” said Tomlin. “When people jump into song and dance, that’s a level of fantasy that takes a long time for me to buy into, except when it comes to rap. There’s something about watching rappers do their thing, that you just instantly get so hyped up because you know it’s coming from a real charged place. You’re only good if it’s coming from an emotional place.”
“As a movie producer, you are a prognosticator and hopefully an optimist, but sometimes you’re just reading tea leaves and hoping that you’re looking at the right signs,” said Newman. “You couldn’t really predict where the rapping idea would go, but what Dominique and Chika did is amazing and a revelation.”
“When you first hear Robin rap, you can understand that’s where her heart is and why she does the things she does,” said Fishback.
Foxx, Chika and rapper Machine Gun Kelly, who’s also in the film, discussed that point further in a roundtable recently presented by Billboard.
Host Carl Lamarre asked about a line in the movie where Foxx’s character tells Robin, “You’re young, you’re black and you’re a woman. The system is designed to swallow you whole.” Lamarre’s question for Chika was, “What’s the best advice you would give for African American women to maneuver in a climate where the system isn’t designed to let them win?”
“I would say to ignore the system, and not in a way that says the system doesn’t exist, because it does,” responds Chika. “However when it comes to the limitations we’re told are placed on us, I think we should explore more what we actually can and cannot do.” She goes on to say that fear makes those limitations real, “And so if you don’t really acknowledge the things that people tell you are your limitations, in so many ways they aren’t.”
“I don’t know if y’all saw the story, but I saw this girl on Instagram,” says Foxx. “I hit the people with ‘Power,’ I said, ‘If you want to get the future, you got to get her, man.’” He goes on to talk about encouraging a self-empowering attitude similar to Chika’s in his own daughters.
“Project Power” premieres on Netflix early Friday morning. It comes at a busy time for Chika: Last weekend she released the summer single “U Should,” and there may also be a new collaboration with Snoop Dogg in the works. Snoop popped up on a Chika Instagram Live session on Aug. 8 and the resulting dialogue made waves.
According to NME.com, when Snoop asked if Chika would write him a song, she threw out the idea of giving him a Black country song.
“Make it work,” Snoop said. “You gonna make it do what you do.”