Sizwe Sibiya
Sihle “Blxckie” Sithole, also known as “Somnyama Yena Yedwa,” has the SA hip-hop game by the throat, after dropping the smash debut album B4NOW on Friday 21 May 2021.
The lyricist from Durban told MacG’s Podcast and Chill on Thursday that the album is a compilation of songs he started working on before being “on the mainstream,” hence the name B4NOW (Before Now).
Blxckie exploded onto the country’s hip-hop scene during the festive season of 2020 after he released one of the singles from the album with LucasRaps, titled Big Time Shlappa.
His meteoric rise can also be attributed in part to the hit Ye x4, which features fellow rising-star, Nasty.
Blxckie said he had to send Nasty five songs before he eventually agreed to collaborate with him on the sixth song that he sent.
In 2019, the rapper decided to leave Durban before finishing his degree. He was in the middle of his final year at the UKZN Howard College, studying for an undergraduate degree in psychology, when he moved to Johannesburg to make his musical ambitions come true.
The lockdown kept him in Joburg for the whole of 2020 due to travelling restrictions during the pandemic. And that’s how he ended up working tirelessly with LucasRaps and the rest of his squad, including Dr Peppa on the hit song Mntase, which Blxckie featured on.
On MacG’s podcast, he also revealed that he does not write his music down, but his musical process mirrors Jay-Z’s, who gets in the booth and listens to the beat a few times before constructing “most of the songs line by line.”
Blxckie, who started rapping at the age of six, added that it takes too long to write a song, recite it and record it, because he wants to record new songs every day.
The artist is so prolific that according to him he had to choose from a total of “420 songs” to craft the twelve-song project, B4NOW.
The resultant album couldn’t be classified as a traditional hip-hop record, and songs such as Sika are genre-defying, tapping into elements of Amapiano and Kwaito with its instrumentals and melodies.
Managed by the M4 managing company with LucasRaps, Blxckie also mentioned that, unlike other young hip-hop artists in the country, he owns the rights to his songs.
Following the album’s market campaign, Blxckie said he will release music with big names in the game, including DJ Capital, Ricky Rick and the American rapper Vic Mensa to name a few.
Video source: YouTube
Picture source: @blxckie___
