Lil Kesh dropped an album recently, but the chief vibe around YBNL is all around Olamide’s ‘Who you epp’ freestyle.
Lil Kesh and Olamide are what you will refer to as benefactor and beneficiary. The former is a protégé of the latter, profiting from his financial and experiential magnanimity to create a thriving career path. From 2012, they both partnered, and together they have become influential players in the uber dynamic clime of the Nigerian music industry.
But now there’s a clash. And Olamide is winning.
Lil Kesh dropped his debut album “Y.A.G.I” in March 2016, and he is currently working on promoting the album. The LP contains features from Phyno, Adekunle Gold, and even Olamide, marking his first body of work ever in his career. With an album out of the way, the popular opinion is that under the leadership of Baddo, YBNL would aggressively push the project, thereby generating record sales and many more.
But that isn’t the case. Less than a month later, Olamide has released 2016’s most viral song ‘Who you epp’.
The rapper has been at the top of Nigerian rap via the quality of his content, and the marketing of his sounds, from owning the gunman pose for his “Baddest Guy Ever Liveth”, album art, to his simple, yet expressive dance step for ‘Bobo’, king Baddo has kept up his profile. ‘Who you epp’ took a simple, yet different route. The rapper’s single comes with a free 16 bars of instrumental, with no vocals laced in it. Olamide put that deliberately, and via social media, announced a competition for people to bring on their most creative 16-bars to fill that space. First came the celebrity rappers who took the gauntlet, and dropped their golden flow. Ruggedman, Phyno, Lil Kesh and many others are proud fillers of ‘Who you epp’.
But the competition really became a hit with lesser known rappers and singers. There have been works from Slay, Bils, MVP, Pepenazi, Gunzoe, Ms Chief, Ozee, Lypsi, Viktoh, Subzilla, Lowbeek, Ckay, Pryse, and a host of others. This has created a long list of ‘Who you epp’ songs flooding the internet, and offering new versions and extended enjoyment to fans.
Right now, currently, Olamide’s single is one of the top singles on iTunes Nigeria, with no single from Lil Kesh playing at that level. There’s also no video to support the marketing of the album, as the conversations around Nigerian music have moved from “Y.A.G.I” to ‘Who you epp”. The album is currently still on the streets, but support for it has all but died online.
Olamide has always epp Lil Kesh. But at the moment his new single hasn’t just failed to epp him, it has become toxic to his album.
