The story behind viral hit, "Love Nwantiti"

Brut India

His song, "Love Nwantiti," blew up and became the most Shazamed song in the world. Nigerian artist CKay takes Brut through the lyrics of his viral hit.

Transcript

00:00I think Indians call it polé because apparently polé means something in Hindi.

00:13Everyone's just having fun with it, it's crazy.

00:16It's an exclamation, literally. To be honest, that word is not from any language, it's my

00:35language. I was freestyling and I came up with it and I thought it sounded great, but

00:40it's an exclamation. It's like when you say OMG or when you say, you know what I mean?

00:46Like when you say damn or when you say wow or something like that.

00:49It's so crazy because they probably don't understand what Igbo means.

01:11It's a southeastern Nigerian language called Igbo. It's the tribe I'm from and it means

01:17small love, literally, but it also means in context when you see a couple, love between

01:26a couple and the way it just makes you feel, the way it just looks good on them, the love

01:33looks good on them. It's also called love-wantency.

01:39I would say love-wantency has a foundation and some highlight, but it's just that with

01:45me, my approach to it, it's basically guitar music that was created in the earlier parts

01:52of the 20th century, like the 40s, 50s, and they fused jazz with Hawaii. It was like a

02:00mixture of Hawaiian jazz and a little bit of Spanish jazz and they put African rhythms

02:06on it and that became highlight.

02:08A young DJ from Mauritius Island, his name is DJ Yo, he remixed the acoustic version

02:14of the song. He put drums on it and uploaded it. It's so crazy because we didn't even

02:19know about the release. It was an illegal upload. We found out about it when it got

02:26to the top 50 of the global Shazam charts. So my team had to reach out and kind of reclaim

02:32the song and everything. And it's so crazy because the day we claimed the song, the next

02:37day it was number one on Shazam.

02:44Different people started making all types of challenges with that song. Some people

02:49were using it for memes, some people were using it to dance, some people were using

02:53it for makeup, fashion, travel, like people were using love-wantency for all sorts of

02:59things. People from different cultures and it literally just went even more viral than

03:06the first time. It's crazy to see people from different parts of the world vibing to

03:11the song, even if they don't understand the meaning.

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