‘Nishike’, the song that changed Sauti Sol boys into Men!

December 17, 2021 117

‘Nishike’ is the song that saw Africa’s biggest boy band graduate from boys to men literally. ‘Nishike’ saw Sauti Sol come out with hot sizzling bodies, chipped and shiny with an attitude to get to the bed and get nasty. The once good boy band now had already turned bad, but do you know the story behind the song? In an interview on ‘CTA’s Cleaning the Airwaves’ YouTube channel Sauti Sol’s guitarist Polycarp whose moniker is Fancy fingers dishes all the tea.

“While we were still in the process of doing the album, we decided to get other producers. So we reached out to young producers and at the time Kagwe Mungai was fresh from the UK, he’s a young cool kid maybe around 20 years. So he came to the studio and played us some stuff but none could cut it then the last track he played us was ‘Nishike’ and it was interesting because it had the rising scene and that was so nice and sensual and coming from the ‘Still the One’ sensual mentality we choose it.”

So in this song we were like, we can only sing about sex, nothing else, we cant sing about global warming or anything! We started jamming to it started writing and it was all sensual stuff and things just started flowing. We came up with the chorus. The first chorus was “Nishike, nishike shike”, we were trying to sound super raunchy and stuff. In the Penya studios everyone wrote their own verses and the song was out. Mareek, our manager came with different ideas and we shot the sizzling video after months of working out and having good-looking bodies. The first cut was so raunchy that we had to request Enos Olik to re-edit it which is what people have seen now. The day we released the video nobody could sleep. We planned a press release to release the video, after we played the video, the reaction of the media was dumbfounding. We had a split divide of the feedback. The comment section was just divided. We had people who were for us and the new direction and we had others who were shocked to say the least. We lost so many deals for about two months we did not have any gigs planned. All corporate canceled on us last minute,” he said.

Despite the mixed reactions over the song, ‘Nishike’ ended up being so big all over the continent. ‘Nishike’ got on rotation on Channel O and Trace MTV which was unheard of by a Kenyan artist.

source: mamadj