It has not only topped South African music charts.
What started off as a dance challenge on TikTok has taken the song beyond the local shores.
Tshwala Bam now has a remix featuring none other than global superstar and multi-award-winning Nigerian artist, Burna Boy.
A week ago, in an exclusive interview with DRUM, the Soweto-born Snenhlanhla Ngobese, fondly known as S.N.E, who's the lead vocalist in the hit, hinted that big things were about to pop.
Now the cat's out the bag.
“I was in Nigeria for, like, a month. So, I was working with those people and one thing I've realised is that they're not like us,” S.N.E tells Drum, explaining how the remix came about.
“They don't go step by step, they do everything now so we recorded the remix and video at the same time.”
"Our song is doing really good,” he chuckled.
This has been the big break he’s been waiting for.
“It makes me feel grateful because I’ve been working so hard to get such a platform in such an effortless way like this. I mean, you record a song two years ago and you even forgot about it. Next thing you know, somebody took the vocals and created something and now it’s trending. The day it happens, it’s like God puts everything in place without you doing anything.”
From being a producer, vocalist and sound engineer, he makes music from across several kinds of genres.
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Now that he’s heeded to amapiano’s calling, he has one of the biggest songs in the country – Tshwala Bam.
Although he can’t pinpoint when exactly he developed love for music, he says he went from being an avid listener to being a creator of music in 2008.
His rise to stardom may have seemed like an overnight one but it had been almost a decade after making music that he began doing what he does best professionally.
With his first hit song though, came a few mishaps. When you google Tshwala Bam, the first song you come across is Mellow and Sleazy’s Tshwala Bam.
“Mellow and Sleazy are not part of the song. They also have a song called Tshwala Bam and it was dropped around the same time that we dropped [our song]. Only I, Eequee, TitoM and Yuppe are on the song. I am the lead vocalist and Eequee has a verse.”
Without delving too much into the politics, S.N.E tells Drum that Mellow and Sleazy have a not-so-pleasant history with TitoM, one of the producers of the song and that there might be subtle beef between the two brands due to creditations on previous hitsongs.
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“I’m assuming that because they have bigger names, they were like, ‘I can drop anything and stop that fire of theirs’ and even the naming of the song was intentional in trying to get their song to land bigger than ours. Unfortunately, they couldn’t stop the heat.”
Mellow and Sleazy were not keen to comment on the matter at the time of publication.
S.N.E, however, goes in on how their song with millions of streams was made.
“Some other guy, Saint Jay, sent me a beat that TitoM had been working on. When they sent me that beat, I recorded Tshwala Bam vocals on it and sent it back to them. Saint Jay didn’t like the vocals, so he cut them out and released the beat on its own. I gave up on it, but Yuppe took the vocals and created another beat around the vocals and posted it on TikTok,” he adds.
Three days later, the song had gained noticeable traction on TikTok.
To date, S.N.E is still stunned at how everything fell into place for the song to make as much as waves as it continues to make.
Confirming how the song got to have a dance challenge on social media, the 30-year-old musician tells Drum that in the initial video that trended, the three boys seen dancing to the song, were actually not dancing to the song.
“There were these three guys who posted a video, they were at a like house party and were vibing to a totally different song. Yuppe again did the trick, he took the song and attached it to this video and it made sense, it was a perfect fit. Next thing we know, local and international celebrities are joining in.”
He says he first met the three dancers at a YFM interview he had with Ayanda MVP and they worked with them on the song’s music video.
More than anything, he’s proud that his song managed to establish so many new faces in the industry
