The story behind TikTok's viral hit, "Love Nwantiti"

Brut America

"It means 'small love,' literally."  His song, "Love Nwantiti," blew up on TikTok and became the most Shazamed song in the world. Nigerian artist CKay takes Brut through the lyrics of his viral hit.

Transcript

00:00It's an exclamation, literally.

00:21To be honest, yeah, it's not that word is not from any language.

00:25It's my language.

00:26I was freestyling and I came up with it and I thought it sounded great.

00:30But it's an exclamation.

00:32It's like when you say OMG or when you say, you know what I mean?

00:37Like when you say damn or when you say wow or something like that.

00:57It's so crazy because they probably don't understand what the Igbo means.

01:02It's a Southeastern Nigerian language called Igbo.

01:05It's the tribe I'm from and it means small love, literally.

01:09But it also means in context, when you see like

01:16a couple, like love between a couple and it like

01:20the way it just makes you feel like the way it just looks good on them.

01:23The love looks good on them.

01:25It's also called Love Wanted Tea.

01:30I would say Love Wanted Tea has a foundation in some highlight,

01:35but it's just that with me, my approach to it,

01:38it's basically guitar music that was created in like

01:42the earlier parts of the 20th century, like the 40s, 50s.

01:47And they fused jazz with Hawaii.

01:51It was like a mixture of Hawaiian jazz and

01:54a little bit of Spanish jazz.

01:56And they put African rhythms on it.

01:58And that became High Life.

01:59A young DJ from Mauritius Island, his name is DJ Yo.

02:03He remixed the acoustic version of the song.

02:06He put drums on it and uploaded it.

02:09It's so crazy because we didn't even know about the release.

02:12It was an illegal upload.

02:14We found out about it when it got to the top 50 of the global Shazam charts.

02:20So my team had to reach out and kind of reclaim the song and everything.

02:25And it's so crazy because the day we claimed the song,

02:27the next day it was number one on Shazam.

02:35Different people started making all types of challenges with that song.

02:39Some people were using it for memes, some people were using it to dance.

02:43Some people were using it for makeup, fashion, travel.

02:47People were using Love Wanted T for all sorts of things.

02:50People from different cultures.

02:53And it literally just went even more viral than the first time.

02:57It's crazy to see people from different parts of the world

03:01vibing to the song, even if they don't understand the meaning.

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