“There’s no one who has ever done this before.” These were the words of Temi Adeniji, the managing director of Warner Music Group South Africa when she was asked about Ckay’s recent surge in the music industry, his rise was so sudden and massive that not even the label who scouted and signed him saw it coming.

Ckay or Chukwuka Ekweani was born in the Northern part of Nigeria to parents who loved music dearly. According to the afro-pop star, his father’s love for classical music was instrumental in his musical journey, and in 2017 he left for Lagos to pursue his musical career on a full scale. He started up as a producer and was fairly successful, producing hit songs like Dice Miles ‘Miracle’ and “No Corner” by DJ Neptune. That same year he was signed on to the Chocolate City Music Group and he went on to release his first EP “Who the fuck is Ckay?” Under the label.

WTFIS received critical acclaim from critics across the country but songs from the EP failed to break into the mainstream, nevertheless, he continued to gain more ground as a producer and went on to produce more songs for different artists across the continent. In a bid to further his singing career, he released ‘Ckay the First’ the following year with that EP spanning the biggest hit of his career and earning him a label deal with the Warner Music Group South Africa.

On 30 August 2019, the Kaduna born singer released Love Nwantiti as a single from his second EP. The song became a national hit and generated a lot of attention from fans in Nigeria and Africa but like most songs in the genre, it died down and gradually left streaming charts.

But two years after the song’s release and a year after its initial wave of success, TikTok found it with top creators Mooya Musunga and Tracy Joseph pivotal in the song’s reincarnation. It all went from short videos of teens dancing to Disc Jockeys remixing and then to massive international stardom. Barely a month after the TikTok trend, he became the first Nigerian artist to feature in the Billboard Hot 100 as a solo artist.

The song became the first African song to amass over 15 billion plays on TikTok topping the social media charts for weeks. Ckay also became the first Nigerian artist to gain over 21 million monthly listeners on Spotify and also the first African artist to top the YouTube charts. Bloomberg described Love Nwantiti as the Biggest Hit in African History and maintained that Ckay gave the entire continent and genre a gift that it will appreciate for years to come.