9ice has been in the news cycle for a while now due to the unending conversations about his Living Things song- and he can thank Falz for that. People didn’t respond to the song and its remix that featured Davido until Falz decried it as harmful to the youth to believe in the ‘shashe’ doctrine. It made people actually take time to listen and decipher the lines of the song that seemed to hail a number of individuals with dubious money.
9ice didn’t have the patience to savour the unusual attention: he went on a PR campaign to attempt to stem the tide of the bad press he got.
The most ridiculous of them was his appearance on Channels TV’s Rubbin’ Minds with Ebuka Obi-Uchendu this past Sunday. He showed how much of an illiterate he is with his pathetic explanations of his Grammy line from nine years ago and the Living Things song.
About that Grammy he sang about in ~Street Credibility~#RubbinMinds pic.twitter.com/XQC32CS5na
— Ebuka Obi-Uchendu (@Ebuka) July 17, 2017
When asked about the Grammy matter, 9ice said he didn’t promise anybody he was going to win. ‘I was only talking about myself, just thinking out loud’, he said. Oh dear!
You guys also wanted 9ice to explain the meaning of ‘shashe’.#RubbinMinds pic.twitter.com/XTrolSXNwV
— Ebuka Obi-Uchendu (@Ebuka) July 17, 2017
But the most ludicrous was when he explained what ‘Shashe’ and ‘Wire-wire’ meant. Anybody familiar with pop culture would know- as Ebuka rightly pointed out- those terms were street euphemisms for credit card and wire transfer fraud. Those two are the bedrocks of the age long 419/Yahoo Yahoo scams that many young Nigerians resorted to in the last decade and a half. 9ice thought it was a good idea to say ‘Shashe is an advanced name of sise (to work)’ and tried to include bitcoins and forex trading in his confused rambling. He also translated ‘wire-wire’ to merely mean the act of transferring money.
9ice explaining on #RubbinMinds what ‘wire wire’ means from his single ~Living Things~ pic.twitter.com/st3LkMA6wr
— Ebuka Obi-Uchendu (@Ebuka) July 17, 2017
Here’s where it gets annoying: 9ice may have thought he could bamboozle the Igbo born Ebuka with his dubious translation of the Yoruba language. However the several millions of native Yoruba speakers know for damn sure that nowhere since the days of Oduduwa has the act of working been referred to as ‘shashe’. The term wasn’t coined until the last decade of the 20th century when scammers learnt how to swipe bogus credit cards through POS terminals. That’s what ‘shashe’ means: to swipe.
Wire-wire on the other hand needs no any complex elucidation. Who among us has ever gone to the bank and said ‘I need to carry out a wire-wire?’ Bullshit. Everybody knows that’s the lingo for wire transfer fraud.
So why did 9ice go on this longwinded route of trying to alter what was obviously clear to listeners? Maybe he wanted to paint himself as an upstanding member of the society. Maybe he was afraid of the ‘backlash’ that has passed sef. Maybe it was his new handlers, Temple Management that suggest this spin. Whoever it was, they need to cover their face in shame.
9ice just succeeded in making a mockery of himself on the internet that never forgets. It would have been better for him to stick to his earlier claim: ‘I was just singing for socialites’. That’s all. Nobody was going to argue with him for his choice of patrons. He’s not the first to sing for people who turned out to be shady characters. All our juju stars fell over themselves to sing for the likes of Ade Bendel in the 90’s. No one has arrested them for hailing ‘socialites’.
It would be hard for 9ice to live this one down. He just exposed himself more to an audience that was already laughing at him. His pathetic attempt to bullshit his way out of an otherwise simple question has shown how incapable he is of simple logic and how desperate he is to whitewash the reputation of his ‘investors’.
Now the whole world knows he’s not the sharpest tool in the box.
Shame.