AKA expressed that his and Costa Titch\u2019s joint album, You\u2019re Welcome, helped take him out of a dark place after losing his fianc\u00e9 in 2020. \u201cHe and I started just hanging out, and he brought me out of my shell, saying, \u2018Come out, come make music again, come start performing again,\u2019\u201d AKA told HYPE Magazine two weeks before being shot and killed in Durban last month.<\/p>\n
Costa Titch, who died a month later while performing on stage at Ultra Festival in Joburg, had met AKA through Riky Rick, who also passed away in 2022. AKA and Riky appeared on the remix to Costa Titch\u2019s 2019 breakout hit \u201cNkalakatha\u201d\u2014and AKA they hit it off from then.<\/p>\n
Breaking Through to the Mainstream
\nThe \u201cNkalakatha\u201d remix was Costa Titch\u2019s knighting event. Following years of bubbling under, the New Wave (South Africa\u2019s SoundCloud rap scene) pioneer had not just caught the attention of two of the biggest rappers in the country, but he was on a song with them.<\/p>\n
Costa Titch had worked his way up from dancing with his homeboy Benny Chill while growing up in Nelspruit in the Mpumalanga province. Costa and his crew had a stint as Cassper Nyovests\u2019 official dancers in the mid-2010s. But Costa Titch found himself being a recording artist after making music with Tumi Tladi (another South African rapper who passed on last year). Their thinking was that, in order for their dance videos to be played on TV, they needed to be accompanied by original music. When people fell in love with their music, the two rappers ran with it and Costa Titch started building his name in South Africa\u2019s SoundCloud rap scene.<\/p>\n
By the time of his death, Costa Titch had grown into an A-list South African artist. His breakout hit \u201cBig Flexa\u201d had gone viral through a TikTok challenge and a music video that had surpassed 40 million views. His lyrical approach to amapiano was reminiscent of Focalistic\u2019s style. \u201c\u2018Ke Star\u2019 like Foca,\u201d Costa rapped on the song which featured his early collaborator Alfa Kat alongside Sdida, Man T, C\u2019buda and the duo Banaba Des.<\/p>\n
Polarising Nature
\nWhile millions of fans danced to Costa\u2019s viral hits, the critics were crying foul play at a white kid appropriating black culture. \u201cI had a lot black friends and I connected with black people more,\u201d Costa Titch explained in an interview with SlikourOnLife. \u201cI\u2019ve just been around African culture.\u201d Costa Titch\u2019s best friend growing up was the rapper Benny Chill with whom he remained close until he passed on. \u201cI\u2019m learning Zulu through making music,\u201d Costa said at the time.<\/p>\n
The game opened its arms to the young rapper. His debut album Made In Africa, which dropped in 2020, featured the likes of DJ Maphorisa, Sjava, Riky Rick, AKA, Boity, Boskasie, YoungstaCPT and a few other South African music stars.<\/p>\n
Costa Titch\u2019s music was catchy and allowed him and his dancers to give a lively show on stage. He also maintained the dance element in his music which was helpful in an era when fans connect with songs they can dance to on camera, becoming TikTok sensations in the process.<\/p>\n
Explaining the joint album, AKA said the two of them had set out to make a \u201cnon musical project.\u201d \u201cWe are living in the amapiano era. So we said how can we make amapiano without making amapiano,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wanted to make TikTok songs\u2026 We didn\u2019t wanna make long songs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Saving AKA\u2019s Life
\nYou\u2019re Welcome hardly made a dent. The album wasn\u2019t well-received by fans and its lead single \u201cSuper Soft\u201d didn\u2019t do much either. It also felt too soon for AKA to be making music after the controversial passing of Nellie.<\/p>\n
To AKA, though, You\u2019re Welcome meant a lot. He was introduced to Costa\u2019s younger fanbase as the duo performed in spaces AKA wouldn\u2019t normally give the time of the day. Costa Titch saved AKA\u2019s life, but both rappers, unbeknown to anyone at the time, didn\u2019t have much time left.<\/p>\n
AKA passed on two weeks before the release of Mass Country, his comeback album which was led by the monster single \u201cLemons (Lemonade)\u201d which featured Nasty C, a rapper AKA has invited to rap on stage in Durban many moons before Nasty became a superstar himself.<\/p>\n
Costa Titch was only getting started. His career had just taken off. At this year\u2019s Cotton Fest in February, Costa brought out Akon as a surprise guest. The Konvict Kulture head honcho announced a partnership between his company and the South African rapper. \u201cI wanna inaugurate him into the Konvict Kulture family,\u201d he said. A remix of \u201cBig Flexa\u201d featuring Akon followed a week after. Costa Titch was about to make the world his oyster. But the universe had other plans. He collapsed while performing at Ultra and was pronounced dead almost instantly.<\/p>\n
Costa Titch was a polarising artist as, while some felt he was performing musical black face, those on his side felt he was just being a citizen of a post-racial South Africa where racial and cultural lines are blurred the way Mandela envisioned.<\/p>\n
Others hailed Costa Titch as an icon, understandably so. \u201cYou were that white kid who stood out like a sore thumb because of how incredibly skilled, technical, intentional, creative, professional, disciplined, hardworking and wildly amazing you were as a multitalented dancer and choreographer,\u201d wrote Bontle Modiselle, who also spent a long time in the thriving South African hip-hop dance scene of the late 2000s and early 2010s.<\/p>\n
Costa Titch joins a plethora of popular South African musicians who have passed on in what seems like a purge of sorts. In the last two years South Africa has lost talents such as Riky Rick, AKA, Tumi Tladi, Mpura, Killer Kau, DJ Dimplez, DJ Citi Lyts, Mampintsha and DJ Sumbody, a majority of who were on top of their game and had exciting futures ahead of them in the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Following his tragic passing, we take a look back at the polarising South African rapper\u2019s career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":27917,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,16],"tags":[7,32,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-27920","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"category-news","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-news"},"yoast_head":"\n