Being in the company of his sports-loving brother yet struggling to find his own passion for years motivated a promising young Eastern Cape rapper to ardently search for his niche, until he fell in love with music.
Enoch Ansah, 18, whose stage name is ¥ung, is now running his own race in a new-found love for “trap” music. When the teenage rapper is not submitting high-ranking albums to online music platforms such as ReverbNation. com, he is winning cypher battles in the mother city.
“At the age of 17, everything looked down in my life [and] I felt like I didn’t have a passion or something I loved. “Because I grew up with a big brother who was very into sports, and was very good at it, I had to live up to the expectation,” said ¥ung, who grew up in Graaff-Reinet but moved to Port Elizabeth this year.
While going through his struggle to find his niche, the Bluewater Bay-based artist’s love for music began to grow.
“Since a very young age, I have loved all kinds of music but mainly hip-hop because I can relate to some of it.“At the age of 15, I came across a rapper from Atlanta [in the US] called 21 Savage and this artist inspired me through his music, talking about the struggles he had to go through to get to where he is and so on,” ¥ung said.
¥ung then wasted no time and started recording with the help of his cousin, who owned a recording studio.
The first two songs he recorded were Aint It Obvious and Angel Skrrt.“When I released those two songs that’s when everything started for me and I just wanted to improve because for the first time in my life I’d found something I loved doing.“I did improve in my music in a very short period of time. I’m not where I want to be yet, but I’ll get there,” he said.
Earlier this year, ¥ung recorded his album Hurt Bae 2 and released it on July 13. He uploaded it to a good reception on ReverbNation.com, and in less than 24 hours, it was at No5 in the platform’s upcoming artists category. On July 17 he went up to No2, then hit No1 the next day. He is now at No3 on local charts in the pop genre.
The Edu College pupil writes his own music and records it at Big Dreams Entertainment in Motherwell.
He identifies his music as trap, an alternative pop and hip-hop genre.
He is working on another album, Fly Trapper, set to be released in December.
¥ung’s music is available for streaming on YouTube, SoundCloud, Audiomack , ReverbNation and Spreaker.