Cassper Nyovest returned to the music fold with every intention to resurrect South African Hip-Hop. However, the general sentiment online suggests he may have dug a deeper grave for the dying genre with his new single, Put Your Hands Up.
Cassper Nyovest ‘Put Your Hands Up’ song review
Nyovest, a marketing guru in his own right, put a lot of work behind the promotion of his first Hip-Hop single release since his 2020 collab with Tweezy, Amademoni.
Earlier this week, the rapper warned his fans that Put Your Hands Up was going to be a different texture from his traditional Hip-Hop releases, and a few spins confirmed this
Billiato’s new offering borrows heavily from the mid-tempo sounds of the 90s. In fact, Put Your Hands Up is an interpolation of Mousse T’s Ooh Song which first surfaced on vinyl in 1999.
The reinvention of old mid-tempo house music is nothing new in SA Hip-Hop. His arch nemesis, AKA, as a matter of fact, leans heavily on house samples.
Alie Keyz is credited for flipping the Mousse T classic and, if there is anything positive to draw from Put Your Hands Up by Cassper Nyovest, it’s the nostalgic nudge it offers to those who were alive to experience the mid-tempo era.
Otherwise, the new single, unfortunately, does not live up to the hype Nyovest built in the days leading up to its release. The exhaustive repitition of the sample, which makes the listening experience all the more painful, adds nothing to Nyovest’s failure to encapsulate the audience with thumb-sucked bars like:
I'm a rapper slash soft life ambassador This is that real s*** they do not have in stores
If Alie Keyz thought he’d hood-wink us with the age-old Hip-Hop chant sampled from Nas’ Made You Look, he was grossly misled. If anything, the mixture of Mousse T’s mid-tempo groove with the aggressive chant made for an unbearable ear-sore experience.
Fortunately, our opinion is not isolated, since many fans of the rapper took to social media to share their thoughts on Put Your Hands Up:
