Beef season: Ethic and Team Psycho

The new wave of street music slowly creeping into the scene a majority of Kenyans young and old embracing the style. This has led to a majority of young ins jumping onto the bandwagon and the availability of the Internet they are capturing everyone despite the cheap quality and low budget videos. 

The first group to hit the Internet and thrust themselves to the national acclaim with their hit Lamba Lolo is undoubtedly Ethic.  Nearing one year since its release, the song has garnered 3.3 million YouTube views. Seeking to tap into their growing fame, Kansoul came on board and they did New Position, which now stands at 3.1 million views. Ethic has gone ahead to release Saba and Instagram, which both have 1 and 1.2 million views respectively. The members were individual artistes when they did Lamba Lolo, but after the success of the song they came together to form the group. Their songs have featured prominently in Dallas Mavericks home games courtesy of DJ Poison Ivy.

Despite their massive airplay and their songs on rotation we have another group Team Psycho who are clearly not happy with them. “We think at the moment Ethic is our biggest competitor because they copy our music. If you listen to our ‘Kata Tenje’ well and listen to ethic’s ‘Instagram’ and ‘Pandana’ you can clearly feel our original touch. They basically copy our vibe,” says Frank, the group’s manager.

The trio popular for their song ‘Kata Tenje’ claims Ethic copy their flow and they need to be more creative.

“We started this type of music and anyone who's came after us simply copied us. Why would we copy people who in the first place copied us?” asks John, Ethic’s manager. “We only got to hear about them recently. Kwanza wametoka wapi?” he adds on. “We all started out as very talented individual artistes who have different flow and when we came together we are doing bigger and better by day, we don’t copy anything. Let them work on themselves first before calling us out,” he warns.