Collaboration boosts musician’s career

Poloko Mokhele

When Rethabile Rabiri’s late friend told him that he has a musicians’ voice, Rabiri thought he was being teased because his passion was in football, but today he has released a single and has a growing of list of collaborations under his belt.

The soft spoken musician told Newsday this week that he became a musician after the persuasion of his late friend, Tiisetso Huis known as Golden Heart, who was a music producer.

“In late 2014, we had a music movement called Deadly Elements, and one-day Golden Heart wrote a song which shared with me, and then after that I took a few tips on how I can also perfect my song writing skills, Rabiri said.

“Sometime in 2015, Golden Heart passed on, and I decided that I needed to come up with my own stage name because Deadly Elements was no more so I called myself Why De?, which was a mixture of my football name and few words from Deadly Elements,” he said.

He said his main motivation to give his music career a shot was to continue his late friend’s legacy.

“When Golden Heart passed away I told myself I needed to carry on from where he left off because of the trust he had in me. It was also because some members of Deadly Elements began leaving the group, it was no longer strong like before, so I decided to go solo.”

In August 2017, Rabiri enrolled at Botho University to further his studies in Business Management, where upon arrival he joined an arts crew.

“There used to be producers that would give us beats and I would take them and create music out of them, that is when I began noticing progress in Why De? as a musician and some artists also asked for collaborations with me,” he said.

He highlighted that one of the things which played a huge role in his musical development is collaborating with other artists.

He highly recommends upcoming artists to collaborate more than going solo.

“I worked with Teddy Pistols, Charlie, Lili and K-Deck and we came up with a concept for a song named ‘marry me.’

The idea was to accommodate non-English speaking Basotho as the song had both Sesotho and English lyrics.

“This track was one of the best we ever produced because it was also among the top 40 hits on PC FM. I must state that it was epic because it was a collaboration, hence I also wish to encourage upcoming artists to collaborate more than going solo”.

He added that in order to ensure that his music gets known, he started building relations with radio presenters from different radio presenters so that his music could be played for a wider audience.

“I also did jingles for different youth radio stations shows, which also gave me a chance to mingle with radio presenters and learn more about music and radio.

“Sometime in 2017, I worked with an artist named K-Deck and because our music taste was almost the same, we decided to form a crew which released a track called ‘ke rata mang?’ and because we felt like we were doing justice to music, we named ourselves The Jury,” he said.