As if this season’s Premier League wasn’t exciting enough, one footballer appears to have discreetly released a rap song. Dide published the song Thrill on YouTube, where it has already received more than 500,000 views.
Football fans will be quick to inform you that there is no Premier League player named Dide, sending social media users into a frenzy as they attempt to identify the musician.
Who is the top-tier rapper whose identity is unknown, and is the composition any good?
The name is Dide is an anagram of Eddi, according to supporters, who have suggested it for Arsenal striker Eddie Nketiah.
Others assert that it must be a Gunners player because the lyrics contain phrases such as “my team keeps winning” and “every game is like a final” – a reference to their title competition with Manchester City.
The music video is also set in London, which has led some to speculate that it features Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha or Chelsea’s Noni Madueke.
Dide made his debut on Instagram earlier this year with the bio “Home Rapper. Football player on the field.”
He recently uploaded a photo with the caption “It’s time to think outside the box,” implying that he is not a striker like Nketiah.
Some Premier League players have already ruled themselves out, with Michail Antonio and Callum Wilson stating in their Footballer’s Football Podcast that it wasn’t them.
“Obviously, he says South London, major Premier League player, and I have my own money, so it’s not me,” says Antonio.
“I don’t believe that is Wilfried Zaha; his physique could be that of Nketiah.”
The truth is that nobody knows who Dide is yet, so we asked a specialist, Radio 1Xtra DJ Kenny Allstar, who he believes the unknown rapper could be.
Kenny, who was recently named presenter of the Radio 1 Rap Show, believes that the Instagram post may be a red herring.
He tells BBC Newsbeat,
“I’ll go with the Arsenal forward Eddie Nketiah.”
“I’m getting Nketiah vibes from it; I believe it’s him.”
AJD, a music producer and DJ for the BBC Asian Network, concurs with Kenny that Dide is actually Nketiah.
“It sounds like a London accent, and he’s following London-based [music producer] Steel Banglez,” he says.
Justin Carr, a celebrity groomer who has trimmed the beards of Dele Alli and Kyle Walker, is uncertain about Dide’s true identity.
“I’ve heard the song and seen the mask, and now I’m rating it,” he says.
“I trim a large number of players, but nobody has rapped in my chair.”
This is the opinion of the rap DJ and the celebrity barber, but what do the experts say?
Matt, an expert in artificial intelligence, was tasked with determining whether the rapper was one of the suspects.
After extracting the vocals from the song Thrill, he trained his high-tech AI systems to compare the vocals to the audio of football players speaking.
He claims that his system is “between 80-98% confident” that the rapper is Nketiah, as opposed to Zaha or Madueke, who is the most popular suggestion.
“What I do is cut the Dide vocal into fragments of one second, and between 10 and 20 percent of those fragments sound like Wilf [Zaha], while the majority sound like Eddie [Nketiah],” he explains.
However, Matt is eager to point out that his system is not flawless and that additional tests are required to be certain.
“Normally, you would be quite cautious about data cleansing,” he explains. “I simply tore it out and cut it up rapidly.
Therefore, I have not done an excellent job here. However, it appears quite confident.”
Dide, whoever he is, appears to be treating the rap game seriously, as he has launched a website selling merchandise such as T-shirts for $49.99.
According to his website, he is from the United Kingdom and “wears a rose-adorned disguise to keep his Premier League football life separate from his evocative music.”
We reached out to Dide through his manager, who informed us that he was not conducting interviews but would stay in contact – so stay tuned!
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