It’s official: Central Cee’s “Doja” is the most-streamed UK rap song in Spotify history. The track, which was produced by Mancunian hit-makers LiTek & WhyJay (with Scott Storch also credited as a co-writer), was released almost a year ago today and has since amassed over 470 million streams on Spotify alone.
That’s not the only record Cench smashed this week, either. According to the @chartdata Twitter account, his recent collab with Dave, “Sprinter”, has broken the “all-time single-week streaming record for a rap track in the UK, surpassing Stormzy’s “Vossi Bop” (13.4 million). It’s also the longest-running No. 1 for any UK rap single (5 weeks and counting).
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Away from the stats, we’ve been seeing a lot more of Central Cee lately. Up until recently, he was notable for how few interviews he gave as well as his silence on social media. Just last week, however, even as many users were ditching Twitter in favour of Instagram and Meta’s new baby, Threads, Cench went in the other direction and deleted his Instagram and got active on Twitter.
Interview-wise, it seems like every podcast and platform has been vying for some insight from him, too. In a recent conversation with XXL, having made the publication’s Freshman Class Of 2023, the West London native spoke of his influences and those first artists that inspired him to pick up the mic over a decade ago.
“I take influence from everybody, but it’s not sonically,” he said. “I don’t really take influence sonically. Maybe some underground [or] like popular UK street rap—that’s probably, sonically, what kinda influences me, in a sense. Everyone just influences me in a human way, but not really in a music way.
“People who influenced me 10, 12 years ago when I first started recording music… Skepta, I’ll always pay a big thing to, Jme, the whole grime scene—which is no longer really like a thing anymore, but that was what made me wanna rap.”
You can read the full interview here.
