Some dreams seem far-fetched until they are within reach or one starts finally living in them.
This has been the case for Lenny Masedi Sadiki, who is fondly known as Mass the Difference.
Growing up in a family where music was just another language spoken in the house, reggae music was a staple for the rising star.
His uncles would blast it out loud and with time, the slow rap sounds found their way to his mind.
Only later in life was he then told that his grandfather, Ernest Mulangaphuma was involved in creating the South African national anthem and that he’s the reason behind his uncles’ taste in music.
Fascinated by the rhyming patterns in the songs, he then started writing poetry and falling in love with his own rhymes when he was 10 years old.
Taking us down to memory lane with him, he says, “In grade 8, I met this guy who was a rapper. He got ahold of my poetry book and he was just reading my stuff and was like ‘you got some pretty dope verses, these are pretty good raps’.”
“Then I was like ‘these are not raps, I don’t rap at all’ because I was a shy kid before this rapping thing so [with] rapping you know you got to be out there so I would just write my poems for myself, I wouldn’t even take it to anybody,” he says.
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But after rapping was suggested to him by someone who was a popular rapper at school, he figured that there was potential in him and started attending the rap battles at school.
“Break time, they would spit, they would rap. After school, they would also rap and [that’s] when I started honing my skill,” he shares with Drum.
It was also around this time that Lenny added the likes of Drake, Kendrik Lamar, AKA and his favourite NAS to his playlist as well.
“I started copying their flow. I remember the first time I started rapping to people, they were blown off, so it was easy for me to get into it. That’s how I started rapping.”
At just the age of 14 in 2010, the rapper from Hammanskraal got himself a call centre microphone piece and started recording his bars on Audacity, a free sound editing software while finding his way around it.
When he realised that people were recording better quality music and releasing music projects, he took it more seriously.
The passionate teenager at the time moved on to using the Fruity Loops software, which was widely used amongst his rapping peers and eventually got himself a bedroom studio in 2017.
It wasn’t until varsity that he started gaining a fan base though.
Because he had been extensively writing poetry about love in sonnets, when MacMiller released his album titled The Devine Feminine, he was inspired to work on his very first mixtape.
“Before that, I dropped an EP which was four tracks. After that when Devine Feminine came out, I was like I got to do something. I need like a full body of work and then I dropped Loud Noise and it was crazy,” he tells Drum.
Shortly after releasing the second version of Loud Noise, Slikour poached him and took him under his wing.
The year 2019 then changed everything for him when his talent was affirmed by Cassper Nyovest on social media while he was back in Limpopo at the University of Venda where he was completing his honours in media studies.
In disbelief, he then sent Cassper a direct message (DM), where he sent through some of his work.
When Cassper reposted his work and he went from 900 followers on Twitter to 9 000, Universal Music Group picked up on his talent as well and approached him later that year for a deal.
For him, the moment went from sweet to sour quickly when he only got to sign on the dotted line, a week before Covid-19 hit and everything came to a standstill.
Instead of dwelling on the negatives of the situation though, Lenny decided to continue honing his skills and redefine his brand.
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Not only did he go from Mass_80 to Mass The Difference, he also brought in a Tshivenda spin to his bars.
“When I got signed to Universal Music and we were talking to the A&R’s, they mentioned a couple of things like that they need to find an identity for me.”
At first, he didn’t understand what this meant because he had been rapping for so long but after they broke it down to him, he understood because people had previously told him that he sounded American.
“That didn’t sit well with me. I want people to hear my music and be proud that someone from here (local) is dope. It’s crazy because I got culture in me so that’s when I started instilling it into my songs because for you to go world wide, it gotta start from the ground, your local people got to have your back.”
This seems to have worked out well for him as his first EP under Universal Music has garnered over 50 000 streams in less than a week since it dropped on 21 July.
As from the first week of August, he will be open for bookings and he is looking forward to gracing big stages with his Venda bars as he also gears up to release his first music video later on this year and an album next year.
