Released in 2019, “I Been That” paired Canadian rapper Dax with Mumbai’s Emiway Bantai on a bilingual independent collaboration. Seven years on, the record stands as one of the clearest early proofs that Canadian hip hop could travel without a label pushing it.
The song runs on a simple premise stated in its hook. Two independent artists, one built in Canada and one built in India, trade verses in English and Hindi over Lex Nour production, each testifying that he was already what the industry later called him. The official video has passed 15 million views on its main upload, with millions more on a second posting, and neither artist had a major label behind the release.
Dax I Been That And The Seven Seas Premise
Dax, born Daniel Nwosu Jr. to Nigerian parents and raised in Ottawa after a childhood that began in St. John’s, built his audience the independent way: relentless self released singles, spoken word pieces and videos posted directly to his own channels. By 2019 he had turned that grind into one of the largest independent followings in Canadian rap, without radio carrying him there. “I Been That” was his declaration that the model could cross an ocean.
“I crossed the 7 seas and made an international BANGER. This is definitely a historic moment.”
That is Dax in the official video’s own description, and the description bills the record as the first international bilingual collaboration between two independent rap artists. The video, directed by Rayhaan Patni and produced by Lex Nour, was shot as a meeting of two systems rather than a guest verse exchange. Dax opens the record announcing a global run, crossing seas and building foreign ties, and frames the collaboration itself as the achievement: two artists with no label machinery, meeting at scale on their own terms.
Emiway Bantai Brought Mumbai With Him
The other half of the record was no feature for hire. Emiway Bantai, born Bilal Shaikh in Mumbai in 1995, had spent the decade building Hindi hip hop from the internet up, starting with the English language “Glint Lock” in 2014 and breaking through with “Aur Bantai” and “Boht Hard.” In January 2019, months before this collaboration reached its audience, his “Machayenge” became one of the most streamed Indian rap songs by an independent artist. His verse on “I Been That,” delivered in Hindi, carries the same testimony as Dax’s: he remembers when his views were two, and he measures the distance from there to a collaboration spanning two continents.
That symmetry is why the record holds up as a catalogue piece for Canadian hip hop. Toronto rappers and Canadian rappers generally were still being told in 2019 that international reach required a cosign from an American major. Dax and Emiway skipped the cosign entirely. The collaboration treated Mumbai as a peer market rather than an afterthought, years before cross border independent rap records became a standard rollout move, and the audience numbers followed the artists rather than any campaign.
The Numbers, Seven Years On
The view counts tell the story plainly. The main official upload of the “I Been That” video sits above 15.4 million views, with more than 838,000 likes. A second official posting carries another 2.5 million views. For an independently released bilingual rap single from 2019, those are catalogue numbers, the kind that keep a record in recommendation feeds long after its release week. The song also lives on in both artists’ catalogues on streaming, listed among Emiway’s essential tracks on Apple Music playlists years after release.
The credits underline how handmade the record was. Lex Nour produced it, Rayhaan Patni directed the video, Bantai Studio in India housed the production, and Dax himself shared video producer credit. There was no label department coordinating two continents. There were two artists, their own crews and a direct line between Ottawa and Mumbai, and the finished record carries that economy in its structure: two long testimonies, one hook, no wasted space.
Both careers kept climbing from the same independent base the song celebrated. Emiway’s run after 2019 included the “Firse Machayenge” remix with American rapper Macklemore in 2020, another cross border record built without a major label introduction. Dax turned his following into headline tours and a catalogue of self released singles that chart on his own schedule, and Emiway grew into one of India’s biggest hip hop draws while staying outside the major label system the song was recorded against. Revisited today, “I Been That” reads less like a boast and more like a blueprint that both artists then followed in public. Canadian hip hop has bigger international records now. It has very few that were built earlier, cheaper and more independently than this one.
