Malaysian rapper Namewee (黃明志) is trying to restore the nearly 1,000 videos on his YouTube channel that disappeared after his account was apparently hacked, his agent said yesterday.
The rapper’s agent said the musician’s management team had reached out to YouTube for assistance in restoring the videos of his music and the related comments after they vanished overnight and the title of his channel was changed from “Namewee” to a sentence in Russian.
While Namewee’s YouTube channel, which was set up in 2006, was yesterday afternoon showing that he has 3.27 million subscribers and has garnered 1,432,644,663 views, it also displayed the message: “This channel has no videos.”
Photo: CNA
The rapper, known for his comments and songs that touch on sensitive social and political issues, made headlines in October last year when his song Fragile (玻璃心), a ballad in Mandarin satirizing nationalistic Chinese Internet users, was pulled from music streaming services in China one day after its release.
Namewee and co-singer Kimberley Chen (陳芳語) also had their accounts on Sina Weibo shut down and all of their other songs removed from streaming services in China.
Despite the ban in China, Fragile was viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube in the six days following its release, and was trending at No. 1 on the video-sharing site in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
A graduate of Taiwan’s Ming Chuan University, Namewee has been nominated three times for best Mandarin male singer at Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards.
He splits his time between Taiwan and Malaysia, and returned to Malaysia in January to promote the comedy film Nasi Lemak 1.0, a sequel to 2011’s Nasi Lemak 2.0 that he directed and starred in.
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