FEATURE:
Spotlight
Genesis Owusu
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ONE of the problems with this Spotlight feature…
is that I am including hardly any male artists. It shows that there are so many terrific female artists, but it is time to introduce an artist who is among the finest around. Genesis Owusu (Kofi Owusu-Ansah) has released his phenomenal debut album, Smiling with No Teeth. I will finish with a couple of reviews for the album. First, it is worth sourcing from some interviews so that we can discover more about the Ghana-born rapper. Owusu spoke with The Guardian recently. We find out about his upbringing and a remarkable, accomplished debut:
“Now 22, Owusu was born Kofi Owusu-Ansah in Ghana, then moved to Canberra, Australia when he was two. Canberra, like much of Australia, is extremely white, and although there are tight-knit non-white communities to be found everywhere, institutions like schools often remain ignorant of the experiences of people of colour. Owusu-Ansah’s brother, the rapper Citizen Kay, was five years his elder, meaning that the pair only went to school together for a year before Owusu-Ansah was on his own.
“I had to figure this shit out myself, because all the Black people I knew were the people that came to the country with me,” Owusu-Ansah recalls from his new home base of Sydney. “There [were] no real role models to get advice from. It was definitely interesting being in a white space like that, but it kind of taught me, to the [most extreme] extent, how to be myself.”
This repeated iconography provides a through line for what is a remarkably varied debut, touching upon anthemic 80s rock (on Kirin J Callinan-featuring highlight Drown), synth-funk, out-and-out punk (Black Dogs) and everything in between. Owusu-Ansah achieved this frenetic, hard-to-pin-down style by bucking a more traditional producers-and-beats A&R method – which he had used in the past – and instead holing down with a band, made up of Callinan on guitar, house producer Touch Sensitive on bass, World Champion’s Julian Sudek on drums, and Andrew Klippel, founder of Owusu-Ansah’s label Ourness, on keys.
That truth is wilder and more thrilling than one could imagine. Inspired equally by Prince and Talking Heads – “But like if Prince were a rapper, in 2020, in Australia” – Smiling With No Teeth might freak some out, but feels more likely to win fans than lose them. Either way, Owusu-Ansah doesn’t really care: “I have no interest in being like some random pop star or rap star with a million random people who don’t really care about me as an artist,” he says. “I want to reach people who will really understand it”.
I think that Smiling with No Teeth is one of the most impressive albums of the year so far. I would urge people to investigate the album and discover an immense talent! I have been listening to the album a lot over the last few days and really digesting and absorbing the fifteen tracks.
I came across an interesting DIY interview from this month. Genesis Owusu talked about moving to Canberra, the characters that go into Smiling with No Teeth, in addition to looking ahead to live gigs:
“I don’t know what music does, but it pulls out something really different in me,” chuckles Kofi Owusu-Ansah, or Genesis to his increasing number of listeners. “I don’t know how to describe it but it imbues me with a lot of confidence. It’s like Clark Kent and Superman, you know? Genesis Owusu is the Superman, and day to day, I’m just in Clark Kent mode.”
Confidence is an idea that crops up a lot in conversation with the Canberra musician. Moving from Ghana to the Australian capital aged three, he speaks of acknowledging his difference among his new peers and leaning into it from a young age. “It was definitely a place where I was immediately the outlier and it had come to a point where it’s like, do you assimilate and try and fit in or do you go full-frontal with the outcast label? And I chose the latter,” he recalls. “I chose to try and embrace who I was completely.”
Genesis’ own personal hellfire, however, is one less indebted to the millenium bug. Across the record, against a backdrop of deceptively upbeat cuts, come repeated motifs of black dogs - one a familiar metaphor for depression, the other a more troubling reference to the fact that he'd “literally been called a black dog in my life as a racial slur”. “Throughout the album, I wanted to create these two black dogs as characters with their own personalities. The internal black dog of depression is very possessive and wants you to be its only one, kind of like a toxic relationship,” he continues. “Creating them as characters really helped identify all of the characteristics [and work through] how I was interacting with them.”
With his debut, Genesis is resisting the restriction and conformity of any boxes - be it social, stylistic or other. Already selling thousands of tickets in his home country (yep, they can go to gigs already - sob), it seems like a foregone conclusion that, by the time the rest of the world is able to open up its venues once more, Owusu should be stepping through them into crowds of hungrily-waiting fans.
“It’s exciting and it’s very cool to know I’m not just doing this for myself, even though that was the original intention,” he smiles (with teeth). “That means the most to me, these little weirdo Black kids like me growing up in spaces that they don’t necessarily belong. If instead of, like I did, not having many people to look up to, they feel like they have me, then that’s super meaningful and it warms my heart”.
I am keen to get to the reviews for Smiling with No Teeth as it is a fantastic album that has so many highlights. I don’t think one needs to be a fan of Rap or know about Genesis Owusu to appreciate and fall for such a stunning and compelling album. It is an album that you will listen to again and again and discover new elements and highlights revealed.
I want to bring in the final interview. NME. Alongside a look at Owusu’s visual aspect, he discussed racism and depression, in addition to the rise of artists in Australia from the African diaspora:
“Owusu-Ansah is a visual auteur as much as he is a musician. In the video for ‘The Other Black Dog’, he sprints down a road late at night, chased by a black car driven by his shadow self. The driver’s face is wrapped in bandages à la The Weeknd circa ‘After Hours’, with golden grills forcing gritted teeth into a grin – covering up suffering with “a little gold, or extravagance”, as he puts it.
The two weighty concepts that haunt ‘Smiling’ are depression and racism. They split the record into thematic halves, and are personified as two living, breathing black dogs. One is the external figure of Owusu-Ansah himself, who experiences the dehumanising brunt of racism, and the other an internal, depressive figure that he describes as “almost seductive, wanting to lure you in… almost like a toxic relationship, wanting to be your only one”. The title track articulates the relationship between the two black dogs as analogues of racism and mental health: “Society’s stray and the stray’s hound / Caressing and stabbing each other with a technician’s touch”.
“I’m trying to live comfortably but I’m pursuing a life [in the music industry] that is known to just be fucked up. To be full of vultures, creeps and people that drain. That line is just acknowledging the contradiction and the walking paradox I can be,” Owusu-Ansah says.
Australia is currently seeing a rising wave of artists from the African diaspora making varied music under the aesthetic umbrella of hip-hop: Sampa The Great (Owusu-Ansah’s favourite rapper out of Australia), Manu Crooks, BLESSED, and more. Genesis Owusu’s story could be read in this context, but does he feel part of this scene? The answer is yes and no.
“Whenever I see any of those people, it’s always love and you always feel that sense of community from an identity perspective. [But] from the outside looking in, in a lot of publications I don’t feel like I really get recognised in those circles or in hip-hop in Australia at all,” he explains”.
I am going to wrap things up shortly. I want to end by bringing together a couple of reviews that praised and heralded an amazing album and artist. Smiling with No Teeth is an album that has won huge kudos and focus. In their review, NME were eager to lend their positive thoughts:
“Genesis approaches ‘Smiling’ as a catharsis – and, especially with his figurative writing, it can be occasionally unclear whom his missives are aimed at. Songs like the assertive, stomping lead single, ‘Don’t Need You’ are conversational yet candid, Genesis delivering barbed observations on a toxic relationship: “I always saw yo ass as a hindrance and you saw me as a target.” On the title-track, with wry spoken word, he admits to politely concealing his anxiety and depression when probed, realising that people seek assurances, not truths.
Singing partly in a Pharrell-style falsetto, Genesis ponders the trade-offs of fame, and material trappings, on the low-key single ‘Gold Chains’. Thematically similar to both his own ‘Cardrive’ track ‘Drive Slow’ and Denzel Curry’s ‘CLOUT COBAIN’, it captures a rising star astute to exploitative music industry machinations. ‘Smiling’ consistently surprises: superficially, ‘A Song About Fishing’ is breezy folk balladry – but Genesis conjures a Nick Cave-esque parable, chronicling an exhausting quest to catch fish with no success, only hope. It’s a bleak commentary on perseverance – and Genesis at his most imaginative.
With ‘Smiling With No Teeth’, Genesis Owusu has delivered a riveting album that underscores the power of self-knowledge, perspective and art – one that should be cranked loud”.
In another really positive review, DIY raised some interesting points and made some good observations about a huge album from an artist who is going to go very far:
“If the gleeful monster-mash of ‘The Other Black Dog’ or the ’80s cruise of ‘Drown’ seem like frivolous costume, they are worn by a man who carries a much wider weight of depression, frustration and societal disrepair that only really reveals itself when you dig into the lyrics. ‘A Song About Fishing’ is a laid-back, relatable rap-folk mediation of the difficulties of motivating yourself when nothing seems to be going right, while on ‘I Don’t See Colour’, he ponders the nature of racial stereotyping over a slick beat (“‘Cuz somehow my actions represent a whole race, it’s hard to move different when your face is our face.”). There’s a whole abundance of themes at play, but all are dealt with a knowing creativity, a melodic choice tailored to fit the topic.
If Genesis is consistent with anything, it’s the reminder that life is often more fun when you allow yourself to explore the leftfield. At 15 tracks long, he occasionally falters under the weight of his own abundance, but there are so many great sweets in the pick’n’mix bag that you don’t really mind the odd underwhelming chew. In time, it’ll be a real joy to watch his ideas crystallise into something properly essential. Until then, there’s a lot already here to be grinning about”.
I will leave things there. I discovered Genesis Owusu a few months ago. It has been good reading about him and his start in life; how he has grown as an artist and what the scene is like in Canberra. If you have not heard Owusu, then go and check out his social media feeds and have a listen to Smiling with No Teeth. As soon as you hear the album, it will stay in your head and come to mind frequently. I am really excited to see where this amazing young artist…
HEADS next.
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