Genesis Owusu
BARTOLOMEO CELESTINO/Grandstand Media
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BARTOLOMEO CELESTINO/Grandstand Media
Genesis Owusu
BARTOLOMEO CELESTINO/Grandstand Media
A humorous factor occurred on Australia’s music scene a few years in the past. Genesis Owusu was a model new artist dropping his debut album, Smiling With No Tooth. The album, his first full-length LP, began profitable awards. And never only one or two. Owusu ultimately gained virtually ALL the music awards Australia had accessible: The Aria, the Australian Music Prize, the Rolling Stone Australia Award, the Air Awards…you get the thought.
However Genesis Owusu wasn’t about to relaxation on his laurels.
Together with his second LP — Struggler — Owusu takes an formidable step ahead. It is a idea album revolving across the tortured lifetime of a cockroach — however Owusu treats this roach’s existence as a form of epic narrative, the type that will naturally embody a dialogue with the almighty.
“It is an album that was undoubtedly framed by the previous few years of this chaotic and absurd world that we have all lived in,” Owusu advised Morning Version‘s A Martinez. “Being in Australia, we suffered extraordinarily loopy bushfires after which hailstorms, after which all of us went by way of COVID collectively. Day-after-day by way of that, all of us nonetheless acquired up and placed on our ties and saved on trucking.”
For Owusu, the roach metaphor captures the typically helpless feeling of persevering towards overwhelming forces. On the tune “The Roach,” his protagonist exclaims, “I am a roach, do not knock me on my again/ Legs within the air, hope God do not assault.”
Owusu says the God determine stands in for “these enormous, unrelenting, uncontrollable forces that, by each logical means, ought to have crushed us a very long time in the past. However for some purpose, someway, someway, we simply carry on roaching to stay one other day.”
Or as his protagonist places it within the tune “Keep Blessed:” “Now we fill the bottom/ In case you kill me now, you gon’ take care of Roach quantity two!”
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Genesis Owusu was born Kofi Owusu-Ansah to oldsters who moved the household from west Africa to Australia when he was nonetheless a toddler. He says the transfer instantly positioned him as an outsider. “I had by no means met white folks. White folks had by no means met me. Folks anticipated me to stroll a unique means, discuss a unique means. As a result of I assume again then, the one Black those who a number of Australians had data of on the time was 50 Cent and Eddie Murphy. So I used to be, like, both just like the gangster or the comic, and I did not actually match into both of these roles. So I needed to discover ways to be myself from a younger age.”
To placate his dad and mom, Owusu studied journalism at college. however he all the time knew that music was his true calling. “My dad and mom flew all the way in which from from Ghana to present me and my brother an training. And so they’re very pleased with what we do now [his brother, Kojo, is also a musician]. However they have been undoubtedly beneath the final immigrant mentality of: our sons are going to be medical doctors, legal professionals, engineers. So I feel I went to [university] to, you realize, give them somewhat present and present them that I recognize their efforts.”
His debut album decisively conquered his adopted nation — and sure, gained his dad and mom’ approval. Now, with Struggler, Owusu’s set his sights on the remainder of the world. “I’ve proved all I wanted to show to Australia, and now I am simply making what’s real and what’s genuine.”
