Genesis Owusu Does Some Cool Shit
There is no one in music who moves like Genesis Owusu. Watching him light up the stage at the Corner Hotel feels like witnessing history as it’s being written. When singing the buttery hook on ‘Gold Chains’, Owusu is radiant. He cradles and rocks the microphone like he’s a rockstar playing Wembley. When blitzing through ‘Black Dogs!’, he has the fierce intensity of a main event prizefighter waiting for the ring of the bell. Only a handful of songs later, the intensity has evaporated and Owusu is flashing a million dollar grin, bouncing across the cramped stage with his Goon Club bandmates during an energetic rendition of ‘WUTD’. No one can say these shows are monotonous.
It wasn’t easy finding a ticket to catch Genesis Owusu on his just-finished national tour. He sold out three nights at the Corner Hotel on his run of shows celebrating the release of Smiling With No Teeth, his lavishly praised debut album. The record is a flex, a versatile sprint showcasing Owusu’s wide set of skills. Despite the genre-warping odyssey encompassing industrial, electro-pop, blues, hip hop and folk (non-exhaustive list, by the way), Smiling never feels stapled together, owing to uncompromising creative vision of Owusu.
It is a breakout that has been a long time coming. Since splashing onto the scene as a finalist in triple j’s Unearthed High in 2015, Owusu has levelled up every year since. In 2016, his pairing with brother Kojo (aka Citizen Kay) took flight, playing festivals across the country as the Ansah Brothers. In 2017, Owusu’s solo career ramped up with his Cardrive. The atmospheric EP stood out as an ambitious and lyrical project, unafraid to colour outside the lines over its compact 19 minute run time. Capping off a busy year, Owusu promptly followed up with ‘Sideways’, a head-bobbing single that proved he could get people moving just as he easily as he got them thinking.
It set the stage for a productive 2018, highlighted by a headline-grabbing performance at BIGSOUND, Australia’s proving grounds for emerging artists. Competing for attention with future Oz music titans such as G-Flip and Kwame, Owusu’s blend of energy, charisma and polish saw him leave the conference on the radar of every industry insider in Australian music.
However, it was a more low-key show in 2018 that may have most drastically accelerated Genesis Owusu’s ascent. While performing at the 250-person capacity Black Bear Lodge in Brisbane, Owusu was fortuitously watched by an entourage of international visitors who had touched down for the next leg of Laneway Festival. As Owusu would later tell Richard Kingsmill on triple j, he was approached after the show by Mac DeMarco Moses Sumney and members of Anderson .Paak’s band, the Free Nationals, who were impressed by his performance. The chance encounter led to an open invite from the Free Nationals to link up if Owusu ever found himself in their home city of Los Angeles, which led to a series of collaborations in 2019.
Across the next twelve months, Owusu unfurled five singles attached to his sessions in California. All five (‘WUTD’, ‘Vultures’, ‘Good Times’ and ‘Simmer Down’) were produced by Callum Connor of the Free Nationals, and the writing credits across the tracks show a constellation of musical minds that are linked to the group, such as Mike B, Ken Nana and Vicky Farewell. More than just diversify Owusu’s already loaded list of collaborators, the sonic shift from the new songs revealed an artist who had undergone metamorphosis. Genesis Owusu had gone from a rapper on the rise to a must-see chameleon could falsetto like Pharrell just as fluently as he could spit over moody jazz.
Now, the sky-high potential has translated into a fully-formed masterpiece. Smiling With No Teeth is a special first album, the rare kind that can vault an artist straight from underground sensation to headline status in a matter of weeks.
The project is conceptually anchored by the ‘black dog’, a double entendre that plays out over the course of the record. In the first half, Owusu’s battle is internal, fighting against depression. Sometimes, his black dog takes the form of an abusive relationship. Other times, it’s a hungry beast with razor fangs, desperate to draw blood. Across Smiling, the black dog lingers as a shape-shifting force, bringing nothing but destruction and darkness.
Midway through, the album flips the coin and inverts the meaning of the black dog. Suddenly, it’s all oriented around the slurs and bigotry Owusu and his peers from the African-Australian diaspora persistently endure. A music industry intent on compartmentalising him as just another rapper in gold chains, shopping centre security guards, right-wing media and Australia Day defenders are just some of the wars waged on Owusu as soon as he makes it out the door, and he blasts back at them all across the album’s second half.
Sometimes he does it over a thudding kick drum, like on ‘Whip Cracker’ where Owusu meditatively dispenses wisdom before snapping into revolutionary frenzy. On ‘I Don’t See Colour’, Owusu is surgical as he sits in the pocket of the beat to deliver a searing micro-dissertation on systematic racism. He follows it with ‘Black Dogs!’, an album highlight which sees Owusu tumble and roll with the breakneck pace set by producer Matt Corby, skewering everyday microaggressions with a palpable bubbling fury.
Smiling With No Teeth is a thematically heavy record, but there is some fun and levity. Lead single ‘I Don’t Need You’ is a sterling centrepiece, a skittering glitter bomb that opens with punch, diving headfirst into a rare moment of unabashed celebration. The chorus is fun to shout and is guaranteed to ricochet around your head for a few weeks, while the verses feature some of the wittiest writing on the entire album. ‘A Song About Fishing’ is an unexpected left-turn on Smiling’s final stretch, a calming folk song that feels like a minute of brevity amid a storm. It precedes the penultimate track, ‘No Looking Back’, a warm hug that ever-so-loosely interpolates the familiar theme of Full House.
Genesis Owusu has begun his bloom. Watching Owusu at the Corner Hotel, it was hard not to feel like this is only scratching the surface of his boundless potential. He’s charming, he’s vulnerable. He can hold a room arrested in admiration just as easily as he can incite a ferocious mosh-pit. His explosion of popularity is no accident of the algorithm, nor does it have the hallmarks of a flash in the pan. Genesis Owusu is a force to be reckoned with and it’s intoxicating to imagine what heights he’ll reach on whatever comes next.
Note: This post’s title was inspired by a quote from Genesis Owusu in a great interview with Alexia Radkiewicz in Notion. Read it here!
