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 Enamel. The album, his first full-length LP, began successful 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 kind of epic narrative, the sort that might naturally embody a dialogue with the almighty.

“It is an album that was positively framed by the previous couple of years of this chaotic and absurd world that we have all lived in,” Owusu instructed Morning Version‘s A Martinez. “Being in Australia, we suffered extraordinarily loopy bushfires after which hailstorms, after which all of us went by means of COVID collectively. Day-after-day by means of that, all of us nonetheless received up and placed on our ties and stored on trucking.”

For Owusu, the roach metaphor captures the typically helpless feeling of persevering towards overwhelming forces. On the music “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, by some means, someway, we simply carry on roaching to stay one other day.”

Or as his protagonist places it within the music “Keep Blessed:” “Now we fill the bottom/ When you kill me now, you gon’ cope with Roach quantity two!”

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 individuals. White individuals had by no means met me. Individuals anticipated me to stroll a unique manner, discuss a unique manner. As a result of I suppose again then, the one Black those who lots of Australians had information 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 learn 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 best way from from Ghana to provide me and my brother an training. They usually’re very pleased with what we do now [his brother, Kojo, is also a musician]. However they had been positively beneath the overall immigrant mentality of: our sons are going to be medical doctors, attorneys, engineers. So I believe I went to [university] to, you realize, give them a little bit 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.”