Genesis Owusu Wants to Tell You a Story

It’s been one hell of a year for Genesis Owusu. In March, the Ghanaian-Australian multi-hyphenate played a sold-out show at the Sydney Opera House—backed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; this summer, he toured the United States with Paramore and Bloc Party; in August, he unveiled his hotly anticipated sophomore LP, STRUGGLER, a concept album about a roach running away from God that’s actually a metaphor for combating the romance of existential nihilism, a convergence of “Vogue, strike a pose” and “You’re killing me dead.” My bingo card is expansive. I’ve got squares for every possible angle, every conceivable twist and turn. What I didn’t account for at the beginning of 2023, however, was that one of the most brilliant records released would be about a bug. But anything is conceivable now that Owusu is forever locked into our orbits.

When he took the Opera House stage in March, Owusu did so in such an elaborate get-up that descriptions just will never do full justice. He donned a full black gown with red hands perched atop his shoulders and biceps; a bright red stripe stretches from his forehead to the back of his neck. Futuristic, bug-eyed glasses shield away his face. This is the world he’s built, one of theatrical unpredictability and finesse. One moment, he’s 10-feet-tall. Next, he’s alone on stage crooning “Gold Chains” in a red, cropped two-piece suit. Immediately, as Owusu began rapping “The Other Black Dog” in front of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, it was clear that a new era was on the horizon. By the time the Australian winter arrives, he’ll already have ushered in the ecosystem of STRUGGLER, playing a new song like eventual lead single “Leaving The Light” for the first time on stages at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It would also be his parting goodbye to the performances he’d been doing for the last year. It was, without a doubt, a beautiful farewell to the era of his debut LP, Smiling with No Teeth.

While touring with Paramore and Bloc Party, Owusu had to leave most of his theatrics at home. It’s no surprise, given that he was first on the bill and could only play eight songs a night. Being an opening act can be a difficult role to maneuver; anyone who’s gone to a gig this century has likely seen just how enthusiastic crowds are to talk and socialize during the sets of musicians they’re unfamiliar with. But, it’s a challenge that Owusu is eager to face head-on every night. “I know what I’m getting into as an opener,” he says. “People can view you as just filling a space to amp up suspense between the doors opening and who they’re really there to see, which is totally fine. But when I am the opener, I’m here to shatter that notion. I’m here to grab your attention and take it hostage so that, the next time I’m in your city, you’re gonna be as keen to see me as you are Paramore. It’s the challenge that I really enjoy.” He carries that mantra—of blowing the door of preconceptions open—into his own headlining tours, as the Mongolian throat singer Bukhu recently opened a gig for him in Sydney.

That Paramore tour, though, in the moment and in hindsight, was a surreal exposure for Owusu—who’d cut his teeth on listening to both bands when he was a kid in Canberra. And to be sharing a stage with a frontman like Kele Okereke, a Black British bandleader whose songwriting was crucial for musicians of color getting their flowers in indie rock at the turn of the century, was especially monumental (and you can hear Okereke’s style of enacting an equilibrium of gang-shouting and angelic harmonizing deftly presented in Owusu’s repertoire). “They were such huge, foundational pieces in the music environment that I grew up in in the early 2000s,” he explains. “Whether you wanted to listen to them or not, you were going to listen to them—because they made up what music was at that time, especially in that indie-alternative world. It’s not hyperbole to say I was sharing the stage with legends. It was really beautiful and it was great, as an added bonus, that they were all just really lovely people, because you’re not always lucky enough to say that when you tour with people of that stature.”

Since Smiling with No Teeth came out in 2021, Owusu has built up a reputation of being one of the most captivating live acts in the world. His first formative memory of stagecraft came from watching Kanye West’s BRIT Awards appearance in 2015, when he performed “All Day” at the height of grime’s global notoriety. West had called upon all of the notable grime rappers in the UK, dressed them in all black and armed them with flamethrowers. “I remember that performance so distinctly,” Owusu says. “The camera would pan to Taylor Swift dancing. I thought it was such an interesting dichotomy between this aggression with this art and the mainstream accessibility of it at the same time.” For as long as he can remember, Owusu has held a love for theater and how it can intersect with every other art form if you choose to let it. “I love film, I love watching scenes,” he adds. “Because I’ve chosen this primary mode of creation—which is music—it doesn’t mean I don’t want to create things that are actually tangible and a dialogue in a different kind of way. Loving all of those things has made me want to turn the medium of a live performance into something more akin to theater rather than just going on stage and regurgitating songs that I already made. I want to create a piece that can put those songs in a new context and give them new life and new meaning.”

And that’s exactly what Owusu has done. STRUGGLER arrives as a full-bodied performance from tracklist to show choreography. One of the biggest checklist points he looks for when conceiving a song is whether or not it will go absolutely crazy live, hence why his setlists are nothing short of being wall-to-wall electric. “If I can’t imagine it being really impactful live, it’s not very often that I’ll end up putting out that song,” Owusu notes. STRUGGLER began with a short story he wrote that he then, later, turned into the album we now have at our disposal. When he was sketching the narrative, he was also drumming up the visuals and began panning his creativity outwards—daydreaming about short films and using the songs as the final pieces of the intricate, thematic puzzle. But Owusu makes certain that there’s a crystalline intentionality in how his stories open doors for every listener at each twist and turn—extending each song’s lifespan and giving STRUGGLER a lifetime warranty. “[The album] definitely gains more meaning and context and gravity the longer it lives, and I think the means of the ambiguity only serves to add more value to it,” he says. “I just put it out with a bit of ambiguity, then other people’s interpretations come into play. And I feel like other people’s interpretations can mean as much as my own when I was making it. As it lives on longer, it just gets more powerful. That’s how it stays alive, through the passages of time.”

As is the case with any concept album, propelling the record forward via a character and an imagined throughline can be just as freeing as it is difficult. Owusu bends every track around the existence of The Roach, a character detached in myth from himself—a vessel that serves to examine the pressures of a health crisis, global and local poverty and ongoing extremism. “It’s awesome and weird and interesting that I’m able to make an album about a roach that runs away from God and have people actually interested in it and being able to tour it. I think that factor is so liberating. And I feel like it means that the music landscape is in a pretty alright place, if that type of thing is embraced. When it comes to the actual creation of it, it can make things a bit challenging—just because I’m so focused on this narrative and this story and exactly what I want to say that, sometimes, I’ll make a song that sounds really cool but I just can’t see it fitting into this narrative. So I have to set it aside for another time.”

STRUGGLER was informed by three things: Samuel Beckett’s two-act tragicomedy Waiting for Godot, Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis and Kentaro Miura’s manga series Berserk. They each have subtexts of living through chaos and absurdity, and Owusu leaned into them greatly when he was trying to draft his own take on the mid-pandemic free-for-all we were stuck in. “It was very prevalent in how I felt I was living and how I felt a lot of people were living in the 2020s,” he says. “Music felt like the right way—but also the biggest challenge—to translate those ideas into a new medium. Me, Genesis Owusu, I’m primarily a musical artist. It’s my bread and butter. Trying to translate those ideas into music, it felt like it was something that hadn’t been done that much, but I was always up for the challenge of it.” STRUGGLER is a COVID record, yes, but it’s overarching thematics of purpose in the pointless is what becomes the emotional dagger. The Roach is going through a whole mental crisis and is just looking for some sense of survival. He is meant to be an outsider that we can, despite his bug exoskeleton, see ourselves in, too.

Narratively, Smiling with No Teeth wasn’t nearly as conceptual as STRUGGLER is. Its throughline was sparked by Owusu’s lifetime being spent pacifying his own coping. As he puts it, his debut was about “having to sugarcoat things.” “Before music, when I was going through my teenage years, I was struggling with depression and going through experiences of racism—these things that I wanted to talk about and get off my chest, people weren’t really open to hearing about it at the time,” he explains. “The only way to get people to listen to it was to somewhat sugarcoat it, in a sense. Make light of it. So I thought about that and put it to music and made it ironic, in a sense. That was what I was going for with the music, conceptually, where you try to run away from these things but they’re so prevalent that you’re gonna have to face them at some point. So let me lull you in a bit, let me sugarcoat it a bit. Let me catch the fly with honey rather than vinegar.”

STRUGGLER came together in a much less linear way than Smiling with No Teeth. Where the latter was built during massive, intense sessions during lockdown, the former germinated sporadically in-between tours for Owusu. Smiling with No Teeth holds the presence of his Black Dog Band—Kirin J. Callinan, Michael Di Francesco, Julian Sudek and Andrew Klippel—throughout, a chemistry and collaboration born out of making music together for 10 hours at a time because there was nothing else to do. STRUGGLER features them again on tracks like “That’s Life (A Swamp)” and “Stuck To The Fan,” but Owusu was splitting his time between Los Angeles and Australia and expanded his coterie of players accordingly. Instead of having a great amount of time and space, he had to find the time. Ushering folks like Jason Evigan, Gitty Gitelman, Mikey Freedom Hart and Psyum into the fold changed the alchemy of Owusu’s sound altogether—but in a good, necessary way.

Smiling with No Teeth was much more straightforward in boasting its rap influence, as opposed to the new wave, punk and soul experiments Owusu makes on STRUGGLER. There are very catchy melodies and restless sonics, a mode of taking the dark, heavy shit and transposing it into bouncy, danceable instrumentation. And yet, his first outing was heavily measured up against a benchmark Prince’s “1999,” a vivid documentation of how, at the world’s end, it’s better to go out partying than anything that might flirt with sorrow. It speaks greatly to him being cool with his listeners taking whatever they need from his music at their own pace. “I thought the contrast of [‘1999’] was so interesting and funny and also just engaging,” Owusu adds. “I talk about a lot of things that are wavy and sometimes heavy. But, at the end of the day, it’d be cool to just have my work appreciated on as many levels as possible. Even if you don’t give a fuck about any of the philosophical shit, if I can make your day a bit better through a pleasant melody, then that’s cool, too. And if you decide to listen to that pleasant melody enough and want to get deeper into it, then those options are there for you as well.”

The ideas of disco and funk and R&B that Owusu pens on STRUGGLER in response to times of brutality, sickness and unrest don’t come from a historical place so much as they arrive like learning a language. He cites the phrases and euphemisms we learn first, how they become parts of our vocabulary that we turn to when we encounter unfamiliarity. “When it comes to those genres, they’re just a big part of my musical language. These genres are emotional phrases, in a sense,” Owusu says. “If the emotion is more angry or aggressive in my mouth, it will usually come out with a punkier sound. If the emotion is more somber or sweet, then I might open my mouth and it will come out like an R&B sound. It’s like using my musical language.”

The Smiling with No Teeth track “The Other Black Dog” points its focus on the phrase “black dog” and its problematic history as a racial slur thinly veiled as an allegory for depression. All across that record, Owusu was working through various modes of reclamation. He returns to that place on STRUGGLER, too. There are conversations around masters on “The Old Man,” an interrogation of crowns and royalty on “Stuck To The Fan,” a portrayal of blessings in the wake of death on “Stay Blessed.” And it’s not just about him being a Black indie artist navigating mostly white musical spaces; the immediacy of reclamation—and how Owusu formulates that through theatrics and finesse and charisma—comes from his upbringing as a Ghanaian immigrant whose family moved to Canberra, an un-diverse part of Southern Australia.

“I was thrust into the role of being the outsider very very quickly at a very young age. And from a young age, I was subconsciously given the choice of ‘assimilate and be like everyone else or learn to live with your true self and take the benefits and the pitfalls of that.’ I chose the latter, which means I had to embrace the outsider badge as a badge of honor,” Owusu says. “That journey of reclamation starts almost from birth. I have had to learn how to take things that people thought were bad and make them cool and good. It’s the same thing with the N-word. Black Americans took that word and made it their own, made it a term of endearment. I think it’s a real skill and a blessing to be able to take the shit and turn it into gold. I think that’s just the way that I’ve lived my life for a long time. It’s come out in my music. The Black Dog to the Roach—a pest, a small insignificant thing has now become a symbol of perseverance and strength in absurd, unforeseeable times.”

Owusu isn’t sure where he’s going to be in five years—none of us are, really. But, throughout the process of making STRUGGLER, he’s come to realize one resounding truth that will propel him forward: He’s right where he wants to be. “I started my first real creative outlet when I was a kid writing short stories. And then that moved into poetry,” Owusu says. “And then that moved into music and then albums. As I wrote the story for this album, it came full-circle. I realized the whole time I’ve just been telling these stories, that the medium has changed throughout time. I’ll probably always want to tell stories, and who knows if music is going to be the last transformation of that. I might go into making movies or furniture or some shit.”

If his next turn is towards woodworking, I’ll still be first in line to see what comes of it. Near the end of our conversation, I ask Owusu where his Opera House performance ranks in his career thus far. At the top, he tells me. “I’ve been playing shows for a long time, to the point where, sometimes, I can be on autopilot,” he adds. “I can be rapping ‘The Other Black Dog,’ which is quite spitfire, but, in my head, I can also be like ‘What am I going to have for dinner today? Oh, shit, what did I forget off the grocery list?’ During that performance—backed by the 40-piece symphony orchestra, sold out, with all of these people looking at me—I was rapping and, in my head, I was like, ‘Damn, I’m really doing this. This is surreal.’ And in that thought, I was like, ‘Damn, where do I go from here? What’s next after this?’”

If STRUGGLER is any indication, he can go wherever he damn well pleases. After making his mark on the industry through building multi-dimensional blockbusters out of his own poetry, I don’t think “ceiling” is even in Owusu’s vocabulary. If it once was, it sure as hell isn’t anymore. STRUGGLER’s central story of The Roach takes many sonic shapes. On “Tied Up!,” Owusu plays around with guitar distortion, funk harmonics and clap-hand percussion; “Stay Blessed” is pure post-punk tinged with grime rap and pedal-to-the-metal indie soloing; “The Roach” takes alt-rock patterns and plugs them into dream pop and disco-inspired grooves; “What Comes Will Come” experiments with jungle and house; “The Roach” is new wave washed aglow with pop framework. But, at its core, STRUGGLER is an amalgam of everything that Genesis Owusu does best and does brilliantly. It’s the type of music someone who thinks of themselves as an outsider would make; it doesn’t fit anywhere, and that’s where the magic comes from.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.