Genesis Owusu – ‘STRUGGLER’ BIO
“The world is an insanely absurd and chaotic place,” Genesis Owusu says, “but there’s a whole lot of beauty to be found in that as well.”
Over the past few years, Ghanaian-Australian artist Genesis Owusu has been crowned as one of the most exciting voices emerging in Australia. The 2021 release of his debut solo album ‘Smiling with no Teeth’ was among critically acclaimed albums of the year, breaking new ground for Black and alternative artists from in the country. Now, the 25-year-old is ready to enter the next chapter of his career with his second full-length project. Titled ‘STRUGGLER,’ it’s a bold soundtrack to an uncertain time.
11 tracks long, ‘STRUGGLER’ is a vivid, narrative journey into the soul of a fictional character searching to find himself in an increasingly confusing, and isolating world. Pulling on influences that range from Punk to the Rap, theatre to poetry, the album offers up a portrait that wrestles with resilience, hope and doubt, that explores questions of faith and spirituality, and does so over an arresting, musical backdrop.
“There’s always going to be times where things feels like meaningless and purposeless,” he says about the existential themes unspooled in the album, “But that doesn’t mean we have to stop.”
Genesis was born in Ghana but moved with his family to the Australian capital city Canberra when he was around two years old. It’s a small city of around four hundred thousand people, and predominantly white. It meant that he arrived as an outsider.
“It’s impacted the way I move through life,” he says, “and the way I express myself through art. I feel like being able to turn that label from a negative to a positive at an early age helped me to understand that the difference and the uniqueness is a powerful thing.”
He found his way to words at a young age. In school, English was among his favourite subjects, where he enjoyed the process of forming stories, crafting metaphors and creating new worlds from the imagination. That sense of being on the outside, a minority in his hometown, saw him attracted to varying forms of Black expression. He began to find esteemed Black writers like Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes, artists like Erykah Badu and Gil Scott Heron, and eventually rappers like Lupe Fiasco and MF Doom.
“They were telling other stories that I resonated with, but I hadn’t heard anybody speak before.”
Elsewhere, his Mum was the Gospel Choir leader at their Pentecostal church, and his older brother Kojo was into rock bands like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Rage Against the Machine. The likes of Michael Jackson, Bob Marley and Ray Charles would also play in the home, and his dad would collect records with standout, distinct album covers.
Genesis sat at the converging point of these disparate influences, the sounds of home, the influences from Kojo, the structures and narratives of the Black American writers and poets all pooling into his work, shaping him before he had started to make music of his own.
“There are certain songs and stems and strings and lines in a song that I can pinpoint to a certain genre or music that I remember from my childhood,” he says. “Then in the same song you might get another string that comes from a different place. It was the mixture of it all together all the time that was my biggest influence.”
His foray into music began when he was around 11. His older brother, Kojo, had turned the family study into a studio, using the space to make Hip Hop instrumentals. Kojo, aware that Genesis was flirting with poetry and creative writing, handed his little brother an MP3 player with a pre-loaded instrumental. Genesis wrote his first rap verse to it, and a musical group they titled the Ansah Brothers took first flight.
They were Hip Hop lovers with keen interests in funk and jazz, the melding of genres finding its way into their releases. When he was around 14 and still in school, they began gigging around the city, playing shows into the early hours and then heading into class in the morning.
By the time he had finished high school, he had released his first project, the 2017 EP ‘Cardrive.’ Kojo produced bulks of the record. They made it in a bedroom. It was the first time he started to pull in the idea of narratives and creative writing concepts into music of his own.
As he grew, his passion for story and narrative only widened. He began watching avantgarde TV Shows, anime movies and visiting art galleries, trying to take energies from other mediums and place them in music.
By the time he was ready to record his first album ‘Smiling with no Teeth’, his mind had expanded. The process of working one-on-one with a producer had started to feel stale. Instead, to craft the album, his manager Andrew Klippel gathered a guitarist, a bass player and a drummer. Andrew played keys. Alongside Genesis, they locked themselves into a room for six days straight, improvising and experimenting and jamming in sessions that stretched 10 hours. At the end of every day, Genesis would re-listen to the session and timestamp the moments that resonated most. These segments formed the bedrock of the 15 tracks, a bedding from which ‘Smiling with no Teeth’ would flower from.
“I wanted to do something I wasn’t comfortable with,” he says, “because I knew It would produce something I hadn’t before.”
With these instrumentals that roved between, 80s rock and synth-funk, punk and rap, he began to write lyrics, shaping a narrative around the double meaning of the phrase ‘the Black Dog.’ The term is used to describe depression but was also a racial slur he heard while growing up in Australia. The album became a vessel to talk about both, a release valve for his innermost thoughts.
The album was released in March 2021 to mass acclaim including sweeping the 2021 ARIA awards with 4 awards. He toured across Australia, America as well as Europe, playing everywhere from France to Germany, Lithuania to London. In Australia, the album was heralded as ground-breaking. At the country’s prestige 2021 ARIA Music Awards he claimed Album of the Year (the first Black Hip Hop artist to do so), Best Hip Hop Release, Best Independent Release and Best Cover Art. In March 2023, there was a landmark performance at the Sydney Opera House where he reinterpreted the album with a forty-piece orchestra.
“It was a game changer in my life,” he says about the album, “It’s changed everything.”
By 2022, he was beginning to think about a second album. The first album was so personal, so heavy with what felt like almost the entirety of his life experiences to date, that he had to go away and live for a little while.
“This transitionary period between the two was a real exploratory phase,” he says, “where I almost had to figure out how to make music again. I had to figure out where to pull from.”
What came out of this soul searching was ‘STRUGGLER’, the 11-track album that again combs his varied, eclectic taste into a cohesive, concept driven project. ‘STRUGGLER’ weaves Post Punk into Garage Rock, blends Funk Rock with Heavy Soul. It is Genesis at his most agile and open.
Conceptually, the album centres on an existential search for purpose in an increasingly ‘absurd world.’ It was part inspired by his reading of works by philosophers like Albert Camus, novelists like Franz Kafka and theatre plays like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, artists whose work wrestled with questions about humans search for meaning.
“It got really existential,” he says, “and that shaped this album – existentialism, nihilism, absurdism in the form of a narrative structure.”
Layered under his brooding, sharp sense of lyricism is the metaphorical journey of ‘the roach.’ He describes the concept as a ‘roach who runs and runs, trying not to get stepped on by God,’ emblematic of a world where in recent years the COVID 19 pandemic, deadly Australian bushfires and a spiralling, global economic depression has the left the world feeling like a daunting place.
“We don’t have a hand in controlling all of these things,” he says, “but we just have to keep going. We are the roach, and we just have to keep roaching, we have to keep surviving against the extreme.”
The title comes from the Manga series ‘Berserk’ where a man who has been ‘death the worse hand in life’ is nicknamed ‘the struggler.’ The dynamic acted as a guiding theme as Genesis poured his reflections on survival and purpose into music. Throughout the 11 tracks there are songs of rumination and defiance, mental angst and surrender.
“Even if there’s no grand, lofty purpose, we still get to see the sunrise every day and have friends we get to go and eat food with. These pleasures and these beauties of life aren’t meant to be taken for granted. The fact that we’re alive right now against so many odds is beautiful in itself, and so if we’re roaches, we’ve just got to keep running.”
‘STRUGGLER’ represents the next chapter in an exciting career, the music of an artist who with every project is willing to go deep within himself, and by doing so, pull out a holding space and a soundtrack for those seeking solace in these uncertain times.
Written By: Aniefiok Ekpoudom
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