Genesis Owusu is one of the most exciting new artists on the local scene, and his debut album is a kaleidoscopic take on two black dogs.
The first thing Genesis Owusu wants to assure me is this: he and The Weeknd are just fine.
“I mean, there’s a very big chance that it was just a coincidence… But if we performed together I would bring it up immediately,” he says of the suspicions that arose on Twitter last month following The Weeknd’s Super Bowl performance.
His face covered in bandages (think HG Wells’ The Invisible Man), The Weeknd’s new get-up was unusually close to that of Genesis Owusu (real name Kofi Owusu-Ansah), who had obscured his own face with hospital garb months earlier in the teaser shots of his debut album cover.
“We’re really in PR mode now: putting the album cover everywhere, sponsored ads,” says Owusu. “But people seeing me for the first time, with no idea who I am, their immediate thought is just Who is this guy copying The Weeknd?”
Still, it’s no surprise to learn that The Weeknd may have been inspired by Owusu. Like Talking Heads, one of his own influences, Owusu is sui generis.
A born musical chameleon and one of the most exciting new artists to arrive on the Australian scene in years, he proves himself unusually kaleidoscopic on Smiling With No Teeth. Marked by multilayered production and mood shifts, opening track ‘On the Move’ recalls the golden era of techno and 80s-90s house and hip-hop (think Public Enemy and The Prodigy), while ‘Drown’ is a new‑wave vamp pitched somewhere between Joe Jackson and Todd Rundgren, with a dash of David Bowie.
The eclecticism is thanks, Owusu says, to the interplay between the musicians involved. “We put together a band of ragtag musicians from completely different genres. My manager [Andrew Klippell], a jazz pianist, was on keys, along with Kirin J Callinan on guitar, Touch Sensitive on bass and Julian Sudek on drums.”
Recorded in “sweltering heat” in a studio no bigger than a bedroom, the band gathered and played over six days, spending up to 10 hours each day jamming. “The recording process was extremely uncomfortable and extremely unorthodox,” Owusu says.
“I think the uncomfortable nature of the room kind of stripped everyone down to bare essentials. We did nothing but play music. It was all we could do! We couldn’t really function. But you home in on what really matters. All the facades go away. It was too hot to try and act cool.”
A lack of facade animates much of Owusu’s music and personality. Born in Koforidua, Ghana in 1998 to a gospel singer and a probation officer, his family migrated to Australia three years after Owusu’s birth to give their children greater opportunity.
“It’s always a culture that I’ve simultaneously been close to and also felt not close enough to. I can understand the native tongue but I can’t speak it fluently. I feel like being part of the diaspora is a culture in itself,” he says.
Although Owusu acknowledges identity issues in Australia, he calls both here and Ghana home, although “people [in Ghana] can tell that I’m not from there”.
A recurring theme of Smiling With No Teeth is the “black dog”, who represents both depression and the Black struggle against dogma and misunderstanding, the abject violence of white supremacy. On the title track, Owusu sings: “The two black dogs/Society’s stray and the stray’s hound/Caressing and stabbing each other with a technician’s touch…everybody wants the summer without holding the rain/Everybody wants feeling without touching the pain.”
“The album is essentially entirely about depression and racism,” he says. “They’re the two concepts that everything goes back to. I’ve literally been called the ‘black dog’ with a racial connotation. So I felt like that was just a really interesting phrase that encompassed both of the things that I wanted to talk about. And when I was creating the album I didn’t really want to talk about those things just as concepts or statistics. The two black dogs – one being the internal black dog, which represents depression, and the other, society’s outcasts – I wanted to give them uniforms and personalities. So I made them into characters. The black dogs’ personalities are very controlling. Like a toxic relationship, essentially.”
Owusu’s live show sees him take to the stage with his “goons”, whom he describes as versions of the “misconceived outcast” – manifestations of how he felt growing up in Canberra as a Black man. “A lot of the time I was either seen as a novelty or a threat. The same can be said of all my friends, who became the goons,” he says.
On stage, the goons and Owusu enter in balaclavas and military dress, “very, very staunch, very aggressive, playing the boogeyman that they want to see, the people that they love to hate”.
As the show goes on, Owusu and his entourage remove their ski masks and military apparel and begin throwing rose petals into the crowd, singing love songs. By the end of the show the performers are wearing traditional African dashikis. It is, Owusu explains, intended to contrast how people are perceived versus “the rich diverse people that we actually are”.
For a moment, they are three-dimensional, multifaceted: people who can laugh and sing and cry and dance.
“And also,” he says, smiling, “fuck you up.”
Smiling With No Teeth is out now.
By Declan Fry, essayist, poet, critic and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta. His work has appeared in Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Liminal and elsewhere.