GENESIS OWUSU
you will always Be Famous

By Shaad D’Souza
Photography by Tim Swallow

24th November 2021, a small function room at the Taronga Zoo: For a moment, the ARIA Awards – Australia’s premier baston of regressive “artistry” and industry back-patting – became, for maybe the first time in its history, must-see TV.

Thinking back on it now, it plays like some kind of fucked up dream, or a Miltonian reverie of Lucifer and his fallen angels, made thotty and streamed in 4K. Genesis Owusu stood on a small round stage, statuesque and smirking, his lean frame shrouded in thick sheets of white fabric. His hair, teeth and nails were slicked with gold, and he had a metallic twinkle in his eye, that knowing sense for mischief that some pop stars possess and all pop stars want.

Surrounded by his ‘Goons’ – the mob of young men who, clad in balaclavas and combat vests, have flanked Owusu since his earliest shows – Owusu ran through the songs that form the emotional and conceptual backbone of Smiling With No Teeth, his 2021 debut album. Each new song heralded some new formation for the Goons, some new way for Owusu to bare his teeth into a combination smile/grimace, some new shape for him to bend his surprisingly agile voice into. It was a balletic vision of chaos: A group of young outcasts from the suburbs of Canberra, congregating to fuck shit up on the national stage. It was weird, and, as far as transgressive performance can go on national TV, it was perfect.

Owusu himself thinks he’s still a work-in-progress when it comes to television performances. “I'm very used to, obviously, creating a show for the stage, but there's a different element when someone else has to capture it and present it for you. I feel like I’ve still got some work to do there, which is always cool — I like feeling like that,” he tells me. He knows, though, that the vibe was there — the electricity of seeing a bunch of Canberra kids who had spent the past few years sleeping on floors, largely ignored by a relatively conservative music industry, ecstatically toast to their own vindication for five minutes. “Conceptually speaking, bringing a bunch of my homies from Canberra, in red ski masks, to the ARIAs is such a funny thing to me — it’s just kind of hilarious, in the absolute best way.”

Owusu – real name Kofi Owusu-Ansah – is peering out at me through a Zoom window from a hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he just played 8 Festival, a new event hosted in an old Lithuanian prison. He’s a few shows away from finishing his first European touring leg of 2022, which included a set at Barcelona’s iconic Primavera Sound festival – Catalonia’s debaucherous seaside answer to Coachella – and is steeling himself for the next half of the year, which will see the 23-year-old rapper, singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter support Khruangbin in the States and Tame Impala in Australia, perform at Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits, and end the year at Falls Festival.

The novelty of being Genesis Owusu – a genuine sensation in Australia, and a fast-growing concern everywhere else – has not yet worn off: “I'm in fucking Lithuania. I just performed in a Lithuanian prison with Yves Tumor – like, what the fuck?” he asks, agape. Every show he’s played on this tour, he says, has been met with a rapturous response – fans in, as he says, fucking Lithuania, screaming along the words to songs he only released a year ago. “We played in the Netherlands and France with Idles, who are like, one of my favorite bands, and we were just hanging out and talking to them. I was like, ‘Hey, I'm a big fan.’ And they're like, ‘Oh, yeah, likewise’ – Like, what the fuck? What does that mean? I really haven't computed it at all.”

That’s partially because, well, he’s hardly had any time to process. Owusu released Smiling With No Teeth in March 2021. Made with a full band that included luminaries from Australia’s indie and electronic scenes, it’s hardly a conventional rap project – a suite of pop, hip-hop, funk, R&B and krautrock that serves as a kind of fabulist memoir of Owusu’s life to date, turning his experiences with racism and depression in suburban Australia into a stark, darkly comic fairytale. Propulsive and endearingly weird, it quickly became one of the year’s few Australian consensus breakouts, a taut, whip-smart debut with surprisingly widespread appeal.

Owusu’s shows just kept getting bigger and bigger, as did his accolades, and, by the end of the year, he had become the first ever artist to win all three of Australia’s most significant music prizes — the ARIA for Album of the Year, the Australian Music Prize, and Triple J’s award for Australian Album of the Year. Owusu felt like a profoundly deserving winner, in part because, unlike so many Australian debutantes, it had never felt like he was trying to curry favour from the Australian music industry. Instead, he had just made a great fucking record; The gatekeepers who had once ignored him were forced to play catch-up. Just prior to the release of Smiling With No Teeth, I had asked Owusu where his ambitions lay for the record, and, without missing a beat, he told me that he was largely looking beyond Australia, where he felt that there were more opportunities for Black artists who didn’t fit a certain box. Fast-forward a year, and he’s made a new box — and it’s everyone else who’s scrambling to fit.

It would likely be easier for Owusu to be bitter about his success in Australia than grateful: The institutions that honoured him over the past year hardly have spotless reputations, and there’s always something strange about being ‘the first’ to change the mold. (Owusu is the first hip-hop artist to win the ARIA Album of the Year award.) But he sees his wins as part of a grander design than personal gain. “There have been instances where it felt like, when the album dropped, specifically, certain people kind of just publicly brushed it to the side — and then, after all the hype of everyone else accepting it and taking it in, it felt like those same people suddenly became its biggest fans, so there was a bit of a bittersweet feeling there,” he recalls. “But I think, in general, it's just so positive. Regardless of how I felt about any of the things before, I think [being celebrated by these institutions] means that the next generation of little Black kids don't have to feel that same way — they don't have to feel like they weren't represented, because that change is coming.”

Owusu’s eyes are trained firmly on the future, then. It’s a good thing they are: He says he’s had hardly any time in the past few months to just sit with his success. With the release of a new single, “GTFO”, imminent, and his touring schedule remaining at a baseline level of ‘totally airtight’, that’s not set to change. Still, the nature of success still peers out at him from time to time – as in Vilnius, when he tried to see Yves Tumor perform after his set and realised his perceived anonymity wasn’t as tangible as he had initially thought. “I was talking to the Goons, and it was one of those moments where it's like, ‘What the fuck are we doing here? Like, how do people know who we are?” he says. “Like, we watched the Yves show from the crowd, so we were just expecting to walk into the crowd and watch the show — and then we walked into the crowd, and everyone's losing their minds. It's like, ‘Oh my God, that's Genesis.’ [And I’m like,] ‘Yeah, I'm just here to watch the show, thanks guys.’ We get these little moments every once in a while where we actually just get to sit and reflect.”

and then we walked into the crowd, and everyone's losing their minds. It's like, ‘Oh my God, that's Genesis.’ [And I’m like,] ‘Yeah, I'm just here to watch the show, thanks guys.’ We get these little moments every once in a while where we actually just get to sit and reflect.”

Genesis Owusu

Touring the world with the Goons, too, makes it hard for Owusu to forget where he and his friends began. His kinetic, bracing live show has always been one of the main drawcards of the Genesis Owusu project – the scrappy ingenuity to tour with masked hypemen rather than the traditional band or DJ. “Touring with the Goons means so much to me because they're literally just the homies from high school – like, they've lost jobs to do shows with me where I couldn't pay them, and their employers are like, ‘What do you mean you’ve got to take another day off, you're fired,’” he recalls.

Although there’s little about Owusu that fits in a conventional mode of rap stardom, that age-old adage – Remember where you came from, bring the crew up with you — holds true. “We were always talking about moments like this, like, in 2015, when we were just like, becoming friends. To be here in fucking Lithuania, to be able to take them around the world and put them on the payroll… Bailey is now an ARIA award-winning photographer because of this — like, it's so surreal. It's really surreal.”

Director / Photographer: Tim Swallow @timothee_hirondelle
Stylist: Romy Safiyah @romysafiyah  
H&MU: Desiree Wise Makeup @desiree_wise 
Record Label: @ourness
Agency: @thinkingloudau
Aniela Swiatek: @ajswiatek
Charlotte Harrison: @_charharrison
Unit Manager: Amy Finlayson @amy_fin
Digital Operator: Dan Hilburn @danhilburn
1st Assistant: Wade Whitington @wadewhitington
Stylist Assist: Barnabe White @yungbarns

Special Thanks @Urth @Kodak #super8