“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
So begins The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, but the woefully limited medium of the written word [who would bother with that?] prevents it – even as one of the better opening lines in literature – from having an infectious backbeat like the first track of Genesis Owusu’s latest album, Struggler. ‘Leaving the Light’ has a synth bassline that glides up and down its scale, a sonic scramble that sells the thesis here: Owusu’s narrator is a cockroach, on the run from forces astronomically larger than itself. This existentialist masterwork is easily one of the best records of 2023, and Owusu’s live show matches its intensity.
He appears in his idiosyncratic spectacles, pitch-black and flaring upward in a way that recalls the insectoid, and he’s wearing long black robes with prominent red stripes like the one that adorns his head. He’s alone onstage, joined only by a pair of props: a thick tome sat atop a nightstand to his left, and during ‘Leaving the Light’ Owusu rips the cover off of the mysterious monolith that’s been towering center-stage all night; revealing a vast array of lights inside a human-sized, cubic shape that looks like it’s been borrowed from the set of The Prestige.
What follows is a set that weaves tracks from Struggler deftly into older offerings including those from Owusu’s prior album, Smiling with No Teeth. That album trafficked in a different animal metaphor, often invoking the dog; but it’s Struggler and its lower food chain station that best emphasizes what he’s been driving at. ‘The Old Man’ says it all: “There’s an old man / waiting in the sky / just to fuck my life up”. Like anyone – or any roach – grappling with the quandaries of existence, the protagonist comes to face the seemingly deliberate machinations of a universe that pushes relentlessly against him. Whether the Old Man is actually God, Fate, or the happenstance of an uncaring, indifferent universe – Owusu personifies something we all know, the seeming insistence of the world to thwart our best attempts to live unimpeded by its jagged edges.
As fierce as his premise is, Owusu demonstrates his mastery of pacing by weaving in slower numbers like the soulful ‘See You There’, that eponymous lyric tied to the not-insignificant predicate: “You’re going to hell…” While a major component of the thrill of his show – easily commanding the room as simply one man and a huge cuboid behind him – is the thrusting pace of his tracks which draw inspiration from experimental hip-hop and rap, he channels the gorgeous smoothness of R&B into tracks like this, ‘Gold Chains’, and ‘Tied Up!’ that show his dimensionality as an artist. Owusu is nominated for seven of Australia’s Aria Awards in 2023, outpacing any other individual nominee.
A song or two into the night, Owusu entices the packed crowd at The Sinclair to a chant: “I don’t know what I’ve been told / I’ll be roachin’ ‘til I’m old”, repurposing some artifact of the American military. They all join in enthusiastically: “roach” is now a verb as much as a noun, and yet this transmogrification of language feels as natural as singing along to the witty, earworm hooks of his songs. Owusu goes quickly from track to track for the early portion of the night, kicking up his knees to their most energetic portions. But after the warming breakup anthem ‘I Don’t Need You’ he addresses the audience directly and at length. He talks about Struggler, saying, “At its core it’s about us, about humanity. Our stubborn perseverance and willpower…”, a sentiment made even more powerful by the geopolitical climate in which we’re all now scurrying. He also says it’s about existentialism, and how it deals with the absurd and, once again, the resilience of human entities – underlying an album and a show that moves from strength to strength.
The human element takes center stage for the latter portion of the show, and during ‘Stay Blessed’ – for which Owusu recounts filming the video surrounded by fans – he descends from the stage and walks a line through the center of the crowd. The song is an absolute firecracker and he doesn’t remain in one place for too long, eventually clambering onto the stage-right monitor and, by virtue of his wireless microphone, loops back to the stage through one of the venue’s internal side doors. It’s hardly long before he returns to the pit – for the close of the main set, he performs ‘A Song About Fishing’, which finds him grabbing the aforementioned book from its place and carrying it like a preacher through the crowd. ‘Fishing’ is unlike most of his songs but it’s suited perfectly to this role – he calls for phone lights to illuminate the room, and walks the length of the floor before climbing the stairs to the mezzanine, casting his arms out as would a preacher. The song ends the set on an ethereal and joyous note, much calmer than what has preceded it – but even though it hails from a different album, the notion of “casting [one’s] net in a fishless sea” embodies the absurd pursuit that Struggler sought to uplift even further. It’s perfectly fitting, a book of “Useless Information” in hand, Owusu pacing the room and leading everyone in a genuinely modern, humanist hymn.
This moment of unexpected beauty resolves into a message from Owusu when he finally retires backstage, egged on by the crowd to perform one more song. Once more he comes to the stage to lead them in a chant, this time: “Fear the roach! / Love the roach!” ‘The Roach’ is the title of the final offering here, going from Kafka to The Killers in just a few fantastic bars. In an unparalleled one-man show, Owusu has refined the very notion of the beleaguered insect, from some reprehensible pest to a stand-in for all of us human beings – an impressive feat that, along with a stunning album, has rightly earned him accolades this year and, one can only imagine, a well-deserved place in the consciousness of modern music going forward.
Photos and Review by Collin Heroux
