Rapper-producer Oddisee talks latest album, the lyricism of hip hop and his coming gig in Hong Kong
- Oddisee, who played Hong Kong festival Clockenflap in 2018, is returning to the city for an intimate gig with DJ Unown at the Eaton HK
- He talks about his parents’ musical tastes, turning to electronic music as a teen, and the power and poetic brilliance of hip hop
After wowing the Hong Kong crowds at Clockenflap 2018, multidisciplinary hip hop musician Oddisee is returning to Hong Kong after six years and a global pandemic to play an intimate gig at the Eaton HK’s Terrible Baby Music Room on Wednesday.
This comes after a drastic shift in the New York-based rapper-producer’s mentality during Covid lockdowns. Cancelled tour dates did not push him into a creative rut; it was more a matter of having too much time on his hands.
“I had got used to making music very quickly,” he says. “I’d tour for six months of the year, see how my music connected with people at live shows and go back home immediately to make a new record.”
But the pandemic brought about a relatively long silence for the usually prolific musician, and in January 2023 he came out with To What End, a 16-track studio album with hopeful song titles such as “Try Again”, “Ghetto to Meadow” and “More to Go”.
This past January, he released Odd Sketches, Vol. 1, a 20-track compilation album made up of “rough drafts, songs that had got cut previously and music I just didn’t think was good enough”, as a “therapeutic exercise” that he released “to the world just to see – am I crazy? Is this stuff good? Will anybody like it?” Turns out people did.
Born Amir Mohamed el Khalifa in Washington to a Sudanese father and an African-American mother, Oddisee grew up in the Maryland suburbs, “listening to a little bit of everything”, from “my mother’s folk, soul and R&B” to “my father’s music of Sudan, Egypt and the Middle East”.
In his adolescence, young Amir started gravitating towards electronic music production, with a beat machine as his “weapon of choice”. While many musical styles came from pre-existing genres or other cultures, hip hop sounded like “it was made for me and for my time” and was “very accepting to any and everyone who wanted to listen to it. You could see a reflection of yourself in this music”.
Now, more than 20 years after he decided, aged 18, to pursue music as a career, Oddisee is one of the few rappers who does not use profanities in his lyrics, not wanting to be dismissed as “unintelligent” or “unnecessarily aggressive”.
“We hear of people like Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe being great American authors and writers, but what we love about them is being displayed in rap times 10: double entendres, metaphors, similes, plays on words, the ability to use poetic devices. These are all standard mechanisms to create beautiful literature and poetry, which are executed on an Olympic level in rap music.”
And after the past few years of sociopolitical uncertainty, he has prepared a new EP, And Yet Still, which took him only a month and a half to write and produce, to depict his current mentality and instil some optimism.
“I had a lot of inspiration,” he says, having started to write just before Ramadan, which began on March 12 this year, and wrapping the project in late April. “I would break my fast and go to the studio at night for eight hours, just working on the music.
“There’s so much going on in the world ‘and yet still’ we carry on and continue to live because we have to. No matter what’s going on, we have to wake up and make a living. We have to take care of our family, children and loved ones. We still have to love and laugh and celebrate birthdays. Each song is about a different understanding of that.”
And Yet Still will be released on May 30. But for now, he is excited to perform in Hong Kong. With just him and his DJ, Unown, it will be a far more intimate affair than Clockenflap in 2018. He will put a set together by “picking things from all over my albums” and “doing a little of everything” to “make you very familiar with my large catalogue of music from start to finish”.
