“Before we go any further, I want you to all tell your fellow humans, safe metamorphosis.”
Otis Mensah’s Rap Poetics show and “SAFE METAMPORPHOSIS” book launch at Café Totem dove deep into the psyche of an expressive artist, as would be expected from Sheffield’s very own poet laureate.
Mensah’s lyrics took the crowd on a ride through the struggles we all relate to. Whether it was feeling like you’re stuck in a computer and buffering through life or experiencing existential crises, Mensah opened up his mind and offered a hand to those who knew a common struggle.
His multisyllabic wordplay seemed effortless, especially considering the cogency of his storytelling through music. Mensah’s buttery smooth vocal delivery over the lo-fi jazzy hip-hop backing tracks, courtesy of his producer “The Intern”, set Mensah apart from his hip-hop peers.
Breaking up his music with spoken word poetry, Mensah held and changed the pace of his show whilst keeping it engaging and interesting. Spoken straight from his new book, Mensah expresses his own ‘safe metamorphosis’.
Switching seamlessly between addressing the crowd, rapping and spoken word, Mensah commanded the attention of the room. After talking to the crowd, he switched, and with his first spoken line, silence fell upon the room.
“It’s like therapy to me, riding waves of systematic heresy at sea, rid you of that uninvited stranger that never leaves…”
The self-professed semi-conscious rapper jokingly talked about hip-hop artists at shows caving to the trap music trend and referred to how everyone in trap show crowds go crazy for it.
He then described trap as “a beautiful punk music that has derived from the beautiful culture that is hip-hop”.
A fitting description for yet another splinter of hip-hop that’s dominating both the mainstream charts and smaller independent hip-hop events.
Mensah also played a new trap-inspired song dubbed “Yellow Body”, which is on his new Rap Poetics EP releasing in June. The song opted for more impactful kicks and a stronger 808 style bass than in Mensah’s previous songs, whilst managing to ditch the “sprinkler hi-hats” used so unsparingly in popular trap music.
Between songs and spoken word, Mensah stresses the importance of having a better emotional and human connection with the people that we interact with.
The show closed with Mensah telling the crowd that he had nothing to sell other than his poetry book and that he had no need for an encore, before performing his last song “Solar Eclipse”.
The show was a brilliantly curated mix of Mensah’s discography, with the addition of content from his new book giving him an angle that many other hip-hop artists struggle replicate.
