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”.