There is a beautiful, crackling hum to Obaro Ejimwe’s voice that permeates through his Mecury nominated album, Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam, and the telephone line as he offers me a cheerful hello.
With a debut showered in every aspect of critical acclaim aside from the manifestation of actual awards, the self-styled Ghostpoet has been a bold figure on the fringes of the main stream since his 2011 ascent.
It is easy to understand why. Rather than resting on the laurels of his striking appearance, beard only bettered by that guy in TV on the Radio and a name wrought with double meanings, Ghostpoet offered an ailing British hip-hop scene a lease of life. Peanut Butter Blues is an album bereft of the alienating swagger of rap and filled with a gentle, personal touch only enhanced by the oblique nature of his lyrics. Where verbal genius succeeds often musical accompaniment suffers, but not for Ghostpoet. Beneath the east Londoner’s mumble tinged lines of “pork pies” and men who “wear things likes pork pies” lie minimal beats, piano riffs that ebb in and out of focus and dissonance. The obvious comparison is not Dizzy Rascal, a man with whom he shares geographical roots, but James Blake and Mount Kimbie. For Hip-Hop, that’s quite a big thing.
By even noting the surprising musical company he keeps however, I feel I am doing Obaro a disservice. Early in our discussion he bats away my attempts to define his music in relation to any grander scheme. “It’s not because I want to be a loner, I just don’t feel the need to be part of a scene or part of a place or part of a genre. I just do me. I’ve never sought a place, I’m not really bothered about that. I want to be as wide spread as possible. I want to appeal to as many people from as many different backgrounds as possible. The moment I say “I am part of this” I restrict my creativity.”
Despite this being the first time I’ve interviewed a musician, I am aware of the slipperiness of this answer. In a decreasingly solvent industry, the last five years seeing bankruptcy claim the likes of Tower Records and Macasounds, commercial success has been fighting an increasingly vicious battle with the leftfield. In a chart beleaguered with sure-fire capital investments, the musically disenchanted masses have flocked to the underground as a breath of non-auto tuned air. One only has to look back several months to James Arthur to understand the commercial potential of the tortured artist.
Ghostpoet however, cannot be accused of such cynicism. In the space of a twenty minute interview not once does he mention his new album, Some Say I Say I So Light, and seems genuinely pleased when I say I liked it. When I ask if he hopes to emulate the success of the his breakthrough record, an album which not only saw him enter the warm circle of music journalism’s high regard, but narrowly avoided early destruction in Sony’s arsoned music depot, he deflects attention. “I don’t really have any hopes. If anything, I just want to be able to carry on making music. If people like it, great, if they don’t, that’s cool.”
Whilst sentiments of this sort are fairly common for artists at the top of their game, especially those waiting on feedback for their sophomore album, Ghostpoet’s new record has a quiet air of the unassuming, everyday that renders his bashfulness plausible. Much as Peanut Butter Blue’s title track aspired only to “live life and survive it”, its successor is imbedded with enough minor key stutterings and obscure aural clashes to deter all but those willing to immerse themselves in Ghostpoet’s soundscapes. “I don’t see myself as a poet or a rapper, I see myself as an artist. I just see myself as an artist making sound. I make it and that’s what I believe. My mentality is just I want to make a record I want to listen to. It’s partly personal. I try and make records that aren’t completely about me. I want to make records that are about feeling and emotions and people. I always start with the music. I have a skeleton. I try and work out what direction the music wants me to go lyrically. Whatever comes out comes out. I don’t try and go in a particular direction.”
Such professed musical wanderings are best understood lying down, listening to his albums from start to finish. Despite lacking the clear narrative of Mike Skinner’s musical money woes, there is a vein of something that ties his records together and allows their alien sounds to be understood as the sharp reality the lyrics speak of. This notion of “something” is one befitting of Ghostpoet. Despite the name’s ability to suggest a multitude of ideas from authorial absence to a modern day rendering of classic poetic form, Obaro is quick to shoot down such theories. “I just made it up because I wanted a name that wasn’t going to say anything about the music. I wanted it to be a doorway that you go through.” Typically of an artist who can render the quietest, most unremarkable lyrics with profundity, Ghostpoet’s attempt to deflect my untrained journalistic light only unearths a deeper meaning.
This is a reoccurring trend of the interview. My hopeful probing into his political stance, disguised in a roundabout question that includes the words “Plan B” and “protest album” is met with a resounding “No”. Hoping to steer the conversation to more familiar grounds, the ill thought out assumption that an artist who raps and who has the word “poet” in his name must have found his muse in GCSE anthologies receives similar repudiation- “I haven’t read any poetry since I was at school. Maybe I should.”
Although initially turned flat by my inability to coax one of my favourite musicians into enjoyable conversation, retrospect tells me a breath-by-breath account of each song would’ve inevitably been anticlimactic. Not because each breath does not deserve an account, but because they are deeply personal; for both artist and listener. Whilst the likes of Rihanna are spoon feeding their audiences with lyrics see-through to the point of invisible, Ghostpoet is a master of turning the smallest, most personal moments into universal fixtures of recognition. By means of evidence, I will leave you with a verse from ‘Finished I Ain’t’. If you enjoy it in anyway, even if that enjoyment solely derives from his mentioning of KFC, buy his new album. It’s like this, but better.
I want to shout out All those people who left me to mourn Who didn’t bite lips yeah I’ve got scorn KFC bucket-load born in the South but want to get North Now I’ve got dreams but they’re mixed up in the puddles of the mind.
And I need time.