Ever since his career started, one characteristic has defined Ko-Jo Cue – the rap artist from the Garden City born Linford Kennedy Amankwaa- and that has been his representation of the struggle of society’s eternal punching bag, the young man. No demographic receives less sympathy in life than young men, who are simultaneously expected to shoulder a ton of burdens – work hard, take care of family, find a woman, settle down, etc.—but receive very little help or sympathy in return.
As a lyricist, Cue’s superpower has always been his ability to bottle the trials, tribulations, and frustrations of this group, mixed with his own experience as a card-bearing young man, and produce magic on pen and tape.
In his latest offering, Abebrese, Cue goes back to this eternal well of young angst. Ko-Jo effortlessly raps about life’s biggest myth – the myth of meritocracy – dismantling the false notion we are fed that if you just work hard enough, you will make it.
Cue raps/work hard work hard / auntie sell rice and bread saa / nobody dey work pass / still she no get house/. The fact of life is that those who work the hardest rarely earn the most, and owners of capital perpetuate that myth to keep their serfs breaking their backs on the dream of making it one day. Life’s inherently unfair, no matter what motivational speakers tell you, as Cue notes. Bad things happen to good people – like a distraught mother crying in a hospital parking lot, wondering how to find money to keep her son alive—or Ko-Jo himself, who emotionally revealed a gut-wrenching loss that might have broken lesser men. On the flip side, bad people rarely get their comeuppance and continue to flourish and prosper. Life isn’t like the movies.
With the country in the grips of its greatest economic crisis in decades, a generation of Ghanaian youth are being fed into the bowels of poverty. These young people need a voice – and much like religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the opium of the masses, as Marx puts it – Ko-Jo Cue is the copium of the masses, to borrow a 21st-century term. His raw passion, lyricism, and authenticity appeal to the young man on a primal level, making Abebrese resonate with young Ghanaians on a level few other songs can match.
Ko-Jo has always been a lyrical genius—far more talented than the general public gives him credit for – but on Abebrese, Cue cements himself as the voice of a generation.
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