As humans, we are born with an inherent freedom of being. It is through this freedom that we gain responsibility. In the family setting, parents have responsibility over their children by right, at work, older and experienced colleagues take responsibility. Jesus took responsibility and died for our sins because of his love for mankind. What runs through all these examples is love and a will to – freedom and not experience. The freedom to choose what and who to be responsible for at any point and have the moral justifications to back this choice.
Like Jesus, Kweku Smoke is taking responsibility for the youth of Ghana. To show and use his life as a testament to what can be achieved by believing, believing in God the Father, in your abilities as a human, and in your hustle.
Smoke is not trying to evoke Jesus. Across his new project, he pays reverence to the highest and seeks his guidance and blessing. What he does here is set himself a level behind Jesus – as a leader of the people, the hustlers.
His sense of responsibility comes not only from the freedom that his life affords him but his realization at a very young age that he had only himself and that life was never going to be favourable. This is the same responsibility that he brings to Kweku Jesus.
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Kweku Jesus is an act of consistency and great storytelling. In the Intro of Snoop Forever, Kweku Smoke’s debut project from 2020, he boldly proclaims, ‘on my way to give the street boys all hope’ and this is what he does succinctly well, 4 years later, on this body of work.
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Kweku Jesus, unlike the other projects he had dropped prior, is compact and straight to the message. The messages we have always known Smoke for – hope and perseverance. There is a continuity and consistency that is admirable; on the opening track, Jah Guide, he refers to his coming into wealth coinciding with his mother’s ailment. The closing track of the project furthers this but with praise to God. What Smoke does so well is always staying true to the story. This truth is what makes believing in his messages so easy.
The album, as he explains it, is about his life’s journey. Like Jesus giving his life for us, Smoke is ‘showing’ us. He is giving us his life and saying, this is me, this is everything I have been through – feel inspired. Life is not perfect, and neither is Smoke. And the moment you hear problems – the 5th song on the album, you get the feeling you and the preacher are even more alike than you had imagined.
The most poignant song on the album ‘Agyekum’ is Smoke at his storytelling best. Here, he switches between first and second-person points of view to tell the story of Agyekum, who becomes a victim of Ghana’s failing system – a young boy who must find ways to survive because the system doesn’t serve his interest. Kweku Smoke is Agyekum and Agyekum is Kweku Smoke. There is no judgment, only a sense of understanding, of knowing. Agyekum is the only song on the Album where Smoke feels exasperated, even trapped – because what do you do when everything is set up against you? Like Jesus, Smoke doesn’t stay in this tomb for long. He comes back ever so strongly on the next song, Find a Way.
The production of Kweku Jesus is surreal. Unlike his other projects, there is a purposefulness, a need to get only the message to the people. Production credits are shared between Kayomi, Sc4 and Ipapi. Kayomi produced 6 of the 10 songs on the 26-minute album.
Beyond the excellent production and immaculate rapping, the timing is most important. Kweku Jesus is released into a circus where hope is hard to come by. More and more people are fleeing the country to seek something ‘better’, irrespective of the treatments that come with this ‘better’. For those who choose to stay, it becomes more unbearable as day turns to night.
This is not savior music if there is anything like that. This is something to hold on to, to rap along to, to scream out your lungs as you wait for your breakthrough, because that day will come – sayeth Kweku Smoke.