GOSPEL FOR A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS

NAIROBI-BORN, BERLIN-BASED POP MAXIMALIST KABEAUSHÉ ENTERS A BOLD NEW CHAPTER WITH HIS NEW SINGLE THAT RESEMBLES A BAROQUE-HIP-HOP FEVER DREAM.

- WORDS INDRAN PARAMASIVAM PHOTOS FRED ODEDE

EXCEPTIONS RULE. There are artists who pare things down in pursuit of clarity, and there are those who turn everything up until meaning begins to glow from the pressure. Kabeaushé, born Kabochi Gitau, belongs firmly in the latter camp.

His new single, 'I DON'T NEED YOU, SO YOU COULD TELL ME IF I'M GUD', does not ease its way into the bloodstream; it storms in, brass blazing, voices colliding, harpsichord lines skittering with aristocratic mischief. It is maximalist pop as architecture, distinctly overbuilt, joyously excessive, pointedly self-aware. Sneeringly luxuriant in its self-surety. Even its title taunts you, daring you to judge while insisting it doesn't care if you do.

Music like this is rare to come by because it is almost impossible to conceive of. Even after multiple listens, the song feels like a provocation. Nothing in it feels known to me.

On closer examination, it hazily reveals itself as something more precise: a study in grandeur, ego, and the strange comedy of self-adoration. Kabeaushé's music has always thrived on collision—Nairobi rhythms rubbing up against Berlin experimentalism, rap brushing shoulders with theatre—but here, the clash is elevated into a fully realised world. One ruled, fittingly, by a despot.

A TYRANT IN A FUR COAT

Herr Iggy, the egomaniacal ruler at the heart of this new chapter, is not merely a character but a mirror—held up, deliberately, to our age of cultivated excess. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick's