Γέρος του Μοριά — the Old Man of the Morea — was the nickname of Theodoros Kolokotronis, the general who led the Greek armies against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s. Kevin Zans Ansong, born in 1991 in Ambelokipi, Athens, to Ghanaian parents and raised in Kypseli, a dense, multicultural district in central Athens with a large Ghanaian community, took that name and flipped it: Νέγρος Του Μοριά — the Black Man of the Morea. For a Black Afro-Greek artist from Kypseli to take the name of one of the founding figures of the Greek nation makes the point immediately: in a country where citizenship followed bloodlines until 2010, and where second-generation migrants still have to fight for papers, that is not wordplay.

“GreeKs” is his new single, produced by Dennis Green, recorded by Logothetic, and mixed and mastered by Petros Vinakos at Destiny Studios. The track pushes on the question of who gets to occupy the word “Greek”, framed around myths of Greekness, race in the Mediterranean, and Afro-Greek hip-hop as post-migrant counter nationalism. The lyrics address the social and economic pressures of life in contemporary Greece, specifically the struggle for survival and the mechanics of control. Ansong points to the absurdity of internal division, rapping that “we are killing each other for a crumb of bread“. He questions who actually holds power in the country, noting that in Greece, “who controls what, holding one thing in one hand and another in the other“. The track frames this as a “bloodthirsty episode for power, like Game of Thrones,” where the system plays with people’s minds and turns them against each other.

Ansong started in Greek hip-hop alongside MC Taki Tsan, won Best New Artist at the Thessaloniki Hip-Hop Festival in 2014, and spent the following decade building a repertoire that now runs to seven solo albums. The most recent, Μαύρη Ελλάδα — Black Greece — took the questions his name raises and expanded them across a full record.

Those questions were already there on THRASOS — loosely “audacity” — made clear where Ansong was heading. Recorded with Grammy-winning American producer and ethnomusicologist Christopher King, it fused rap and trap with rebetiko, the urban Greek blues that developed in port cities in the early twentieth century among populations displaced by war and migration. Ansong called the result “Trabetiko”: a statement about whose music rebetiko actually belongs to, and who has the right to keep making it.

You can stream and download “GreeKs” HERE