In his recent release, “Top of The Class,” Greo blends his two forms finer than he ever has; melodic rap sliding through spoken words until they feel like one. It’s the clearest picture yet of a method he has been building for a decade, and the best place to ask where it goes next.
Greo has been blurring the lines between artforms since 2015. That year, he released “Oral Tradition,” a concept debut album with a single character at its centre — a Sojourner who sets out against the odds toward something he wants and cannot yet name. He spends the duration of the album being pressed on every side: by family, society, belief, religion, faith and love.
The album runs on two engines. It opens with “The Sojourn,” where Greo charges himself to go and conquer and bring glory to his family and culture, spoken like a father charging a son. Then a rap verse takes over, the spoken voice returns mid-song, and a closing rap verse lands it. The spoken voice returns again on the album, in the form of “Epilogue.” It’s a piece on hard work, expectations that never arrive, and life as a gamble. It asks if the right time ever comes. Throughout the album, rap and spoken word trade forms. Greo has spent his career rocking the microphone the way his ancestors owned the town square, as the means by which their story gets told and preserved.
“Top of The Class” is what happens when a decade of practice makes the style seamless. The switch of the style has been smooth. Unlike the early work that’s a bit easier to spot the blend, his recent work carries both forms unnotably.
That continuity is the key to what Greo does, because it tells you he’s not a rapper who occasionally writes poems, or a poet who raps to pay rent. He’s both a bona fide storyteller working a single narrative across whatever form serves the chapter. And the choice between rap and spoken word is about how close he wants to stand to the listener at any given moment. Rap gives him rhythm, compression and the pleasure of a line that turns on itself. Spoken word gives him plainness and direct address, like when the story wants to be said to your face. Neither outranks the other. He moves between them the way a good storyteller does, quickening the pace here, dropping to a level voice there.
You can see why the label “Oral Tradition” matters to him. Old Benin storytelling never sorted itself into the sung and the spoken. A story carried music where it helped, and dropped it where the plain truth hit harder.
This instinct runs past music. In 2018, he narrated “Benin to Europe: How Migrants Get Stuck In Libya,” a documentary carrying the real accounts of returnees who made the journey and came back. In 2020 he narrated “The Mask of Idia” for the ArtHistory series by Heartbeat 360 Media, a video study of the Benin mask that sits in a British museum. Neither is rap nor a poem. It’s a Benin voice carrying a Benin story to people who need to hear it. The documentaries explain what the songs are doing. Whether he’s on a rap Beat, on a mic, or over archive footage, he’s doing the work of the griot, the man in the square who holds what the community knows.
As a rapper, Greo lets the writing carry him. His delivery is understated, and his bars reward repeated listening, but his flow often settles into a single cadence. For listeners encountering him for the first time, that restraint can verge on monotony. Some may move on before the weight of his writing has time to land.
The spoken word carries a matching risk too. Good production and flow can cover up for a weak line. But when he strips the music away, the writing has nowhere to hide. He has trusted it with his heaviest material. “The Sojourner’s Pain,” a four-minute spoken-word track on “Oral Tradition,” walks lonely roads. It laments a bad government whose policies make his life harder. He weighs lust, love and their consequences against morality and religion. Simply, a man looking for answers that might show him the way out. One can interpret this marriage of styles as two ways of passing his messages and he needs both because neither says everything.
However, in Greo’s case, the rapper and the spoken-word artist are the same person. This is how he coordinates, and his catalogue is the effort to hold those two styles in one form without letting either erase the other.
So, here I ask, does he redefine storytelling, or just perform it well? On the evidence, he has not invented a new way to tell a story. But he has recovered an old one; the griot’s way of moving through melody, chants and spoken word, and carried it into rap.
Ten years separate the trading of artforms on “Oral Tradition” from the blending on “Top of The Class.” The direction is clear enough: the style has become better. However, this refined method can turn into a signature, and a signature is a comfortable place to stop. I’m curious what he does next with his gift of griot.
