Adel Osman ’25 sits on a stool in front of a packed audience, stage lights glaring brightly into his eyes. He’s nervous. He’s about to perform a poem he wrote in front of two very famous poets — from memory. And so, he starts speaking.

“I didn’t realize how surrounded I was by music until I started making music.”

From poetry to music, Osman is constantly creating. It’s a part of who he is.

“I want to be the greatest rapper, I want to be the greatest and do the most,” he continues.

“It sounds so egotistical, but to be that sort of figure of a generation when it comes to hip-hop music and all types of music…I know it’s not realistic, but I don’t care.”

The first album Osman ever listened to all the way through was “To Pimp a Butterfly” by Kendrick Lamar.

“For the first time ever, I just sat doing something for like an hour, I just listened, no headphones, phone on my chest,” Osman said.

After “To Pimp a Butterfly” came another album of Lamar’s, “DAMN.” Since listening to those albums, Osman’s future goals of writing, composing and producing music became clear. He has a music Instagram account where his SoundCloud account is linked.

Listening to different types of music is part of Osman’s process, taking inspiration from everywhere and mixing ideas together. 

“Oh, I like how he delivers this when he’s angry, or I like how this lyric did this, and just drawing like small things from everywhere,” Osman said, describing his listening process. 

Some of Osman’s favorite artists include Tyler the Creator, Liana Flores, Beach House and Kendrick Lamar. “rises the moon” by Liana Flores is his all-time favorite song, and before he even considered pursuing music, he would listen to it to calm down from panic attacks. “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar is another one of his favorites. 

“It was the anthem for the BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement, and it has everything great about Kendrick condensed into a small four or five minutes. His vocal flow in this song is like a drumset,” Osman said.

Osman believes that to make good music, musicians need to listen to music they like and break it down to the beats, chords or lyrics. Not only that, but musicians need to be comfortable with feelings of confusion and learning. 

“As long as you are doing the thing and willing to be confused and trying to do as much as possible, putting all your effort and all, honest to God, hard into it, you’ll be good,” Osman said.

Osman’s goals in hip-hop have given him a new lens on life. The competitiveness of the genre has pushed him to constantly improve his work, and his goals have led him to new motivations. 

“[These goals are what] made me want to keep going with life and social stuff. If it’s not for school or friends or whatever, you got to write that next bar,” Osman said.“I spent a lot of years just not doing anything because it’d be easier and it was more comforting, and I feel so much more fulfilled actually pursuing something I want, even if I don’t become that person [I want to be] in like a year, or in four years or five years, or 10 years.” 

Taking Digital Music Production at West has given Osman a space to work on music in school and connect with peers who share a love of music. Elise Gross ’27, one such student, emphasized Osman’s talent in understanding space and mixing keys. She saw this skill firsthand while working on a project with him after school.

“He’ll have one track, and it has three notes that shouldn’t go together at all, but then he’ll add another track that adds that context to those three notes,” Gross said.“He made this one project, and it just could capture the feeling of nostalgia so well, in ways that you can’t explain, but you can hear.” 

A snippet of music created by Osman. The full song involved Osman trying to create J-Pop, or Japanese pop, as the genre is nostalgic for him.

Speaking of nostalgia, Osman believes that good music doesn’t come from creating solely heartbreaking music. He wants to create music for a range of emotions, from relaxation to sadness.

“I spent two years making bad music because I tried to be heavy…When you have the surface level of it not be the ending of it, that’s how you achieve real deepness,” he said.

Osman hopes to create music for people who need to find pieces of themselves or what they want to do or are just looking for background music to keep them invested. 

A piece of music Osman made. The full song was the first song of the album Osman was working on, and his attempt at consolidating all of the album’s elements.

“Catharsis. And affirmation,” Osman said, touching on the main emotions he wants to evoke through his music. In the future, Osman plans to make multiple different albums, each with a different genre, such as hip-hop or dream pop.

“Dream pop is just sort of a lot of electric guitars, a lot of ethereal ambient stuff and ambient music in general, and sort of just fusing all that,” Osman said. 

A clip of music made by Osman. The full song is Osman’s attempt at creating liminal dreamcore music. “I’ve really fallen in love with that style, and after two and a half years of on and off work, I finally tapped into it.”

Oliver Miller ’25 took Digital Music Production with Osman as well and highlighted that same sense of nostalgia Osman captures in his work. “His music is different from other music that I hear in this class. I was listening to it, and it just brought back so many memories that I had when I was a kid,” he said. 

Not only has creating music given Osman many new goals, but it has also allowed him to feel a deeper connection with himself.

“I just feel like I am me when I’m making music, and when I’m not making music, I feel like there’s a level of separation between my emotions, and my conscious[ness] and me as a person; there’s a lot of dissociation. But the thing I love about music is that it breaks through all that instantly,” Osman said.

Gallery • 4 Photos

Lea Abou Alaiwa

Adel Osman ’25 smiles while hearing pieces of music.

However, there is a level of separation between Osman as a musician and Osman as a person.

“Music helps me figure out who I am and put that out and express it, but at the end of the day, when I’m going through my life, I’m not a song,” Osman said. “I love that you have no control, where it’s like, so easy to not feel anything, music is just like, ‘No, bro, you don’t have a choice in the matter,’ and I feel like that’s the thing with all art.”

Osman’s artistic talents don’t just extend to the field of music, though. He also creates slam poetry and participates in IC Speaks, a local spoken word poetry club created by Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey. This range of talents has led to many unexpected opportunities for him.

“I thought, ‘yeah, we’re gonna do this music thing, and it’s gonna blow up and bam, bam.’ And then, in the background that I didn’t even know, fate was just laughing,” Osman said.

“I’m a random kid from Iowa who wants to be a musician… after a year of doing slam poetry, I’m gonna open up for the person that inspired me, which still feels insane.”

On a night in November, a night Osman described as one of the best of his life, he had the opportunity to perform with Rudy Francisco, an incredibly famous poet, and Outspoken Bean, a former Houston poet laureate, through IC Speaks.

“[The IC Speaks participants and I] were all hyping each other up, and we were just like, ‘Oh my god,’ because we’re all nerds and big fans of them,” he said.

Osman had the opportunity to sit next to Rudy Fransisco, with Fransisco asking for his name and speaking with him. 

“There was a moment where he stopped being this sort of mythical idol, and he just became like, ‘Yo, that’s just the poet I’m performing with also,” Osman said. 

When the performance began, Outspoken Bean and Rudy Fransisco both performed their works from memory, but the performers from IC Speaks all planned to read off of papers. However, before Osman’s performance, Rainey, the organizer of the event from IC Speaks, spoke with him and other performers and asked them if they could do it from memory. Osman’s poem was six minutes long, about a personal, traumatic experience, and he had never once performed it without a paper. 

 “I think it was some sort of hip-hop competitive spirit thing,” Osman said. “I think it was just like seeing them there. I wanted to prove I deserved my spot or something. Caleb called my name. I ripped up the paper.”

Osman stepped up onto the stage and got on the stool.

“I prayed. I was like, ‘This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done in your life. This is not a fairytale, right?”

The lights on stage were bright, and Osman couldn’t see the audience. He started his poem.

“I don’t know what came over me, but it felt like I got possessed.”

Osman recited the entire poem from memory without any gaps or pauses.

“I came back [into] consciousness.”

He stepped off the stage and was immediately surrounded by his fellow performers.

“The moment that I touched the ground on the stairs, everybody else in IC Speaks came up and hugged me, to the point where there’s too many people [hugging] me,” Osman said.

“Man, it felt like it was so spiritually fulfilling in a way that I didn’t realize it could be.” 

Both Outspoken Bean and Fransisco congratulated him after his performance, and Osman even spoke to two music producers who wanted to contact him further.

Darien Robins, an English teacher at West High, was in the audience for the performance. While Robins hasn’t had Osman in a class, Osman will often visit Robins’s classroom to read him a poem he wrote and talk about it.

“Adel is just like a very effervescent soul at West High and is very enthusiastic about the nature of his learning and his writing and just generally of being alive in a way that is infectious,” Robins said. 

One of Robins’s favorite parts of Osman’s work is the relationship between Osman and the art he creates.

“I love the dynamism of his relationship with making art, and that it is this active endeavor to understand himself. When he comes in [to my classroom], it’s because he’s just made something that helped him think about himself, or helped him think about the world,” Robins said.

Robins greatly enjoyed watching Osman perform and liked his work as much or more than the poems of the big names he was opening for.

“Adel, he’s got a really fabulous balance to his writing in that he is both keenly aware of the gravity of being alive and the gravity of the world’s problems and the importance of everything that we do on the grand scale,” Robins said.

“[He’s] so aware of the big questions of being alive, and speaks to them so honestly, but he’s also so attuned to fine details and the sonnets and rhythm of a poem, and the impact of the vehicles he chooses for analogies, and I think that makes him a very exciting poet to see,” he continued.

One of the final impactful moments of the evening was when an audience member spoke to him about how much his poem had impacted her. 

“It was so beautiful. You know, I don’t want to toot my own horn, but it was just the feeling of actually impacting people and finally making something that could touch people in that way,” Osman said.“Having the realization, no matter how small, no matter how big, with whoever, whatever, you made someone feel, and the person you look up to got to watch that and got to feel that too. It just makes everything pure again.”

“I spent almost three years now doing art. Like, I woke up, and I never stopped thinking about it, right? And I mean, like, never. Even when I’m doing homework or this or that or that, I’m thinking about, like, what to do [musically].” 

“There’s a moment where instead of just doing the thing, you become like that thing. Like you spend all this time trying to do poetry, and then there’s a moment where you realize, ‘Oh, wait, I’m like a poet now,’ I do all this music stuff, now I’m a musician,” Osman said. 

The road to where Osman is today hasn’t been easy, but he’s constantly willing to put in the effort required to become better.

“The hard part is not getting access to the industry. The hard part is proving yourself, which if you love the art form that you’re doing, you’re going to be doing that regardless, ” Osman said. Making music that truly expresses emotions can be difficult, especially when it doesn’t translate as expected. 

“When you’re honestly trying to put your emotions into the page, and it’s not good, it feels even worse. But I think I’m just proud of how far I’ve gotten,” he said.

Osman advises anyone going into music or attempting something too challenging to go for it, even if starting is hard. “Once you start walking, you’ll get to those steps faster than you believe,” he said.

“It feels so destined in a weird way, even though I know it’s not. It feels like when you put together a puzzle, and you finally get the centerpiece. You don’t have it in your possession yet, but you know what it is. I finally realized this is what I am.”