George the Poet on Music, Memory, and the War on Blackness Art & Culture (Part Two)
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For this episode, we're rejoining for part two of our conversation with George the Poet on music, memory and the war on blackness. If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode and get up to speed. George joined us recently on stage at the Kiln Theatre to discuss the themes of his new memoir, Track Record, in which he locates his personal story alongside a broader social history of race and identity in Britain. Now it's time to rejoin the conversation, recorded recently at the Kiln Theatre in London.

Here's our host for the evening, writer and social commentator Shante Joseph. As soon as you get back from Uganda you start University of Cambridge and one of the things you talk about with your time in Uganda is like being in a place where everyone is also black and kind of feeling that sort of like comfort and that joy and then going to Cambridge where you were saying you're like one of like four black people like in your halls at the time wasn't three like which is just

insane I mean I know I grew up in North West London I went to John Kelly now Crest Girls Academy so I always say that like I grew up in a time where I remember in my year there was one there was like two white girls one of them she's like my best friend to this day her name is Charlotte but in school we just call her white girl

because she was like the only one. I love her so much. She's my girl to this day. But it was like, I remember kind of growing up in that environment, like growing up in Brent. I never really had, it's so weird to say now, but I never really had this idea of like kind of being a minority. Trust me. I never had that imposter syndrome. Like there was, of course there were different like racial groups, but there wasn't any white people. So I never really acknowledged them as like a dominant cultural group in society. It never occurred to me. I put that in the book as well. Until I went to University of Bristol and I was like, oh,

I was like, oh, this is the real England. You lot can beat me up. Like, there's enough of you man here. I can't be calling you funny names or anything. But it would be good to understand your relationship with higher education, going to Cambridge, being in that space and kind of how you adjusted to it. So for secondary school, I had to leave North West London. I was in the suburbs of Barnet. It was a grammar school, Queen Elizabeth's.

and that was a very educational educationally rigorous experience but it was still predominantly minority it was mainly Asian boys it was a boys school so that was my first foray out of the community that was my first kind of

wake up call that there's a world out there that is not black. Cool. Then I get to Cambridge and yeah, it was not just not black. It was very non-diverse. It was very white. And that in itself, I remember having, my wife will laugh at me because a lot of the time I have a very slow reaction. I'm slow to become aware of how I feel.

So I remember thinking to myself, "That's cool." Everyone was cool. I didn't have any interpersonal smoke with anyone. But I was a fish out of water, man. I didn't really have any cultural common ground with anyone.

I was fortunate that there were so many nice people, but for the first time in my life, I really became a recluse. And I've never, like, my social life has never recovered from that period. That's how I became George the Poet, 'cause I stayed in my room and just wrote poetry. And when I wasn't in my room, I left Cambridge to go and do any poetry performance anywhere, as I explained in that chapter.

So, but I'm grateful. Like, it was, to me, after the experience of my grammar school where I had to leave my community, I was already a super minority within that diverse school. There were only nine black boys in my year or 10 black boys in my year. Eventually, I became aware that

The further you progress in your career, the more you're going to drift away from the black working class, unless you make an effort to stay connected. And how did that make you feel? I didn't like that. That bothers me to this day. That's why it's a consistent recurring theme. Someone might look at my work and be like, why does he always talk about race? He can talk about anything. I think my sister asked me that one time years ago. She was like, why don't you just talk a bit more about

Cambridge or like my mum's asked me this why don't you talk about aspiration why don't you talk I'm like um I'm trying to embody those things I don't have to pretend I don't have to campaign to you know motivate people to engage with the things I engage with but look around like remember everyone that I grew up with where are they now but I'm also curious to know when you

you kind of got into the music industry as well and you were making music that, I mean, I don't wanna call it like conscious rap, but it very much did differ to everything else that was out there. Did you ever feel a bit like, can I continue on this path? Even though you knew you were talented and you knew you were brilliant at storytelling, like that was the thing that separated you from everyone else. You just knew how to tell these very compelling stories.

But like you mentioned before, there wasn't this kind of element of like, it's going to be gangster, it's going to be quote unquote negative. Did you ever wonder if that would impede on your ability to really be successful? Well, I had this long running theory, as I explain in the book. Before I was a poet, I was a rapper, I was an MC. And me and my brothers always used to debate the viability of non-gangster rap.

And I used to say to them, we haven't had a real chance to experiment. We haven't really seen a cohort of rappers in our generation who are as lyrical, as creative, as charismatic, as engaging as the ones that we're all familiar with without badness. But I feel that our music...

has enough merit that we don't need to rely on badness to engage big audiences. So that's a theory that I had from time and as I moved through life, I was constantly looking for like evidence to prove that theory. I would say, look at how influential reggae is. Reggae is not gangster. Reggae is the opposite of gangster. It's about African consciousness and liberation. Everyone loves reggae. And then in our lifetime, we had Funky House,

Just because people would always say, yeah, but that was back in the day. And I'm saying, now look at the contemporary moves. Funky house, South African house started becoming popular. And all of these waves had nothing negative in them, no gangster elements within them. Yet they were becoming commercially viable, yada, yada. So I was always trying to prove a point with my musical output.

Which is why I appreciate the inroads that I was able to make in the rap world because I've always been 100% accepted by the most gangsta rappers to this day, even when I don't have that much musical output. They understand that there's a natural synergy between what I do and the kind of art that we were all native to.

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And in the book you talk about Tupac Shakur, I learned so much about him from this book, but it's kind of in a section where you're talking about music and surveillance and you kind of talk about him, you know, doing these interviews, like talking about gangster rap and whatnot, but then he's kind of investing in his community and he's like spending all of his money helping the, you know, the people around him, the world he belongs to. He was like a true example of like, oh, this artist is becoming successful and the community is benefiting and

benefiting as a result of it. And you kind of saw what happened to him in the sense that like it was, he was, you know, surveilled by pleas constantly in jail, that it was almost like a running joke. And I wonder if, you know, he was the way he was, it was art was the way it was because it kind of served a commercial purpose that he then used to kind of invest back in his community. Is that still viable today? Like, can you, is that still, I guess like a sufficient way of serving your community, even if the

output isn't necessarily beneficial in the long run. So you know what Shantae, I've always had a vision of a syllabus, an education syllabus where we study society through music. This is one of the intended outcomes of my PhD. If you

really study the trajectory of Tupac Shakur, born to not just a Black Panther, but one of the most significant Black Panthers, one of the most persecuted Black Panthers, Afinia Shakur, one of the Panther 21, framed for allegedly trying to blow up police stations in New York.

When you understand the significance of the PAMFA 21 trial and how it was used to split the East Coast and West Coast leadership of the Black Pampas,

And when you see how American intelligence hounded Tupac's mom and his stepfather throughout his life, when you understand that by the time Tupac became famous, his stepfather was still serving basically a life sentence on Trump top charges only was released like a couple years ago. When you understand everything that went into Tupac by the time he was an icon,

you will be able to investigate various strands, not just of American society, but of the pushback, counterinsurgency, the pushback against working class efforts to mobilize in Tupac's generation, to mobilize on a cultural level. Tupac, in his early interviews,

which are some of the most focused interviews of his career because he was as yet untouched, uncorrupted, unharassed. When he's articulating what his vision is, there's an interview where he says, "I am a revolutionary. My job is to continue the revolution through music. They cannot shut the music down. They shut my mom down. They killed Fred Hampton. They can't stop me from rapping."

And then you become aware of all of the different instances of clear assassination attempts, very suspicious events throughout his life, including him shooting two off-duty cops and beating the case because it turned out that they were harassing a black man with a stolen firearm from police evidence. And, you know, like, just...

Is it a coincidence that all of this is happening to someone who's been under surveillance since he was born? Yeah, if you were to study Tupac, you would get an insight into a lot of different things, which is why he got down near a chapter in my book. And I had to cut in half what I wrote about him because my editor was like, what are we doing here? Yeah.

But it's so interesting, though. I think in reading the book, I started to, yeah, think a lot about how surveillance and music interact. I think a lot about... I mean, very different, but in the UK, like, drill artists and, you know, how their lyrics will be used in courts to, like, prosecute them and this idea of, like, the art, of the black art being something that is essentially criminalised or just even the music, the nightlife being criminalised and all of this output being criminalised. Are there ways to...

push back against that is the way to push back against that to not have art that actually reflects your experience because you're scared that you're going to, you know, it's going to be held against you. I really think we need to start thinking about generational work. So a lot of what we talked about in terms of the changes in Brent and the changes in British society and the global economy, all of those changes come under the banner of an ideological school of thought called neoliberalism.

And this is just the idea that society should be governed purely by markets, by who can pay what and what the demand of markets dictate, right? Once upon a time, it was believed that the government should tax rich people enough so that

government can provide services that are essential to society. That is no longer mainstream thinking. It's now normal for government to pull back from social provisions and rely heavily on privatization. Private companies providing services that were once public services. It took a long time for that to become political mainstream thought.

I mentioned Margaret Thatcher earlier being one of the most consequential prime ministers because she was the one that really kicked this off in terms of the direction of government and I mentioned how the left, how the so-called left in mainstream politics has changed because

Labour also accepts this starting point as a standard of governing. It's not cool to talk about socialism anymore. There was a moment with Jeremy Corbyn, we saw what happened with that. And one thing that I've come to learn is that that did not happen overnight. There's a great book called Globalists by a professor called Quinn Slobodian. I might have butchered his name.

But he explains that this neoliberal project started basically at the end of World War I.

And there were different generations of thinkers who contributed ideas and seminal texts. And at different points, they were on the fringe and no one was listening to them. And eventually they became a little more mainstream. And then they got their darlings like Thatcher and Reagan who would go out and institute a new form of government that is now the standard across the world. And I feel like that's how we need to think about pushing back and challenging people

a lot of what we've just discussed. We've got to think generationally. It might not be possible in this time to get all rappers on a progressive accord.

Too much has been done. The conditions of our community produce the music and the conditions of the industries that distribute the music act as a filtering process, as I explain in this book. I don't think it was a coincidence that my time in the music industry was so aggy.

You know, I mean, it is made unwelcoming. The industry is designed to be unwelcoming to a young black man that doesn't want to necessarily present as a gang star, that doesn't want to just talk in circles about the trauma of the community. You feel me? So I've had to break away and create different cultural space. And it is not the most prominent space.

You know, it's nice to see a full house tonight because you guys don't see me on TV every single day. You're not going to hear me on the radio every single day. And that's because mainstream culture is unaccommodating. We have, the BBC has one station, radio station that is dedicated to

black music and that radio station, big up one extra, but they don't really do intellectualist kind of programming. They've told me that's why they won't broadcast my podcast. It's a little too wordy, it's too, you understand?

So in that context, we've got generational work to do. I ain't going to stop. I'm not going to be like, oh, it's going to slow down my career, so let me just dumb down the intellectual. No, we've got work to do, and we can do that. That's our prerogative. Thank you. Thank you.

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I think, I mean, I don't know if it's still there, but we've seen everything that's happened with Stormzy. And I find it like quite interesting. It's obviously very kind of disappointing that he took on this collaboration with McDonald's given his very, I guess, somewhat like...

quote-unquote radical kind of politics, this standpoint that was seen as very, I guess, fringe, but he kind of stood in it, and now people are incredibly disappointed with him for taking up this partnership. And can you even exist as an artist, as a big, huge, mainstream, global artist, and have politics like that and still survive? Did he kind of put himself...

between a rock and a hard place, kind of having his politics but also needing to live the life he does? That's a very good question, sis. So just now I was talking about the need for generational work to change the direction of our society and the Stormzy situation is a perfect example. Stormzy has been on the fly for 10 years now trying to use his prominence for social progress.

On the fly. But I know as someone who's in the same industry as Stormzy, there is no blueprint. There is no training. You have to constantly think to yourself, all right, if I don't intentionally try and use this platform for some good, no one's going to provide the opportunity for me.

So on the fly, he's been thinking to himself, all right, cool, Murky Books, Murky FC, let's get a premises in the community, let's set up scholarships, let's create funds, whatever. That's above and beyond, right? But now you get to a point where...

In terms of McDonald's, obviously Stormzy's come out heavily in support of Palestine and there is a pro-Palestinian boycott of McDonald's that he has seemingly stepped away from. I mean, he's obviously stepped away from. He's not in alignment with the people on that one. And...

that it has evoked a very understandable emotional reaction, right? Because we have a situation where so many of us put our hopes all on whatever public figures appear to reflect our politics and appear to reflect our values, right? And that is...

tied in with what I've been talking about tonight, the disappearance of public space where as a working class we can organize and we can continue to educate ourselves

We've been reduced to seeing Stormzy doing something good and being like, yeah, man, that's what I'm about. I identify with that. You feel me? So that's where a lot of the disappointment and anger comes from. But obviously it's bigger than Stormzy, right? If Stormzy didn't do the McDonald's deal, what more would we be doing in terms of organizing? And I'm not trying to belittle the efforts that are continuous because I see them, right? But

I feel like the Stormzy debacle has been some of the most, has been the loudest noise that I've heard about Palestine from a lot of people for a while. You feel me? So the way I explain it to people is like this, trying to have a socially responsive career is harder than not. Like, especially when you're a rich celebrity, a successful celebrity, it's just easier to be quiet and to not engage. If you create that expectation,

You know, you have to follow through. You've got to deal with it. And it is not easy, which is why, like I said, you guys don't see me on TV as much because, you know, me and certain people can't friend anymore. But yeah, it's a minefield. And what I would like to see, you know, one of the tragic things about the Stormzy situation, which I hope isn't the outcome, is that it potentially signals to...

younger people that it's okay to play both sides or it's okay to do one thing, say one thing and do another when it comes to this activism, when it comes to, you know, we have to sacrifice. We have to feel a bit of the pinch if we are serious about, you know, some of these convictions. Yeah.

I think that was a very good answer. Very diplomatic. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Serenti, and it was edited by Bea Duncan. If you'd like to come along to one of our live events, you can visit intelligencesquared.com forward slash attend to see what we have coming up. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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