George the Poet

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading creative people reveal the formative influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is George the Poet, born Georgian Panga, the son of Ugandan immigrants. He grew up on a London council estate and won a place at Cambridge University. Having started out as a rapper, he made his name as a spoken word performer and poet with the publication of his debut collection Search Party in 2015. That same year, he was nominated for the Brits Critics Choice Award and the BBC Sound of 2015 poll.

0:48He was also offered an MBE but declined the honour. He launched a genre-defying podcast in 2019, which won a host of prizes, including the Peabody Award, a prestigious American prize for broadcasting, becoming the first podcast from outside the states to win it. Have you heard George's podcast, as it's called, interweave stories of his own upbringing with detailed explorations of contemporary social and political issues? George the Poet, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much, John. You were born George Mpanga. When did you become the poet? I was 19 years old. I was in university and I just got the idea of presenting my formerly rap verses in poetic form in a more spoken word style i don't want any pretense or pretentiousness to my thing so i was like george the poet take it or leave it my final offer we'll discover how you made that journey and arrived in the poetic form throughout the course of this program but let's go back to your upbringing um grew up in neasden in northwest london what was family life like beautiful uh we were all responsible for each other so when my younger brothers came along my younger sisters came along it was expected to help out and was expected to want to set an example for them that was something that was nurtured and i said you know it wasn't like imposed on us so i really credit my parents for that and your parents both from uganda originally yeah both from uganda when did they come to britain in the late 80s my mom came over i think first and started working and my dad came over, tried to find work, etc, etc.

2:26But going further back, from what I've read, your grandmother was Joyce Mpanga, who's a politician in Uganda, minister for women? Women's Affairs, yeah. What do you know of her life and her career in Uganda? She's someone who navigated very choppy political waters and has so much to show for it in a country that was so unstable at one point. She just doesn't carry any animosity in her heart for some of the harsh things that she had to deal with. Did she make you want to go into politics? Maybe in what she's always been prepared to discuss with me and the way she's always been prepared to work and develop with people that you really don't see eye to eye with.

3:09Maybe that has influenced me. That did influence me. Just lead us through a little journey through your estate at this time. In your early teens, you walk out your front door. What do you see? What's the environment like? There were kids everywhere. when, you know, a while ago. Now, kids are not outside as much anymore. But back in the day, it was always laughter or shouting, someone chasing someone and squirting a water gun or whatever. Like, I could hear that from my room. What was the environment like? What did it look like? It was actually very, it was a mixture of mid-rise housing and a bit of terraced housing.

3:43St. Raphael's estate is quite enclosed, but across the road or across a big road, across the North Circular, there's another neighbourhood called Stonebridge and a lot of green a field hills and trees so we just have our little island to run around but then as the community vibe started to recede there wasn't as much laughter and playing around there was more Isn't that just growing up, growing out of being a kid and forming new identities I think that's definitely a crucial part of it but in a low income community in which parents are often busy working and there's not much employment in the neighbourhood, not much employment opportunity, if not for the big supermarket or whatever around the corner, sometimes that energy can become stagnant and unhelpful.

4:34On your podcast, you've talked about those social pressures and that combination of unemployment and the frustrations and possibly parental neglect and that fermenting and leading to some of your friends joining gangs or kind of pursuing criminal activities? Was that something that you worried about growing up or that you witnessed at first hand? Yeah, it's a reality that's very difficult for me to, even at this stage, 32 years old, speak to you about on the BBC, on my podcast. It's difficult to speak about because life happens 24 hours at a time. And in this short hour that we have together, I'm trying to explain many 24-hour cycles in just one person's recollection.

5:20But I do remember being concerned about getting caught up in the wrong things because of what many of my peers were going through. And anybody that has heard your podcast will know your story of winning a place at a prestigious grammar school and then winning a place at Cambridge University. And that experience of formal education setting you apart, I presume, from a lot of those friends that you grew up with. I mean, was that something that was difficult to deal with at the time? Difficult in this sense is a challenge and also difficult in that it was a lonely journey. Having a big brother in a local school turned out to be the perfect social tool.

6:02His story showed me what my friends were going through in their local schools, which helped me know the rules. Helped me understand opportunity wasn't equal. I understood why they were shutting and robbing people. It wasn't because they're evil or because they wanted a quick demise. They just didn't want to be victimised.

6:23Badness was a defence mechanism. Most of the oldies in the ends went to prison. And when they came home, they were famous. On road, they had status and all the kids would know what their name was. I loved the hood, but I didn't like that. I hated that my people were living like that. You must have been aware that you were heading in a totally different direction to some of those friends. What was pushing you? Was that just knowing that you had more to offer and more to explore from a young age? Did you always know you were smart? It was always communicated to me that my reading is further than what is expected at this stage.

6:58And at one point I was moved ahead a year. All credit to my parents. They never compromised. It helps when your parents don't compromise on what they expect of you educationally. What does that mean? They pushed me. My mum pushed me to apply for a highly competitive school and while I wasn't up to par in, she rolled up her sleeves and taught me herself because she didn't feel like the education system was taking her kids seriously at some point. She was your tutor? She was my tutor, yeah. So that's what I mean about not compromising, not allowing me to mess around and get distracted. And that school that you went to, Queen Elizabeth Boys School, totally different academic environment.

7:46When you arrived and you started doing those lessons, did you think, yeah, I get this, I'm at home now, I can really flex my brain properly? I don't really feel like that. Any real challenge will make you want to quit, and that's how I felt at the start. Not just academically. Academically, yeah, but I don't think I was averse to academic rigor. That excited me. I think socially it was just hard Were there many other black kids there? No, no they weren't I think there are a lot more now The reality is that much of our lives In London are organised along racial lines My estate growing up was predominantly black And a lot of the kids I was at school with now Were South Asian But they were from areas that were also South Asian So coming from a slightly different social milieu That can leave you feeling a little bit stranded at that young age.

8:37And I presume environmentally it's very different going to Leafy Barnet every day and seeing a different... I love that though. That part of Barnet was beautiful, you know, very affluent. Gorgeous to look at. You're driving past houses that clearly cost, in some cases, in the tens of millions. I had never seen stuff like that before. So that was interesting and it did feel like a bit of a metaphor for what I was attempting to do with my life. Go from there to there. From the first term I refused to settle my skin I did everything I could to get kicked out I messed about, rejected their whole ideology Two middle fingers up, that was my philosophy Cos obviously I'm coming from the ends Freddie smacked Bilal and I just wanted to go back to it now I'm acting out Back home kids got expelled all the time So I thought sooner or later they're going to draw the line But they never actually did They could turn your life into a living hell but they never turned their back on a kid.

9:38Did you then imagine the next step would be Cambridge University, King's College Cambridge? I didn't assume, I didn't assume, no. Was it a hope of your mother's? So my mum made it clear very early on in my life that she wanted me to go to Oxbridge. I think she had that confidence in my intellectual ability and my mum came here as an immigrant whose qualifications weren't taken seriously. I remember studying economics, languages, the house being full of books about politics and world events and history. So she wanted you to have the opportunities that possibly she missed out on. I think so, yeah.

10:17Looking back on it, I think so. You studied politics, psychology and sociology at Cambridge. What was the aim? What were you going to do with that degree? At first I thought I might become an MP. I thought I might enter politics. and then I thought maybe think tanks. I wanted to be in research for a while but that was short-lived and I was just like, I think I just want to be able to engage with things of a political nature without institutional stricture. So what did you do with that knowledge that you accrued at Cambridge with politics and psychology and sociology? Do you think that tangibly you can see the effect a lot of what you learned in the work that you're doing now?

10:54I think Cambridge gave me a respect for political science and an awareness that this is a thing that is worth analyzing with all your energy it made me commit to the journey of political science and socially at the time were you committed to um university life i jumped in with both feet and i was um really excited to to be there at first but like i said you just can't outrun the loneliness i was lonely you know My whole community is not here. For me, it was quite a big thing. Not everyone feels like that about their community, but for me, it was a big thing. So that loneliness, that was a sense of just being dislocated from your community and missing friends.

11:37Was it also that you felt there was any kind of resistance to you being there from your peers? I can't put it on other people. No one made me... I mean, every now and then you get someone that has weird energy, but I felt just a little disconnected culturally. Now, what did that do for the words which I presume you were already writing? You'd become, as you said at the top of the programme, the poet at university because you wanted to start expressing yourself in verse. Was it all on paper at the time? Were you writing in notebooks? I was a rapper first. You develop your skills face to face, person to person.

12:11When you start recording, you learn to listen to yourself and you learn your voice.

12:26I said it to my ex, back when I never had credit for a text While I was rapping, you know, we used to write our lyrics down. I used to be quite formulaic about the patterns, the rhythmic patterns and the rhyme patterns. I felt like there was room to evolve that in a poetic form. When you rap, you tend to rap to a regimented beat, but without a beat, like, what could you do? Could you not put more inflection in it? Could you not play with your intonation? Could you not run over a particular meter and just free form your whole delivery? Technically, I'm from an elegant city, but I'm not the kind to whine and dine.

13:05I grew up around lots of crime, the violent kind. You might have heard about the rocks, the grime, the hype and shine. It's not just cockney rhyming slang. We got block beef, violent gangs. Awkward interactions which most don't force. Children navigating through post-cold wars in the States with the least funding. Look at the state of East London. That's a paradox. That's what I was interested in. But if you'd already started rapping, did you continue that at Cambridge? Yeah, there was a period of slight overlap, but poetry quickly took over. Is that because also you were trying to sidestep the expectations of, you know, as you say, you're away from your community.

13:39And if you were stepping up in this student union, doing some raps. Yeah, I didn't want to feel like a caricature. Now, this is what I mean about community and how lonely I felt. If I did those exact same raps in my community, I wouldn't be a caricature. But here, I would have felt like I'm doing an impression of a black person for a white audience, which made me uncomfortable. I'm not necessarily saying I'm the hero of the story. I might look back on that one day and be like, I shouldn't have adjusted my style. But I felt like I sounded better as a poet. And many people in my life have co-signed that observation.

14:21Let's talk about hip-hop now. For This Cultural Life, you've chosen the Tupac Shakur song, Changes, which was released in 1998 as a formative influence.

14:41I presume you would have been about seven years old when this was released. Did you hear it at that time? Yeah, it was everywhere. I remember it being all over the radio. People were drawn to him because of his passion. Just describe him for those who... Tupac... He died, of course, he was shot famously, but before then... He died at 25 years old. He became famous around 20 years old. So we're talking about a very short window, five years. But in that time, he became the most commercially successful rapper in the world. yet he was a voice of protest he was raised in one of the most radical black panther families but i didn't understand any of that nuance that wasn't communicated to us in the 90s he was put across as a gangster rapper with a heart right that was put to us as the best of the best that hip-hop could offer even though in my adult life i understand he was so much more Often photographed, bare-chested, tattooed, incredibly beautiful looking man as well.

15:48So the charisma must have been... Very charismatic. Must have been very powerful. Sex symbol in that time, yeah. I didn't really buy into his aesthetic as much. I became aware of his passion for community organising. He really believed that gangs should become diplomatic bodies, should become organisational vehicles in their communities. and he worked very hard to bring about peace between warring gangs, both on the street and in the prison system, with a view to resurrecting much of what the Black Panthers were instituting, which was a community-focused political formation.

16:43And some of those themes are there in that song that you've chosen, Changes. So potent stuff to be hearing when you're seven years old. But in that song, I mean, he's talking about social problems, gang violence and drugs as well in Los Angeles. But how did that resonate in Neasden? So I didn't grow up in a criminal family or a criminal environment. but crime became a bigger feature of our social lives because a lot of my friends got caught up in you know trying to make money and having an adversarial relationship with the with the criminal justice system so as those dynamics started to set in and people go in and out of prison and they come back with different philosophies because that's the other thing like Like people come home and bring things from prison into the community.

17:36Some good, some not great. I started seeing that from the time I was about 13. That's when I really became aware of this churn of people going from the streets to the system back onto the street. As I became aware of all of this, I would always return to Tupac's work and realize that there was nothing like it ever. And there has been nothing like it since. And this is something that you have explored intensively in your podcast. You return to hip-hop time and again. It becomes part of the soundtrack to the show also. The way that it relates to the communities, but it's telling stories about the communities as those stories are happening.

18:12Right. I mean, it was Chuck D, wasn't it, that once said hip-hop was the black CNN? That's right, that's right. And having become a rapper myself about the age of 15, I was part of a generation of UK rappers that built something that eventually became quite prominent in this country and is now a hot export of this country. So I really believed in some kind of potential, some kind of transformative energy within the music. Round here there's rocks in abundance But there's not enough keys for the locks in the dungeons Shots in the hundreds Lots of them youngers are clocking them numbers Blocking their jumpers, shocking their mumblers In between the pot smelling hugs They're not even pretending they're not selling drugs How does this happen?

18:59How important was grime music when it arrived? Grime being a very specifically British genre of urban music, telling stories about life literally much closer to home. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the question. Grime was hugely important. Grime occurred in our accent with our slang and with our, you know, it was primed for our linguistic practice.

19:29Now I don't give a monkey From tree to tree Just like monkeys Who influenced me To be funky Who influenced me To make esky beat I made esky girls And esky boys Move their feet to the sound You can hear I hear you Whereas hip hop You always had to adjust yourself American hip hop anyway You had to adjust yourself To even just be able To recite lyrics You're putting on Different accents And this is something That we're better at Than anyone else You can't just come And do grime And sound better than What you know A British person doing it so I think that ownership was very empowering for us you know a lot of people have been able to create careers out of Graham despite not being superstars well Stormzy emerged from that yeah Stormzy emerged from that obviously Stormzy is a superstar and that's what concerned me that's what concerned a lot of us when we were younger we always felt like there was only going to be one superstar per generation where there's so much more talent than the country seems to have interest in.

20:30Who were the artists that you most admired? My first obsessions, I would say, were Wiley, Kano, Dizzy Rascal, Getz and Skeptor. These are all men who are hugely successful now, but it wasn't clear at the time that they would be. You know, when they were younger, the experiences they used to articulate were so poignant for us, even though it sounds like a bunch of bravado. It's actually very emotional. It's very intimate, you know, for us as young people in those environments that at the time didn't have a lot of public attention coming our way.

21:25They were underground figures, weren't they? I mean, counter-cultural figures in a way. Yeah. And what was it, 10, 12 years later, Skepta won the Mercury Music Prize. Yeah, that's right. And something like Kano is starring in Top Boy on screen. So did you see them as role models at the time, these people? Because you said you started out rapping. Is that what you wanted to do? Is that what you foresaw? You can say that, actually. I wouldn't have expressed it like that at the time because these guys, Kano was about 15 years old when many of us heard him for the first time. But I wanted to be like them.

22:00I wanted to be able to tell my experience in a lyrical way that drew people together in the way that they did. But at the same time, I struggled with the politics of grime throughout. I've struggled with the politics of hip hop throughout and I continue to do so. There are whole years when I don't listen to any of it because in its commercial form, it can be a form of self-harm for much of our community and those that practice it. But that's not what it's intended to be. It is just constantly fighting a very racialized a negatively racialized commercial environment which is why the superstar model concerns me because for some reason the most lucrative acts the ones that are so heavily invested in by the music industry they tend to be ones that you know promote all the bad stuff or dabble enough in that negativity there are so many rappers that don't dabble in negative imagery negative messaging at all.

23:04There are so many rappers that are politically aware and socially responsible in their lyrics. None of them get the commercial looks. But you're suggesting almost that the glorification of the violence, the drugs and the bad boy image has been perpetuated by the corporations, by the music industry. But lyrically, that was all there at the time as well, wasn't it? So grime emerged out of the influence of now 12 years of gangster music, which hip hop became after big corporations bought in Heavy. You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge. Following the success, I would say, of NWA, the rap group from Compton in the late 80s.

23:51but when NWA emerged hip hop was a lot more diverse in its representation of masculinity and femininity you know it was a lot more nuanced there was a shift You had a chance to change things in a way didn't you because you were signed to Island Records I wasn't signed as a rapper I was actually signed as a poet Oh really? Yeah But it was to make an album but was the expectation not that you would be rapping? It was all experimental so they signed me with a view to me you know figuring it out and doing something that would work for them commercially they were musical poetry tracks blending spoken word with some of the musical traditions I grew up on So now none of you answer the phone Your conversations happen after the tone But your heart to the bone Not the first that grafted alone In and amongst the system Forgetful of women and youngsters The outcome's worse In a place where loud guns burst But the child comes first That's a non-negotiable.

24:51So when I was fortunate to be nominated for the BBC Sound Poll and MTV Brand New and the BET Award, that was a perfect validation that my experiment was kind of working. And when you made this shift and after Cambridge and thought, actually, I am now George the Poet rather than George the Rapper, how important was it that you had gone to Queen Elizabeth Boyce and I presume had English classes where you were formal study of poetry? How much were you reaching back? I think one of the things that I think the teachers taught me well was the art of essay writing and the art of argument. And I feel like that has been crucial.

25:34So that is on a content level. My work was always intended to be analytical and to present experiences and scenarios in a way that would allow me to advocate. but in terms of respect for the English language and understanding and awareness of different literary devices and linguistic technique, I also think studying English at QE helped me with that.

26:03Your next choice for this programme, George, is Beat FM, which is formerly known as Bang FM, a community station, a radio station. Is this where you got your first broadcasting experience? Yeah, it is, yeah. So tell me something about the setup. You were on air? Yeah, before I was on air, I had put together a small mixtape of my tracks and I was shopping it around the community. And a friend of mine, Rashid, recommended that I take my mixtape to Bang FM at the time. Now Bang was a community organisation based in Halsden. and Bang's work was very much really bringing young people into a space of broadcasting giving them an outlet for their music so Rashid said to me take your mixtape to those guys they support local talent I remember him saying that and true to his word they did they didn't know me I didn't have the biggest profile but they said we like what you do you know you've got something about you this was in my rap days and they played a couple of my tunes man and I really appreciated it and from there I made connections and one thing led to another but again I have to just bring it back to the importance of the community in that space.

27:18How important was that in forging your own identity? How important was it to hear yourself? It was really powerful because like I said I struggled with the politics of hip hop and of grime and a lot of my friends who were admittedly better rappers than me, they were a lot more willing to compromise with some of these politics. They said things and did things in their music that I often didn't agree with. You mean specifically they're rapping about gang life and violence and glorification of that? Yeah, it would be along the lines of gratuitous representations of violence. A materialism that I've always been suspicious of and sexism.

27:59You know, lazy... I would always regard it as lazy stuff because a lot of these guys don't really mean it. They're just, again, going with what has been presented to us as normal, presented to us as desirable, presented to us as profitable. It's the expectation. That's what you deliver if you are that kind of artist. Did you have arguments with your friends about this? Did you challenge them? All the time. All the time. Back when I was a lot less diplomatic than I am now. Anyway, Bang FM is a level of validation because not everyone got on the radio. So this is your first experience of broadcasting.

28:34You still go by the name of George the Poet, of course, but you could these days be known as George the Podcaster. Right. Have you heard George's podcast? He's so successful. And you make it with Ben Brick, whose real name is Paul Carter. Right. Composer, a producer, and he's interweaving these sound effects and archive and music with your words, which are often rhymed, very often rhyming couplets. This verse you guys hear was first than I did. Before it could ever exist on your computer, it was nothing more than a vision of the future. And now, there's this recording that I've recorded, which ain't more than a live performance I thought to provide the audience.