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Speakers: Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka and George the Poet.

Participants

CCN = Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Interviewer
INT = George the Poet, Interviewee

Recording starts

CCN:    Hi, I’m Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society at University College London and an Associate of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre of Racism and Racialisation at Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê. 

Today, it’s an absolute pleasure to be joined by George the Poet. George is a spoken word artist, poet, rapper, podcast host and author, who has gained a following of over millions through his commentary and creative work addressing systemic injustice in the UK. His fields of interest include community and youth justice, musics of cultures and has commented widely on issues of racism, inequality and cultural politics. 

George is the author of the book, Search Party, the editor of the collection of poems about black history and his BBC Sounds series, Have you heard George’s Podcast, won a Peabody award, becoming the first podcast outside the US to win the award. 

His latest book, Track Record, is a fascinating memoir in intellectual exploration of race, belonging, music and injustice. Throughout this podcast, we’ll be discussing George’s latest book, its themes and some of the ideas and experiences that formed and shaped George’s writing and intellectual work. George, welcome to the podcast. 

INT:    Great to be here, man. Thank you so much for that kind intro. 

CCN:    I want to begin by, firstly starting, I guess, back to where I began and in your book you mentioned something that really struck home with me personally, was when you were talking about a part of North West London called St Michael’s Estate, or what we know colloquially as St Raph’s for those who are indigenes of the area. And you talk about labour and employment and you mentioned about the geographic space of St Raph’s as a sprawling estate that is almost shielded by these institutions, one is Tesco, one is Ikea. 

And it struck home with me because I remember as a young person, when you were trying to gain employment as a young person in St Raph’s, the places you look to would be those kind of almost outer borders of the estate, so the McDonald’s just on the edge of the North Circular, or the Tesco or the Ikea, or if you’re lucky, maybe somewhere in Monks Park or Wembley. 

Just thinking about that, did you always think of St Raph’s as a space where capital seemed to exist on the outside of the estate and the borders rather than on the inside?

INT:    Well, you know what it is, Clive, it’s metaphorical. It starts off metaphorical or figurative because from my window from our estate at a certain height you can see Wembley Stadium. In a slightly different direction, you can also see the Diageo Towers, the big drinks multinational company, and as you mentioned, you’re surrounded by Tesco, McDonald’s, Ikea. 

So you grow up with these things surrounding the neighbourhood but it wasn’t until I started learning about labour and about the job market, I just started to notice that a lot of my friends’ parents worked in Tesco and Ikea, and as we started to come of age, we would get some temping work. The lucky ones would get temporary work in Wembley Stadium or maybe Wembley Area. That’s when it started to sink in that the opportunities are beyond the borders of the neighbourhood. 

CCN:    That thing of journey and you describe potentially working in Tesco or working in Wembley Stadium or Arena which were the main industries for people within St Raphael’s. It always seemed to me like that short walk through Vivian Avenue all the way down to Wembley Stadium was a massive cultural and social transition, for people who were coming from St Raphael’s to be kind of be engaged and labour capitalism and earning potential. 

It always seemed to me to be such as a kind of mile away metaphorically, literally, from the existences that we had as young people living on St Raphael’s. There’s some very, very defined about those borders of St Raph’s that really kind of encloses you, economically, spiritually, metaphorically, from the rest of the labour market around you.

INT:    I didn’t feel like I was in dialogue with those spaces for my whole childhood. It was a bit of a flex if someone was able to say that they were in Wembley Stadium or Wembley Arena. I had to bluff for a long time about what these buildings were, not really knowing what they were. Our earliest connection, our generation will remember the market, which was just outside the Stadium. That has all been cleared away, there are high rises all over the place. There’s a whole new generation, or a whole new community that’s been ushered in and the character of even that corner of the area has transformed a lot. But, yeah, it was a given that that is a different world.

CCN:    And the world that you and I inhabit now, in many ways, is encapsulated in this fantastic book, Track Record. I’ve confessed that I’ve read it maybe four times now, which will sound a bit insane as an academic who spends most of his time reading books ad infinitum, but it’s something that just had to be read and revisited because I’m also from St Raphael’s Estate myself.

And even beyond that, there were so many things in the book that both resonated with me in terms of a shared cultural memory and history, as black people, as black people from working class backgrounds of the African diaspora. But equally in terms of the way you are able to step outside of that experience and articulate a childhood and articulate a space of belonging and sometimes non-belonging, but also the legacies and histories of racialisation that one experienced both within the estate and, subsequently, outside the estate as your career transcended. 

So, Track Record, what was its motivation and its intention for this book?

INT:    So, initially, it started off as an autobiographical account of the work that I do and I wanted to centre the work because, as I’d explained in the book, I’ve always been shy about centring myself. So I wanted to talk to people about what I set out to do with poetry and what you might be able to learn from it. It evolved. The world changed as I started writing the book. I started writing in 2020, the Pandemic, George Floyd, protests around the world, and it felt silly to just focus on my career. So I ended up trying to articulate all the ways in which I channel history. 

Just earlier today I was thinking about the style of storytelling that I engage in on my podcast and how I often pinpoint moments and I focus on individuals, and that is not great practice in terms of historiography. But, as a storyteller, who is trying to initiate people into the study of society and trying to encourage those, especially humanities students who sometimes may feel overworked or drained or alienated from the material, trying to encourage them to see connections, it is a technique that has served me well from a storytelling perspective. So, in that same tradition, I wanted to use my story, my geography, my family to make a sweeping analysis of the contemporary experience of blackness, black music and imperialism. Nothing major!

CCN:    You speak to so eloquently about things that for some people, I think many people, are so diurnal in experiences. Yes, we experience the legacies of these things every single day, but the means of identifying that and putting it into writing in the way you’ve done but also in a very, very creative way, this is a piece of astounding intellectual work. But the prose that you seem to migrate into the book, I think is so reflective of just being from that kind of environment where language is very, very important, but also it’s very, very kind of cross-pollinatory. 

I see in the book aspects of poetry, even in your descriptions of certain quite negative experiences as being a child, and I think that is really testament to a certain intellectual journey that, I think, is both learned, if I can say, of course through your formal education, but there is something about a more, I guess, organic education or self-education that you express in the book. 

Would it be fair to call you someone who is autodidactic in a way? 

INT:    Thanks for framing it in that way. I would say so. I endeavour to be. I always had a niggling feeling that there would be gaps in my world view if I didn’t endeavour to teach myself, which is why I taught myself how to rap and then taught myself how to do performance poetry, and now I’ve been on a mission of trying to teach myself how to teach.

CCN:    Yeah, absolutely. So, thinking about North West London, which is so important to you in terms of genealogy of creative and intellectual ideas, and is a huge, I guess, centrifugal force in the book. As someone who is also from that area and I left St Raph’s in 2007, I think it was, when my family finally all moved away, but had spent from the age of six there till my mid-twenties, and a lot of the things that you reflect upon in the book, throughout all the chapters, such as community, North West London, certain landscapes, certain experiences, what I found both fascinating but deeply moving for me was retracing my own steps as someone who was young and black and male, and trying to navigate those two competing spaces. 

The space of St Raph’s and all that are required of young people, sometimes demanded of us in terms of posturing, in terms of safety, in terms of visibility and sometimes invisibility, and the world that one was trying to also explore from the outside, which was more formal education, which was thinking about university, which was thinking about cultural experiences that weren’t always available to us but were found in other areas. 

So Bridge Park was huge for me as a kid because I’d go there for Pan-African school when I was very, very young, my family worshipped there, shopping. Then there was Harlesden, all these kind of black dense enclaves. It seems to me, if I can say, that the cultural social experience was as important to you as the more classic forms of education. 

INT:    Most definitely, man, and it is cathartic to speak to you of all people. It’s just rare to find someone at your level of academia who has walked this path and I’m even more grateful that you have the sensibility to understand the education of it, the value of this cultural experience that we had. 

When I was doing my GCSEs, it was the first time I was in a position to start trying to find odd jobs and make a little bit of money, and I had a job at the Call Centre at Wembley Point, just next to the Stonebridge Park Station, but the financial crash just hit. It was difficult to get shifts there so I had to get casual work wherever I could and I used to really focus on trying to get it in Harlesden and I cast a wide net. 

I started at the butchers, I just started trying to find work at the butchers, and then from the butchers, I worked my way down because my mum wasn’t comfortable at the time. There was SARS or Bird or Swine Flu, one of those infections flying around. My mum wasn’t comfortable and I started moving towards like the more music shops, hair shops and eventually I got to the barbers, and the barbers, conveniently, was a place where it was quite easy to work for tips. It was easy to get a little bit of casual money. 

CCN:    Was that Latti & Son, or the other one?

INT:    No, not Latti, so this was in Harlesden. At the time it was called Active. Now it’s called Cuts. 

CCN:    I know Cuts, yeah. 

INT:    But I thought there was a dual benefit to working there because, as well as making money, I could soak up just the essence. That place was a hub at the time. It was like the community’s heartbeat. Everyone used to pass through there or, let me say, everyone who I thought that I could learn about the cultural milieu from, the cultural milieu that was important to me at the time. 

You know you were talking about the things that our environment demands of us? A lot of that stuff you can’t get from a traditional African upbringing in our estate. You’ve got to be outside, you’ve got to be in dialogue, you have to be in community and a lot of that stuff helped me develop really as an artist, as well as a member of our community. So, I think that’s the perfect example of what you’ve just described about the cultural enclave providing a unique education for us. 

CCN:    As you’re talking now, I’m thinking about I knew Cuts as well but I was close to Latti & Son, obviously because it’s in Monks Park, and I’d go there with my brother once a month and everything you needed to learn about black masculinity, you would find there which was so different to the more, I guess, rigid understandings in the Nigerian diaspora in my own household. 

These were young men, old men as well, who would come together on a Saturday or a Friday evening, and would simply express and talk about what it is to be a black man, whether that’s talking about Ian Wright and Arsenal, or talking about racial politics or Stephen Lawrence or Jamaican food or anything. 

INT:    Relationships.

CCN:    Whatever you kind of wanted. It was a strange place because if you were looking for someone in Raph’s, you knew at least once a month that person’s going to be in Latti & Son, so you could sometimes speculate and see if that kind of person is going to be in there. So it was a space of incredible kind of learning but also potential danger as well, but that became par for the course in the area. 

And in the book you talk about the journey that you made, the physical journey, going from St Raph’s to QE Boys on a daily basis, and some of the people you experienced and met and shaped and formed you in different ways, particularly around music, which was so important to you even in your nascent years. 

I remember, I lived in Pitfield Way, and I’d wake up and get the 232 bus to take me to Staples Corner to go all the way to St James, and even that journey, that 30 seconds from my door to the bus stop at the end of Pitfield Way, there’ll be someone that wasn’t going to school that I had to navigate to get to the bus stop. And once you’re on the bus, navigate the kind of hustle and bustle of different kind of kids from your estate going to different schools. Some went to Copelands, some went to cardinal hinsley, some went to the more local ones around the place, and that was always an interesting thing. Some went to John Kelly, remember that school back in the day?

INT:    Yeah. 

CCN:    So that was all that in that one 30 minute journey to Staples Corner. So there was something about a cultural…

INT:    Can I ask what primary school you started off in?

CCN:    I went to Our Lady of Grace in Dollis Hill.

INT:    Right, so a lot of your friends would have ended up in John Kelly and Copeland.

CCN:    Some of them. Mostly the kids I lived around at the time went to Copeland. A lot of my friends, who live on Stonebridge Park, went to Copeland or Wembley or Kingsbury High, or one of those ones as well. A lot of went to John Kelly. I went to St James. Most of the kids in my primary school went to St James or the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Harlesden, one of those kind of places as well. But certainly kids I was around in St Raph’s were Copeland, John Kelly and beyond and the bus in the morning was a cultural experience to say the least.

INT:    Yes, it was. 

CCN:    But once you got to QE Boys, it must have been so different from Raph’s, but you were going to QE Boys and coming back to Raph’s on a daily basis. That was a different transition for me simply going to Grahame Park and coming back again. 

INT:    Yeah, it never stopped being a daily… sometimes it was an obstacle course but, as I grew older and I grew a bit more versed in how to navigate the cultural differences that I passed through, it never stopped being a huge transition to make every single day, a huge one. 

Before I forget, I’ve got to thank you for reminding me about Latti & Son. Just earlier in the week, my dad was telling me that he was catching up with one of the barbers from there and he forwarded me his number, implying that I should check in. So I will do but that speaks to your point, it’s a perfect illustration of what you’ve just said about Latti & Son and the barbers in general. 

But, yeah, by the time I started QE, and again start off on the 232, sometimes it’ll take me, depending on traffic, down to Brent Cross, take me down to East Finchley or take me to Arnos Grove and then I pivot from there, get North London buses all the way up to High Barnet. So that’s another thing that we share in terms of the centrality of the 232 to that early morning transition. 

Everything that you explained about the journey to the bus stop. The journey to the bus stop, that being a political exercise in itself, and then the different kids on the bus who were coming from different schools, and the different schools having different politics and cultural mixes to them. 

When I was young, I started at QE. When you’re seven, you’re closer to childhood, you’re closer to innocence. So I remember having this good uniform that didn’t look like the rest of the uniforms around. It was a little more formal, it had a blazer and a jumper and a tie with an insignia that people didn’t recognise and I was excited. I was happy, whatever. 

The more I started making that journey throughout year seven, the more I realised that it kind of can make you a target for other people who are part of, like I said, different cultural mixes in their school. That target space, that potential volatility tended to be closer to home. The further out I would travel, the less hostility or the less animosity I would experience from different schools. I don’t know if it was a thing where more of us were travelling further so we also were a little more curious about each other, or we were more distanced from some of the more parochial mentalities of where we come from, but the further out I went, the easier it was to connect with people. 

Yet getting into the school, that was like I was in a demographic that I’d never been in before. I was tasked with the role of kind of explaining the whole black inner city. Yu know that fetishization, that slight weird fascination that everyone else has with your area. I had that but at the same time, like I said, I was young, I was innocent and I was really happy to be on this path to what I understood at an early age was social mobility.

CCN:    Mobility, it’s a really, really interesting point you make about that because much of the book really kind of grapples with the bidirectionality of the term social mobility, who it benefits, what it means, who’s orchestrating it. And one of the central ideas that has really captivated me about the book is the idea of the war on blackness. 

Now, that may be a description for other things but the way you frame it in terms of the war on blackness, I think really strikes at the heart of the mobility question because, as we find as young people, the interest in blackness that you experienced going to QE Boys where you now become the kind of orator of all things they kind of imagine blackness to be, but then going back to St Raph’s in the evening and there’s a different kind of interest in blackness, which is much more violent, which is much more harmful, which is much more lacerating, is two kind of parts of the same war. 

So, when you say the war on blackness as a central experience, what exactly are we saying about this? 

INT:    To continue from where we’ve just left off, my daily transition, my induction into what I believed was social mobility, climbing the social ladder, going into a grammar school that was high performing, one of the best day schools in the country, even that couldn’t save me from some of the long term effects of colonisation that we were dealing with in our immediate environment. And then the necessary isolation that I would have to navigate up this so-called ladder, social ladder, just like you said, two sides of the same battlefront. 

The war on blackness, as I frame it, is the multitude of forces acting against people racialized as black. So within that, we’re not even getting into the debate of whether or not we see ourselves as black. First of all, there’s this external consensus that we’re black. With that external consensus, there’s a lot for us to have to navigate. 

Me coming to a grammar school and having to represent the hood to all of these boys. Me coming home and having to justify why I’m not moving in the same direction or in the same step as a lot of the young black males of our area. It is all part of a multitude of legacies with regards to the racial ordering of our economy, the political constraints on what someone racialized as black can be, can do, and the way we are taught to respond and to talk about these dichotomies. 

CCN:    You use the word dichotomy and I think it’s really apt because the war on blackness, as I’ve interpreted from your book, I see the way that black people were able to navigate those two war fronts in both positive and also sometimes negative ways was black, cultural expression, music. And this is where you can get to what I think is really salient about your book is you and music and music expression, and how that’s been so important to your intellectual work, from the creative base of spoken word and Grime. 

Now, I remember coming back from university and I just remember being in Manchester in my shared student accommodation and I saw Kano’s P’s and Q’s for the first time on one TV station, and thinking wow, what’s happening in my home town of London? I’d been in and around the kind of garage scene in my 16/17/18 years but this was very, very different and I thought, okay, and my brother who, I think, is the same age as you, was much more embedded in the Grime scene. 

So when I came back to London, a couple of things happened. I’d seen that, I’d watched the film, Bullet Boy with Ashley Walters, and a couple of other documentaries on BBC One called Tower Block Dreams which is about the emerging kind of Grime scene in London, I think 2003 / 2004. And I realised that something was happening here, where young people, mostly black people, were rearticulating the war on blackness in much more positive ways and entrepreneurial ways through music expression and musics of culture.

And this is when we had the sudden explosion of the urban, and we became visible in ways that I never anticipated, and all the things that I felt had denigrated us as black people, young black men on the estates, were now being used or being recreated as forms of black cultural expression, that were now being lauded by the very same institutions, cultural ones that were trying to kind of bury us in many ways. 

When you’re seeing people who look like us and sounded like us on the front cover of the Observer magazine or playing at Glastonbury, all of a sudden you’re kind of seeing there is something that is very bidirectional about the way that the war on blackness is now working, in some ways, to our own ends because they’re now opening up spaces within the cultural and creative industries for black young people in all our alleged discorded menace, to show blackness to you in some way. And I think that is what is the key intellectual primacy of your book, is identifying music as the ways in which we had to navigate the war on blackness. 

Am I correct in saying that music is so central to the way that you’ve had to navigate those two aims? 

INT:    Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, man. I became a teenager as Grime was coming into its own and as a young adolescent, I had criticisms of the ways that we were being portrayed in mediam and the ways that we were allowing ourselves to be led by that portrayal in some respects but, at the same time, I was completely in love with the music and the music contained that whole battlefield. The drama was played out in the music. We’re all being forced into a posture but we can still demonstrate our potential within those restraints. We can do it artistically and the more we do it, the more we grow. 

A rapper from our area, Bashy, he stepped away from the music world for decades really. It’s coming up to 20-ish years since his last proper offering for music and he went into acting and he did really well and he became a real presence in Hollywood, and now he’s returned to rap. I remember connecting so much with all of his portrayals of blackness and now that he’s reflecting on his life, it was complex. There was a time when Grime wasn’t making money. He had to pivot to being a bus driver and it clashed completely with the persona of a famous rapper but he had to do what he had to do. He always seemed to want to speak to more but he was also very much playing along with the expectations of being a rapper.

So, in a lot of what he did, that was a little bit stereotypical, it would probably make him cringe a little bit now, he was still able to present range, present richness, creativity, thinking outside the box and he’ll be maybe approaching 40 now, if not turning 40 this year, and he represents, like Kano, a generation who when they started, there was a lot that was up in the air, that was uncertain about their future. People were in and out of jail. People were navigating really violent spaces, just to get this music out. People were having very public ugly spats.

And I look at them now and they’re all men like you. These guys I think are a little closer to your age. They’re just real admirable, storied, esteemed men, which just wasn’t obviously what they were shaping up, what we were shaping up to be, if you would have just looked at it through the lens of our music. But the music, something special was happening. 

CCN:    Yeah, you’re articulating that, a period of time that was very, very kind of liminal and up for grabs because you had these different cultural mediums clashing. You had television and the urban dramas that were coming out that were trying to articulate a certain experience of being young, mostly black, in the urban environment, that was becoming desired by broadcasters as we’ll now show you the realness that you see in the newspapers. This is real. That became the default now, this is real, this is true. 

Yet the music, which was kind of giving it a certain energy, that was cross-pollinating into those visual accounts as well. You mentioned the posturing and there was always something very, very performative in the very idea of neoliberal, as you explore so heavily in your book. And the neoliberal as a kind of economic question, how do we augment ourselves as human beings to make ourselves more palatable or commercially viable to the masses? 

I think in many ways, if I sat back now and watch what I watched on Channel U 15 years ago as a young man, and being absorbed in this kind of low-fi, entrepreneurial style video productions, that were immensely innovative at the time, but there’s also something very, very performative because you are kind of giving the masses the imaginary of what blackness was constructed to be. 

INT:    Yeah. I struggled with that.

CCN:    So if I connect to being from Raph’s and having to negotiate the image of Operation Trident, we’d see posters of young black man lacerated, bloodied, with the kind of proviso ‘avoid gun crime young people’ and the psychological trauma of seeing that but also the instruction is that you are being asked to avoid people like you in the environments that you live in. And that became the image that was, in many ways, transported onto our television screens and inscribed in the lyrical content of Grime as well as a kind of narrative. 

So there’s a neoliberal narrative that I think is really prominent in the ways in which Grime was propelled to the forefront of our cultural experiences as a kind of way of allowing blackness to exist in white spaces. But it also came with some costs, and I think performativity, or the need to live up to the imaginary of the young black male, became the things that I think, in many ways, damaged us through those austerity years. 

I’m thinking of when my friends and my brother’s friends lost their EMA and all of a sudden now, you’re being compelled economically to perform a certain kind of blackness because all other avenues of sustenance have gone. Your book is talking about the ways in which music and music expression and its kind of commercialisation is also the things that allowed the war on blackness, in many ways, to continue without even knowing we’re in a war.

INT:    Yeah. 

CCN:    We didn’t realise that we’re still in a battle, a war on blackness when we thought we were being visible. 

INT:    Exactly, and it’s really complex. It took me to live through it for 15/20 years and then to do a lot of reading to be able to put these dots together. So it’s a real stealthy war. It’s like a cold war and I talk in my book about America. 

To pivot to America a little bit. Tupac being as dominant as he was in the mid-nineties, being someone who was known to have come from a Panther background and someone who would take interviews that were about music. These interviews were for MTV, these interviews were for BT or whoever, and he would go off on tangents about socialism, about homelessness, about US military aggression across the world. So that guy was dominating hip-hop for a couple of years and he died, and he died ostensibly in a blaze of glory in some old gang member stuff. Nothing to do with anything. His guys are ignorant. Nothing to see here. This is what they do. 

That became the consensus on the death of Tupac. Yes, there’s been a constant churn of conspiracy theory, you could call it, or people revisiting and insisting that there was more to it, but the mainstream consensus is that he just died of senselessness. He was performing at a masculinity that he was not qualified for and he got what was coming to him and in the wake of Tupac’s death and then Biggie’s death, what is called the Jiggy error of hip-hop rises. Puff Daddy who was not a rapper suddenly becomes the new star of the rap scene. After his thing kind of dies down, Jay-Z comes the crowned king.

    Now, what these guys represent ideologically, I went through a long period of thinking they’re all the same. They were all self-absorbed, deeply talented entrepreneurial guys who just grew up in America under Reaganism, so that’s why they act like that. But Jay-Z and Puffy really signalled a real divergence from the track that Tupac was on. All of a sudden the highest aspiration you can have is not to serve your community or to speak truth to power but to get money. 

And Tupac, he very much embraced the commercialism of rap and he used it to make his case. I would say he used neoliberal thought to argue that I am real and the realness speaks for itself. Look at the market, I fit and I don’t even have the advantages that some of you guys have. I don’t think he was deeply in love with the money like that. I think he was a young guy having fun. But if you listen to Jay-Z’s logic, you listen to Puffy’s logic, these guys were overtly serious about, my highest aspiration is to get money out of this thing and I don’t have much to say about anything else. 

And I feel like a similar process happened. I’m not saying that we had a Tupac and then lost one but a similar logic formed the foundation, the intellectual foundation of mainstream UK rap. There was a consensus that was just almost impossible to argue with, that the highest aspiration of this thing is to get money. 

Now, I’m not saying that people unanimously accept that. I’m not saying that the community has wholeheartedly subscribed to that logic but it is just an unavoidable feature of people assessing, evaluating this music, and I think that that is a microcosm, or that aspect of the debate and the understanding and the discourse around UK rap, is a product of the war on blackness. If Tupac, in a different universe, if Tupac was able to do everything that he aspired to do with hip-hop to create a political party, to create gang truces across America, to form socialist applications of the music. 

I saw an interview with his mum shortly before she died, talking about how he spoke to her about having so-called fund merchants around America, which were just houses which would take in unhoused children, feed them, mentor them. It gives me goosebumps talking about it now, not only because he was so young but because I just had an idea ever since, I just can’t think of one rapper in his position since the late nineties who has said anything like this, and I don’t think it’s coming to this. 

So me entering the Grime scene, I had an aspiration to reorient at least the aspirations. I wanted to reset the aspirations of what we did with our music. I didn’t assume that I would be the highest selling, I didn’t assume that I would necessarily be the best but I thought that we share a desire for more for our collective existence, and for whatever reason, in the mainstream experience of our music, that desire just doesn’t come across. So I wanted a career that centred such a desire. 

CCN:    When I hear you articulating these ways, literally just imagining the words on the page that I read, because the book is also confessional and it’s self-reflective and you’re talking about maybe some of the wrong steps that you took when you were dipping in and out of the music industry that didn’t align with those ambitions, and not wanting to be purely commodified and wanting a much more richer experience with yourself, with your music and your spoken word, and moving away from a record deal which would have propelled you into that kind of space that we’re articulating now. 

What this says to me is what I was really enchanted by in your book, which was the sociological imagination. Now, I don’t use the word theory, I use imagination because there is a sociological imagination of us as black people, whether that’s in the music industry or entertainment or as sociological beings, or dwellings within the urban environment. 

And your own imaginary of what the sociological would be, I think, is really having the ability to look back and say, yes, there were some problematic aspects of that mass ambition to reach a certain kind of echelon in the music industry as black people, as black subjects, that you had the courage to walk away from and try and carve out a new space and a new kind of way of expressing the same things with a bit more sense of personhood. 

So, I’m really interested in your own development as a sociological thinker, alongside the poetry work, alongside the spoken word, alongside the kind of authorship as well, because I see it very, very clearly in your work that you’re thinking about sociology in a way that, again, is very, very different from the kind of more formal education that I would have experienced going through the education system and university and beyond as well.

INT:    Which I also experienced. I think walking both paths, trying to make it as an artist who had this aspiration of changing the cultural utility of our music, having that side while also under training as a sociologist, as a student of sociology first at A Level and then at undergrad, that made me feel that I am what I am hoping to demonstrate and hoping to institute for incoming generations. I am an artist and I am an academic and the two speak to each other, the two enrich each other. 

I really came into my own as a writer, as a rapper, in the GCSE era and I don’t think that was a coincidence. I think the intensity of knowing that these GCSEs are coming up and constantly feeling like I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t ready enough, propelled by my friends just doing so well in rap in MySpace at the time, building an audience. I saw rap and GCSEs as two different sides of my intellectual development. 

I get to undergrad and there’s a need to pivot because I just feel like I’m navigating a new cultural space. Cambridge is very white, there’s a lot of people that are not from cities like mine. Grime didn’t take hold in their upbringing. If I come and present as a Grime artist, I just anticipate awkwardness, I anticipate a lack of understanding and as it is, I’ve always had these ideas of how I could space out the flow and talk my way through my lyrics a little more. 

I became a poet in Cambridge, in the first month of Cambridge but at the time, I’m also there to study sociology. So I’d be in lectures thinking about ways of amplifying what I’m taking in, some of the stuff that I’m hearing and encouraging people, just sharing information. Sometimes I would literally be tweeting things that I’m hearing in the lectures but also feeling like there must be a better way, a frictionless way of getting this information out, and this starts to inform my artistic process. It starts to inform my presentation as a poet. 

That has stayed with me and I have, if anything, developed more respect for the artistic. I’ve seen how people become locked away in the ivory tower of academia and develop ideas that are community relevant that are in need of application. They’re in need of engagement by the masses because, at the end of the day, if all the Clives and Georges go away and start writing for a largely academic audience, it’s going to be harder for us to build the momentum, build the consensus in the community, etc. but there’s no infrastructure for doing so, is what I’m understanding as I’m moving through my twenties. 

How do you seamlessly take some of the theoretical discussions, the sociological imagination which I am immersed in when I’m listening to music. I’m listening to this music and I’m thinking about diaspora, I’m thinking about history, I’m thinking about politics, I’m thinking about Reagan, I’m thinking about Thatcher. How do I take all of that and make it accessible to people that are not going to go through A Level and university in the way that we did? To make a long story short, that’s how I arrive at the podcast. 

CCN:    I listened to the podcast again recently, particularly your one on St Raph’s and North West, which again was really nostalgic and quite emotional for me to even listen to you speaking about that particular experience, and I see you with this huge following that you’re using to articulate black injustice and its legacies and its manifestations. And on Question Time I get an immense sense of pride in that for me, just to see someone who’s done a similar kind of journey, who’s in the cosmos in terms of the ability to articulate our experiences in a way that was denied for many, many years and it’s still denied now. 

How do you define or understand us? And I say us in a respectable way, that we come from a certain particular environment and we’ve found our ways into different environments now, because one of the things that I think you really pinpoint in the book about black capitalism is the ways in which we are made to be exceptional, and I’ve grappled with this for many, many years about black exceptionality. 

Yes, one could say that me and my trajectory is exceptional because it’s particularly kind of rare, but also it’s about ambition and maybe the ambition for many of my friends growing up was to be a manager in Tescos or work in Ikea or be an estate agent on Wembley High Road. And that often isn’t seen as the same way when we talk about black exceptionality as being able to write books or work in academia or beyond. 

So, do you think of us as exceptional beings, given our journey and trajectory? 

INT:    I think it’s very hard for me to argue that we’re not exceptional. Obviously, us being African and having grown up in Britain, there’s probably an inclination towards modesty, where we don’t want to say that about ourselves.

CCN:    It’s a cultural idiom, like everyone just holds it back and you’re of the diaspora and you know the rules and glory is for someone else, not for us.

INT:    Yeah. So I’m aware of that but it would be a bit silly to say that what we’ve experienced and what we’ve been able to achieve is typical. It’s not and I would love a world in which we could say that is just 100% down to our own work ethic, there were no environmental factors that differentiated us, there were no inherent advantages. We just got here off the strength of our own work but you and I are so steeped in the study of inequality, the structural inequality, that we can’t leave the story there. 

You make a very good point about different kinds of ambition and as you were talking, I was thinking about all the people whose ambition… for example, we talked about the barbers in Latti & Sons and in Active and all the different forms of masculinity that we saw there, and this is again going back to the richness of education of these places, I remember realising that, although a lot of the young men who were barbers in where I used to hang out, although they looked like playboys, they were very loud and charismatic and boisterous and they took pride in having a way with women, a lot of them were young, Jamaican immigrants who were quietly building stability for their family back home. And it would be after 10/12/15 years when they watched me transition from my teen years into my adult years and also into fame, when they would start speaking to me in a bit more detail about the homes that they built back home, about the importance of me getting on the property ladder. 

And these guys, I just saw them standing in the barber shop for all of those years, chatting to girls, making up noise, debating football and whatever, making each other laugh, making me laugh, and you just don’t understand again the different kinds of ambition that are going on. Some of them were able to transition out of being a barber to own their own space on that high road, now renting out chairs for other barbers. Some of them are running food shops now. They’ve just evolved and they would not get talked about in the black excellence way of what I was saying, the neoliberal propaganda that is mixed into the black media space. But like you said, there’s different kinds of ambition. Some people’s ambition was to keep their family together. 

CCN:    The most basic ambition. 

INT:    So, I think staying connected to the community kept me sensitive to those ambitions and kept me ambitious about widening the support for all of this black life.

CCN:    I want to wrap up, but I want to try and tease from you something that I think is quite important to me, that really unites your book, its central ideas, its provocations to me, our home of St Raph’s and the future, because I see you up close and from afar, a public intellectual, a creative, the entrepreneurial self, your developing academic life and how that will kind of migrate those experiences into a much more sharper and formal intellectual articulation. I’m looking forward so much to kind of seeing that in its whole fruition, what it would look like, what form it would take and the impact it will make, I think, to many people. 

But there’s also something else that really gets me going when I think about you and St Raph’s – space and time. And that’s something that I talk about a lot with other black men of my generation and my brother’s generation, is what we were always looking for on St Raph’s, no matter if we were going to school and back, to Barnet or Grahame Park or beyond, if we’re hanging out in Wembley Triangle or Jubilee Clock somewhere, if we’re hanging out around the shops in Lilburn Walk, is always space and time. At some level, that was the end game, space and time. 

And when I was young, trying to find space and time within the Nigerian diasporan household, was always this spot in Monks Park on our side of the canal. So you’d come round the back of Pitfield Way, through Lilburn Walk, you’re into Monks Park where the green is, and you keep walking down along the canal and you get to this kind of like a really kind of bushy part where you kind of open up to Wembley Park subway. 

There’s a really quiet spot there under a bridge and I would just chill there sometimes, just either reading or listening to music on my Walkman and you’d never hear anyone there. You’d hear people on the other side of Monks Park playing football but you would never see anyone in that spot there, and that was my space and time. 

Now, with yourself, I’m sure there are areas in Raph’s where you found a spot that is your space and time that was outside the family dynamic, or the physical space of the family but in your space now, where you’re so prominent and important to us and other people as well, and you are visible and you are in demand and you have little space and time in the industries you work in, how does George the Poet find his own space and time for reflection and peace and restoration, given that journey you’ve been on that’s really summarised in this book, because I do think that we as black people and black men have a particular journey that we’ve been on that always requires a little bit of space and time. And I just wonder how you, on a human level, find that space and time?

INT:    I’m still working on it. One of the things that I realised along my journey is music will always give me that space. Music, even the problematic music that I’ve fallen out of love and in love with over and over again. That provides a mental space, it really does. Sometimes there’s so much change that we’ve been through that you can’t really take stock of it until you hear a song that reminds you of who you used to be and what you were experiencing when you first connected with it. And then, as I always advocate for, the more you read around the music, you learn who wrote it, you follow the trajectory of the artist that brought it to you, the further you can immerse yourself. 

So I find, in a weird way, non-physical space there. But a more practical answer, I would say, is returning to Uganda. I wasn’t born in Uganda, I didn’t grow up there but when I travel to Uganda, something happens, something happens, something happens and I come back renewed. And Uganda can be a frustrating place. I’m not saying that it’s because a utopia but there might be something in, as a diasporan, reconnecting with the motherland. There might be something in that. 

CCN:    Wow, George, thank you so much for this rich and gentle conversation. I’m really, really grateful to you for being so generous with your time and your thoughts and I look forward to continuing our dialogue in some form and in the near future as well.

INT:    Likewise, thank you for all of your work. Thank you for considering my work and I definitely look forward to building, bro.

Recording ends 49:00 minutes