George the Poet on Making Beautiful Things
A conversation about poetry, change, institutions and riots.
Dear reader,
This week I had the massive pleasure of interviewing George The Poet - artist, poet, rapper, podcaster, writer. His podcast Have You Heard George’s Podcast? explores important issues through poetry, music and storytelling. It won the Peabody Awards back in 2020.
Much love,
Sam
I love the podcast and how it traverses lots of different themes. What have you learned from the experience of making it so far?
The first thing that jumps out to me is that you can make a beautiful conversation out of anything. You know, some of the heaviest, saddest topics… because I have approached them with an artistic intention. They have drawn people and they've drawn a respect out of people for the thing that I'm talking about.
Your book Track Record does something similar. It explores topics both global and hyper local. Did that happen as you were writing it, or was it the plan from the start?
I would say that the expansiveness of Track Record evolved out of what I was going through, which I was just reflecting on before I spoke to you. I remember being in a conversation with some very intelligent people and someone casually mentioning How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the book by Walter Rodney, which I also shout out in Track Record. I was quite old, and I hadn't heard of the book. And I just asked this guy ‘what else do you think I should look into?’ And he was like ‘look into Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, the late fifties and early sixties.’ And it just took me down this whole rabbit hole. Throughout this process, I've just been trying to build up a picture of the world and I've had a few entry points through music, through my educational journey and through my upbringing. As I'm building up that picture, it just becomes clear to me that some of my previous thinking was a little myopic and context was required to fully wrap my head around a lot of the big questions that I had. And once I discovered that context, I couldn't leave it out of the book that I was writing.
“We who think and feel passionately about the future have to prepare because change is inevitable.”
Another project of yours that I really enjoy is Poetry in Motion, an anthology of poems by van drivers about life on the road. You must have received some amazing bits of poetry for that?
It was just like, again, about how you can take any experience and bring beauty to it. No matter what. I remember some of the submissions giving me goosebumps… Everyone has a fingerprint on their work. When you're able to see that uniqueness in someone else's material it just puts a lot into perspective. So, that was a great project to be part of.
What are some of the most unlikely influences on your work?
I actually took a lot of inspiration from the Disney movies I watched as a child. Now, obviously, we become aware of what Disney is and how it operates. But in the early days I was just so enamoured with the style of that renaissance period of Disney movies from Beauty and the Beast to The Lion King. I started revisiting them as a grown up in my twenties. And I still remember the words of the songs, lyrics which I'd memorised as a three year old. It just made me think a little deeper about the function of music and the different ways that music can be used to create a generational experience.
A few weeks ago you posted a response to the riots happening in England that resonated with lots of folk. How are you feeling about that response now and how are you feeling about those riots?
I think there's a lot that needs to be confronted. It’s very tempting to slink away from it. We live quite divided lives. Sometimes it's useful to have a rude awakening about how people feel. It has forced me to think about what is the messaging that has been pumped into the public space. [But] we don't have to say they were manipulated. We don't have to say they're misguided or misinformed. Some of them just feel a visceral aversion to seeing the level of racial diversity that we have in this country. [That aversion] needs to be confronted and sometimes we need to be pulled out of our immediate reality to see the competing realities around us.
There must be a little bit of pressure on you to comment on a regular basis. Do you feel that pressure? How do you decide what to engage with and what to ignore?
I've had a slight change of approach this year.
Oh yeah?
I am used to holding back. Part of the reason why I came up with the podcast is because I wanted as much time as possible to reflect on current affairs and then respond to them in an artistically intentional way. But I have felt that now is not the time for that. Now is not the time for stepping back, especially with the amount of reading that I happen to have been doing. Provided I feel sufficiently prepared to make a public comment on something that's happening, hopefully a comment that adds value and doesn't just echo tweets that resonated with me. If I feel prepared, I'm challenging myself to say something closer to the time.
When you do decide to respond to something, how do you figure out whether you should be using a mainstream platform, or deliberately going against it…
I've always had to do it on a case by case basis. There's a temptation, and I fight the temptation every day, to say ‘I know how that sector of media works’ or ‘I know how that sector of society works and I'm not going to engage.’ For a while, I felt like that about commenting on youth violence, commenting on gang activity. I used to get called on the media a lot to talk about that stuff. And internally, I think I started to boycott it. I just started to just turn down those requests. And I'm still not in a space where I want to go and talk about that on TV. I don't feel like at this point in my journey, I'll be adding value to that conversation. And I feel like at this point in society's trajectory, a lot of the media constructions around those conversations are just not fruitful.
Was that part of the reasoning behind turning down the MBE?
That was a little more straightforward because again, you had to make that assessment. What difference am I going to make? It's often said that people take on these honours because it will allow them to redefine the institution. But I turned it down with the understanding that I won't be able to redefine the institution as long as they've plastered the word empire on a so-called ‘honour’. But in other media, where I've been able to just make the whole podcast with unadulterated, unfiltered analysis from my genuine perspective on the BBC… I've even been advised by people that I deem radical, who have taken risks and chances that I haven't had to take, they're like ‘yo, stay on the BBC as long as you can because you’re still able to be you.’ The problem ensues when you're not able to [be yourself].
How does change happen?
I think sometimes we get a bit too in our heads as humans thinking that change is something that needs to be manufactured by our design. Change is the natural state of things. I was trying to explain this to my little brother. Everyone who's alive now won’t be here in 150 years. And in the time we’re here, there’s so much churn. I was reading a book on Palestine, The Hundred Year War on Palestine. And it lands on a note that tries to imagine a world that is more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. I would love to talk to that author because we are in that world now. So, things change. Things change. And we are constantly adapting around those things. That is the state of play, I think. We who think and feel passionately about the future have to prepare because change is inevitable. We have to prepare the world in a way that we'll be able to pick up the responses to those changes that we wish.
I’ve been thinking about change, and everything seems to come down to exactly this… we have to build roots so that when the changes come, we are ready to act within that. If I died today and left this newsletter in my inheritance to you, who would you interview next?
Probably Thomas Sankara.
What’s the last great thing you've seen?
My son.