‘I’m from a community that doesn’t often get to represent themselves’

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/14/george-the-poet-spoken-word

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When George Mpanga was in year 7, a teacher got his class to do an exercise asking how they would all like to be remembered. Mpanga, raised on Harlesden’s notoriously tough Stonebridge Park estate in London and who had recently begun at one of the country’s most prestigious grammar schools – one of only nine black boys in his year – knew the answer instantly: “I want to be remembered as an entertainer with views that other people listen to,” wrote the 11-year-old.

It was an aspiration inspired by growing up listening to rappers such as 2Pac and Nas, musicians that spoke not just to Mpanga’s creativity but his own anger and frustration at the social injustices he witnessed every day and his desire to speak out. It drove him first into rap and grime as a 14-year-old, and later, when he got into Cambridge to study politics, psychology and sociology, write some of the most powerful and socially incisive spoken-word poetry around today.

While the hype around his work has been gaining momentum since 2012, Mpanga was recently included in this year’s BBC Sound of 2015 longlist, which counts Adele and Sam Smith as former winners, and it’s hard not to believe that this spoken-word poet is going places.

In fact, ignore this outspoken and articulate 23-year-old at your peril. Money and fame hold little motivation in his world – Mpanga’s uncompromising lyrics are written to shake the very foundations of a society he sees as enshrining inequality and give a voice to some uncomfortable truths on everything from injustice, social marginalisation and even teen pregnancy.

“I always had something to say, I suppose,” shrugs Mpanga. As a 14-year-old entering into the world of grime, he used performing to vocalise and vent his difficulties negotiating his place as a young black male in a high achieving, predominately white grammar school when many of those he had grown up with on his estate were taking very different paths.

Starting at Cambridge at 18, he expanded into spoken-word poetry after worrying that grime would not translate well to his new audience.

“I’d observed, as an MC and as a grime rapper, how people always glazed over the quality of the lyrics and lyricism of a lot of grime and rap and that always bothered me,” he said. “So I always thought, well, if I take away the beat, slow down the delivery and give people the chance the digest every lyric, it might be received differently. People took it as poetry mainly because it always had strong social messages.”

Going to Cambridge wasn’t always easy, he admits, but he says the experience was a blessing and one that humbled him. For the first time he had access to a new audience who were listening to what he had to say, people who came from an entirely different background who were appreciating and connecting with his work.

“I felt more of a responsibility both to represent my community fairly and only make statements that I could stand by, as opposed to whimsical, childish stuff I might have said when I was younger,” he recalls. It also forced him to look at the social circumstances that had governed his own decisions and those around him, and consider, for the first time, how he had managed to become what he refers to in one of his poems as “the exception to the rule”.

“Cambridge was when I first acknowledged that out of all of those hundreds of kids I grew up with on my estate, my dad was one of only five fathers who were around,” he said. “So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I avoided making some of the bad decisions that others around me made. I’m not saying it’s the only factor because it’s a complicated cocktail of a lot of different influences but I think the fact that my father was in my life was fundamental to my success. So it made me step back and acknowledge that a lot of this stuff wasn’t just down to me, it was largely down to luck.”

The community on his estate has been hugely supportive of his success, said Mpanga, and when he was commissioned by Sky to write and perform a closing piece for the 2013 Monaco Formula One Grand Prix, they had all gathered to watch in the local barber shop, the social hub of the estate, and had “gone crazy for it”.

Yet having slipped through the net to a “better reality from one where everyone tries and fails” as his writes in his poem Construction, this comes with a burden of its own. The 23-year-old is very vocal about the sense of responsibility he feels to productively use his increasingly elevated platform. As he says: “All the material I put out commercially is for political ends.”

“When I was in university with my material I was apprehensive to be completely myself in the public space,” said Mpanga. “I’m from a community that doesn’t often get to represent themselves, we don’t often get to do self-portraits. Whenever we are put in the public eye, it’s not very flattering. I’m used to that kind of vilification, people running away with things that have been said and taking them out of context and not being able to do anything about that. So I was very careful in the beginning about how I saw my stuff.”

He added: “Over time, I realised that you’ve got to give people credit, they do understand, a lot of the time it’s just the media that distorts stuff. So I just thought as long as my communication is clear, then I can be held to account for everything that I say and I’m more than happy to do that.”

Yet the 23-year-old is clearly still grappling with how to balance his own responsibilities as a mouthpiece for his community and society’s ignored ills with his own individuality, and is very open about the personal anger that still drives much of his writing. Mpanga is also keen to stress that the issues he tackles in his spoken word poetry differs little from that already in much of the rap and grime around today, but because he has the elevated platform of a Cambridge education, and an understanding of the sociological framework, he and his work are treated differently.

“When these grime artists and rappers are saying in their music ‘this is my experience, this is why it’s wrong, this is how it can change’, what the conversation becomes by the time it’s a hit is ‘Oh, he’s glorifying things, he’s materialistic’, when actually what he’s describing is upwards social mobility,” said Mpanga. “Because I have the luxury of having the sociological terms for this, people say I’m different from them, when actually I’m exactly the same.”

It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer productivity of this fiery and seemingly inexhaustible 23-year-old. Having released his first EP recently, titled The Chicken and the Egg, a collection of spoken word poems dealing with premature parenthood, Mpanga is currently touring it around universities, speaking directly to young people. He has already published a poetry book this year and is also furious writing material for a debut album, to be released on Island Records, which he said will see him “unpacking himself from a quasi-autobiographical perspective”. Mpanga also has a theatre production elaborating on the themes of his EP in the works and is writing a film which, for now, he is keeping under wraps.

His recent material, which in case of some tracks such as ‘1-2-1-2’ has begun to reintroduce music back into his poetry, has, said Mpanga, become more confident and less compromising as more people have begun to sit up and listen. He highlighted his recent song Tap Dancing, a rap confronting his position as a black man in the music industry and the stigma and expectation attached to that, as an example of his increasing boldness.

“That was scary song for me to write but now I plan to release it,” he said. “It’s a scary thought in that I am saying a lot of uncomfortable truths that my community and a lot of people in my position have to just bear. But why do we have to grit our teeth and bear these truths when they are social facts? So let’s put these social facts out into the public space and discuss it.

“Most people say ‘no, you don’t want to upset people because then you lock yourself out of certain markets’,” Mpanga said. “Luckily for me, nothing takes precedence over the impact, over the messaging and the communication and then the strategies and solutions, that’s the most important thing. So I don’t have to be scared anymore – and that will be reflected in my album.”