George the Poet: ‘there was no blueprint for what I do’

​​‘If art is to make a contribution to a better world, art needs to be able to deal with reality,’ says George the Poet, who, at 34, marks this point in his career as a transition from ‘intuiting’ the world around him, to making work that is grounded in deeper, relational analyses, analyses that are not ‘reactionary’ and do not centre himself. ‘I’m not a big fan of individualism at this time in my life, so I’m suspicious of poetic practices that try to keep us in an individual bubble,’ he says to me via webcam, in a black long-sleeve shirt that enhances the shine of his smile and his singular glittering gold tooth.

Look at his journey, and you see that George the Poet – real name George Mpanga – could’ve easily landed with a different modifier for his stage name. Growing up in the early days of grime in north west London and signing with a record label at 21 he could’ve easily been George the Rapper. Or George the Sociologist, given his studies at King’s College Cambridge where he dutifully honed sociological techniques for examining the Black struggle. Or perhaps he could’ve been George the Podcaster; as presenter of his Peabody-award winning Have You Heard George’s Podcast? – a podcast told entirely in verse that showcases his talent to interweave the personal, the political, the musical, and the poetic into an hour-long odyssey of mellifluous thought. 

But it’s as George the Poet that he has amassed a flurry of honors, awards and invitations; all in a remarkably short time. In addition to the Peabody for his podcast, he’s won in several categories of the British Podcast Awards and an NME award. And his poetry, motivated by articulating nuances of Black experience, has garnered award nominations from the BRITs, MTV and the BBC.

George grew up on St. Raphael’s Estate in north west London where most of the homes were rented by the government to low income-families, creating the conditions for rampant colourism between Caribbeans and Africans, difficult home environments that expressed itself as violence, but, also, the proximity of different musical traditions that fostered loose kinships locally and internationally. The environment was ‘full of wolves, and non-violence made [George] food’. ‘Ride Out’, a poem from his first collection Search Party, begins with: ‘The only way he can overcome the hopelessness that claimed everyone around him is by embracing the likelihoods of death and incarceration’. Yet one can see how music could assuage that hopelessness, offering a balm to the stressors in his environment; as George reflects, ‘every time I’ve engaged with music, I’ve had the opportunity to build my psychology’.

George’s parents were immigrants from Uganda, bringing with them a love of music that would permeate his consciousness. The soundtrack of his home life was made up of grime, pan-African music, gospel, and hip-hop. ‘My five siblings and I inherited our father’s love of music’, he writes in his book Track Record: Me, Music, and the War on Blackness. ‘My favorite hip-hop artists when I was young, I largely have contempt for them now,’ he says, referring to prominent Black music artists who profit from reifying stereotypes about Black communities, all the while, without expressing a ‘concrete Black political agenda’. Much of George’s output has focused on unpacking and exposing those tensions. ‘I developed my masculinity on the basis of this music and developed my artform on the basis of this music.’

‘I’d had the idea that grime without poetry was music,’ he writes, but testing and living out this idea became a parallel journey undertaken whilst he was completing his sociological and political studies at King’s College Cambridge. Alienated for not wanting to participate in violence in adolescence, enrolling at Cambridge opened up a different sort of alienation, being one of four Black students at the college, even if, as he writes, ‘At first I didn’t think much about the lack of Black people, or how it affected me’. But this didn’t deter George, who from became the Kings College Student Union chairman having delivered his campaign speech in rhymed verse, and would garner a broad audience for his creative output on campus, his buzz skyrocketing after he performed at a Jazz, Funk, and Soul event.

Upon graduation from Cambridge, at the age of 21, George signed a record deal with Universal Music’s Island Records. It brought an unexpected and rewarding soubresaut to his career, going from experimentations with his a capella grime verses in small venues to TV appearances and headlining major shows. ‘When I was younger it was about rhymes. That was my number one priority. Then it became about how can I rhyme beyond our neighbourhood?’ His craft swiftly developed, but that in itself often created tensions between what his label knew could sell and what he thought had artistic merit. ‘The dimensions on which we can push ourselves on craft are limitless. In a genre, we tend to convene around a certain set of values. In rap, it might be the flow, the delivery, the truth behind what you’re saying.’

Parting with the record deal wasn’t a decision that came lightly, though it illustrates the integrity by which George has tried to shape a career that doesn’t depend on those extractive and supremacist structures which he aims to critique. ‘There was no blueprint for what I do. All of my peers were rappers. If rap didn’t pan out for them they might have moved into music management or studio management’, and so it’s of little surprise that George’s opting out of a record deal was a decision that left a number of friends and family baffled.

But then George’s entire career can be viewed as one crafted through a series of acceptances and refusals, as he says, ‘I had to become selective’. Turning down Island Records was one thing, but then at 28 he took the decision to turn down an MBE. ‘I knew I couldn’t accept the MBE,’ he writes in Track Record, ‘I wasn’t about to co-sign the whole idea of empire by attaching those words to my name’. Such decisions mean sadly he’s no rookie to digital pile-ons and cancellation attempts, but through upswells of racial abuse for his personal choices George has persisted in his pursuit of an output and approach that encourages young artists to stay steadfast within their values and intention. ‘Hopefully future creatives don’t have the same debates I used to have with my friends, who said it’s just not possible to be progressive and popular’.

Now a doctoral candidate at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, George’s research is guided to understanding ‘how systemic change can be undertaken to create an economy that works for all’, with rap music as a primary means. ‘The role poets have played in some of the most oppressed communities in the world has renewed my appreciation for poetry,’ he explains. It’s therefore perhaps of little surprise that when asked what he would do if he weren’t a rapper, performer, or poet, he mused ‘I would do something connected with development of skills for young people. That’s what drew me into music in the first place. People don’t necessarily think of creative space as a developmental space’.

‘I lay it all bare,’ he reiterates, and indeed he does, whether that’s on his podcast, as a musician, as a noticeably in-demand speaker and performer, or, more recently, as a husband and father. In every arena George the Poet shows himself to be an unflinching artist whose powerful practice is capable of commingling the boundaries between the private and the political, all with that ear-capturingly warm baritone voice.

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