Akala - Knowledge Is Power

Full transcript: Akala on London Real

10:04 Right now. You’ve just come back from Jamaica. Akala, welcome to London Real. Thank you. Welcome.

10:11 Thanks for being here. You’ve been requested by a bunch of our fans for, like, a long time, nine months, a year. But you’re very difficult to prepare for. Yeah? Oh, yeah. Like, really hard. Like, I’ve had all sorts of people in here, like, we just talked about, like, Jacque Fresco. I’ve had, you know, the British Minister of Parliament, George Galloway, and Neil deGrasse Tyson in here, writers like Irving Wells, Jon Ronson.

10:33 But you’re probably the hardest, so bear with me. I hope we get through it all. You’ve got a lot of opinions. You’re spoken about a lot of different things. I usually don’t start here, but I thought maybe we could start here today with growing up in London, growing up in Camden.

10:50 It’s funny, I go to Camden now occasionally, and I kind of call it now the Camden theme park. I don’t know if you agree with me, but it seems like you go to the Camden theme park and you can experience what Camden was like maybe 20 years ago or 15 years ago. And I know musicians complain about this too. Sometimes they say that it’s not really where the independent music is, that kind of thing. But what was it like growing up in Camden for you, and how has it changed?

11:13 For me, I wasn’t tied to that one specific area, so I lived there. But my stepdad was the stage manager of the Hackney Empire Theatre. So I spent three, four days of the week there. A lot of my cousins lived in South London. My dad lived out of London, you know, West Sussex.

11:29 And my friends as teenagers lived kind of loosely between Tottenham and Halston. So I spent a lot of time all over London really. And I think growing up in London as a whole and Camden was perhaps the most extreme reflection of that is the side by side inequality is what really strikes me. Now I’m older and I look back and I look at my childhood friends and I see who’s done well and well and got good jobs and living nice lives and then who hasn’t. And you could have almost predicted it six years old, five years old from the way in which people entered the world, the kinds of family backgrounds they were from, economically, culturally, ethnically, you know, you could have added up a whole load of factors and pretty much predicted where everyone was going to end up and sadly that is how it’s turned out and so it makes me reflect really on social conditioning and the engineering of inequality and there’s a few exceptions to that, myself being one of them, I didn’t grow up with my dad, you know, we didn’t have a whole load of money but then I had some odds in my favour, you know, I had a library in house as a child growing up. My mum was always into reading, always into education, kind of pushed that on me. I had my godfather and my stepfather who were around. You know I experienced some bad things but I experienced some really good things that maybe have pulled me in the direction I’ve gone but then partly it was just luck. I’d be lying if I said I was never involved in any

12:45 Problems that could have led me in the other way. So really I think my greatest reflection on somewhere like Camden, going to school with children whose parents were millionaires and and then children, those of us who were, grew up on and off, quote, unquote, benefits. And you were interacting with all these kinds of- Well, I was in the lower strata of what we’re talking about, you know? Like I said, it was just my mom and we grew up on and off those kind of problems.

13:10 I lived in a council house. I was lucky, I didn’t live on the estate. I lived two streets from the estate. So like I said, I kind of was in between and that even though economically, I was worse off. Culturally, I was kind of equipped in many ways to deal with the world that would confront me.

13:27 I went to a special Saturday school, taught me alternative kind of history, so always led me in a kind of conscious path and in a path that would deal with some of the nonsense we also taught in school. But it’s really that that most stuck with me, the intergenerational inequality, even in a wealthy place like London. And what were the key factors in some of your peer group that turned out in the quote unquote bad ways or didn’t go, I guess, ultimately where they wanted to go.

13:53 Was it lack of the family? Was it socioeconomic? Was it pure economic? I think it’s all of the above. I think it’s economic, it’s social, it’s cultural, it’s racial, it’s your conditioning, it’s your family circumstance, but it’s also the larger society.

14:10 And it’s even school. Even though we have access to education, which is a massive benefit compared to many other places in the world, education is off-putting in the current way that it is to many people. the things that we’re taught in school, the authoritarian relationship between student and teacher, the dictatorial relationship, then particularly with a subject like history. But even as history impinges on maths and science and art and all these other things, the kind of Eurocentric curriculum is often put into a lot of people.

14:34 The glorification of monarchy. Even if people can’t articulate these things directly, even if students cannot say, this is what I think is bullshit about school, they just have a feeling. And so I think many of the students that are rebellious, often the most gifted, particularly from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, are often the most gifted students. There was a famous study, I don’t know the exact statistics, but it was looking at what percentage of people in prison had above Einstein’s IQ.

15:01 And there is a portion of people in prison, if you go from country to country, that have this high level of IQ. And I would argue that actually at five, six, seven years old, this mold, this kind of industrial revolution, learning by rote, preparing us to be serfs working factories mode of education that we’re all being asked to fit in. This one size fits all education doesn’t fit everybody and many of the people that are rebelling against it, Einstein included, who’s the guy everyone holds up as the worldwide measure of intelligence.

15:30 We know that his school teacher wasn’t a fan of him. Did he have degrees even? He wasn’t necessarily an academic by any means. Not from my understanding, but I know that there’s that famous quote of his school teacher telling me he wouldn’t amount to anything. Oh, okay.

15:42 Him and a few others probably. So many others, right? Now I’m saying that many geniuses are wasted because of society’s preconceived notions of identity, because of the approach, and I’m not saying I was a genius, what I will say though is the way teachers dealt with me in my schools and my brightness wasn’t as you’d expect teachers to often do it, I had some teachers that were very encouraging of it. I had other teachers that felt that person from my racial, cultural, economic background, And certainly from my socioeconomic background, should not have been top of the class.

16:15 And that pissed them off, and they were clear about it. That’s what was interesting, that at seven, eight, nine years old, my questioning, and my display of intelligence was viewed as threatening and not as something to be encouraged. And I learned that very early, that actually, this intelligence made certain sections of adult society uncomfortable. So you would play it down sometimes, or subconsciously? Sometimes, and I think, conversely, you’re going to play up your ignorance.

16:39 If ignorance is what is encouraged and rewarded in you, if sports are encouraged and given the thumbs up, but being good at maths is seen as not for people like you, which one are you gonna gravitate towards? Which one are you socially rewarded for? And so I’m saying all of these factors, if we could put them in some kind of mathematical equation, amount to a society where prisons are full of poor people generally, you know? And then the racial disproportions within prison are what they are, you know, where women do not end up being astrophysicists per se, not because women are necessarily less good at science, but because from very young, they’re taught, as a woman, you don’t wanna be clever as a guy.

17:15 If you’re clever as a guy, that’s unattractive. And obviously, a woman’s ultimate aim in life is to get married and to have children. That’s all women should care about. So I’m saying these conditionings work on many levels and they produce a result. But I think that we act like, in a society like this particularly, that education and politics and economics are kind of benign.

17:34 We’re not encouraged to analyze. We live in a society that is a result of a particular set of people’s ideas. You know, if you read Adam Smith. History is written by the victorious, right? Yeah, but not even just the victorious, in the sense that our economy and our culture and this society, like all societies, was designed.

17:54 And there are thinkers who are the designers of this society, and so it’s a society in their image. And so logically it reflects the cultural appetites of its designers. Is that intentional, that sign? Or is it a conspiracy design? Or is it just a result of whoever’s in power, whoever has the wealth that it kind of…

18:16 Well, it’s not conspiracy. I mean, people say Adam Smith or Thomas Malphurs, or they stated very clearly what, or even Plato, if we wanna go back, you know, two and a half thousand years to the root of kind of designs of European culture. They stated very clearly what their design for society was if we read the Republic, for example, you know? And so when we end up with societies that are a reflection of these designs or Machiavelli. We act surprised, it’s not conspiracy, it’s an implementation of a plan.

18:41 And that’s not to say we are powerless to interact against that. That’s not to say things always go the way the powerful want them to go, they do not. Because we’re human beings and we all have our own thoughts and feelings and opinions and we wake up from the matrix every so often and say actually, we’re gonna force power to divert its course in this particular direction or that particular direction. But those interact in social forces. Sadly, the balance of power often lies with the powerful and so the results, I would argue, certainly of my upbringing and of the people I grew up around, the results were predictable and they were the results that favored people that already had some access to power of some form, be that wealth, be that cultural, be that racial, social, gender, whatever else.

19:21 Have you seen much change say in the last 20 years if you went and looked at a 10 year old kid in Camden school system now to where you were 20 years ago, have things changed significantly? Yes and no. So I think that the outcomes are broadly similar. The same groups of people that were underachieving 20 years ago are sort of underachieving now, or underachieving. I would say they’re achieving exactly what it’s designed for them to achieve. I don’t think anyone goes into state schools and is taught, you’re going to run this country.

19:56 I think when people go to Eton and they’re destined for Oxford, they’re taught, as I know, because I know people that have gone to eat. They’re taught, you’re the cream of the crop, you’re the creme de la creme, you are destined to run this country. That is certainly not what I was told in my state school. And I doubt anyone else in the state school was taught that. We’re not taught that sense of entitlement to have our voices heard.

20:15 And so, I don’t know, I think that, as I said, there’s been reaction to it and some things have changed for the positive, some things have regressed. For example, when I was young, supplementary Saturday schools, particularly in my community, African-Caribbean community seemed to be, to me at least, a lot stronger, there were a lot more of them and they were a democratizing force, they were an alternative voice, they were a different voice within the society and certainly many of the young African-Caribbean origin students I know that have managed to achieve, in spite of the odds, have been products of these kinds of community Saturday schools, myself included, and it seems that that movement isn’t as strong today as it was 20 years ago for a number of reasons. They still exist, but I think the more overt forms of racism that were around in the 80s and that were acceptable, were unapologetic within the society, created a more intense need or understanding of need in the community, whereas I would say the manifestations of oppression are a lot more subtle today and therefore it just means the reactions to it are not as forthright sometimes.

21:22 Why music? You know, you could have played football. I know you might have had an injury. You could have gone into math. You probably could have gone to Eaton somehow.

21:30 I doubt it. I don’t think that would have sat with my persona. I mean, I have a lot of people that listen to this from the States. And if you don’t know, I mean, the British system is so it’s so unique. And the fact that you have these super elite schools, that even if you’re not told that these people will run the world historically, you know, they have, and they are some of the top institutions, even to to get into a lot of jobs in finance, where I used to work, you know, there are feeder schools from Cambridge and Oxford, there is this kind of shadow system of elite university versus non-elite in this country, I would say, much more than the U.S.

22:01 I’m talking about what they call the red brick university. But even before university level, you know, what is it? Something like 83% of senior government in this country went to Ian. Don’t quote me on that exact statistic, right, but I know it’s somewhere in that region. So not only are we talking about people in positions of power that are similar in terms of their gender, similar in terms of their race, similar in terms of their economic background.

22:22 We’re talking about people that just went to the same school, you know, and then we say democracy. I mean, how democratic can the decision-making process be when all the people in positions of power are not only from the same background, they all went to the same school. So I think that is worthy of dialogue, but people don’t seem to think so. But yeah, that school system is what it is. For me, music, I was always involved in music.

22:47 I grew up in a sound system. I grew up partly in a theatre, I always loved music, I always loved writing, which even I was good at maths and science, writing was still the thing that I felt I excelled at most in some form of writing. And then Public Enemy came out, but then Wu-Tang Forever came out. Yeah, so 1998 Wu-Tang Forever came out. Yes, 1997.

23:07 1997, excuse me. And you heard that, and that made you start reading, and I said, this is what I want to do with my life. Well, I was already reading, but I’m saying Wu-Tang Forever was a moment of crystallization almost. from Staten Island or inspiring a kid in England to go. For sure.

23:22 Now I look back now, that album, now a lot of people prefer 36 Chambers, I get that, but I was nine when 36 Chambers came out. Retrospectively I think is a great record and I know Wu-Tang forever got slept on a lot in the States, but for me here, number one, it was the first rap album to go number one in the UK. It was the first hip-hop album that it seemed in my childhood united everybody, even if we listened to, you know, the people who were listening to Oasis and Nirvana or Blur or whatever else.

23:49 Bhutan was the first record that got everyone’s attention, but was still authentically hood. It wasn’t trying to be an alternative music album, it just was, the level of poetry was that strong and that good that it seemed to pour everyone in. And everyone was just like, wow, in all of these guys. And so what struck me about Bhutan was the level of unapologetic poetry from these guys. They didn’t dress differently, they didn’t speak differently, they didn’t try and not be who they were.

24:11 Some of them have been to prison, some have been shot, some have sold drugs. They had a cliche hip hop upbringing, right? ghetto upbringing in the projects in New York, at least most of them, and yet here they were using words like benevolent in rap songs, and I just found that amazing, and I wrote out the lyrics to all 28 songs, it’s a double disc album, I still could tell you, the whole album back to front including the skits. Just before they printed lyrics and albums, or you could get them on the internet.

24:36 I mean this was when internet was really first starting to make its impact, I know for the young generation now they can’t even imagine a world without YouTube let alone without internet. I mean the people would know they forget that music was the original internet and whether you look at the doors sing and break on Through in the 70s and promoting an anti-war vibe or Wu-Tang spreading a message in 97. I mean, that was the way Music was the way to spread a message and so for me, I think that’s what attracted me most football I fell out of love with it. It was something that was very useful for me as a teenager that I think helped At least to the best of its abilities. It helped keep me out of trouble I was in I was getting the train to romford and back three times a week from North London, right?

25:13 Which it grew me up as well, you know, my mom was very sick during my early period of West Ham. She couldn’t take me. So I, as a 12 year old boy, and Ronford back then, I don’t know how it is now, you know, but Ronford back then was a real skinned area. Like it wasn’t somewhere as a young black or brown person, you really wanted to be found to be honest with you. It was a real NF territory and you know, we, we, we got a little bit of abuse a few times, you know, and things of that nature, but it grew me up character building.

25:35 It was character building. You know, it wasn’t, it wasn’t what my parents, that’s a great way to look at any horrible experience in your life. Yeah. I wanted to play football that much and when I was 12 or 13 years old, you could have told me I wasn’t going to be a Premier League football player. By the time I got to 15 or 16, I realised it wasn’t for me, I didn’t want to spend the next 15 years playing football to a lot of people that seemed like lunacy, especially given the money involved, but it’s the kind of thing you have to love, in my opinion, to do every day.

26:03 Right, no regrets on that. No regrets on that at all. I mean, I was good, but players that were far better than me, I know personally, are not playing in the Premier League. So how do you express your creativity as a football? I know you can during the game, but you can’t on a hundred different levels like you are able to.

26:19 Exactly, A, and B, I think there’s a, football’s very political though. Again, it cloaks itself, kind of like the music industry now, in this mythology or in the shroud of apoliticism. So so many things that are political go on within the footballing world. Yet, footballers are encouraged to keep quiet, to shut up. There’s this really sly social pressure that’s put on them, to shut them up, basically.

26:42 To keep them well paid millionaires, basically. Okay, political between teams or between sovereign nations? I mean, all of the politics of the society that we’ve just been talking about, all of the geopolitics of the world that we can analyze are reflective within sports, you understand? We were talking about the World Cup earlier and the politics of the World Cup then to Brazil, and now we’ve heard it’s gonna be in Qatar, right? You know, we were talking about, I’m talking about all of the same stratification processes that exist within the society, exist within professional sports.

27:12 And there’s a power structure within football and you’re encouraged to be obedient to that power structure. And it’s a huge moneymaker these days, which has changed dramatically since you were playing. I mean, the last 10 or 20 years, these… No, I mean, even when I was a child, really the money came into football when the Premier League was founded, which was in 1992 and I was 19. So my whole life growing up, football was a big money.

27:35 I mean, even when I was a child, Stan Collymore got transferred for five million pounds. I remember that being a big deal. But if you think, in the mid-90s, that’s still a lot of money, right? And people were on 20, 25 grand. That was the, I mean, people are on 10 times that now, but 20 grand a week still wasn’t anything to be sniffed at, right?

27:52 Yeah, it’s still a lot of money. We tell people that in the States that are like a week. I mean, you know, the salary’s quoted in weekly terms over here. Yeah. It’s pretty shocking.

28:00 So you were saying, creativity, football has a lot of politics as well. So all right, no regrets there. No. OK, let’s talk Wu-Tang briefly. You said one time that after the Wu-Tang album came out, Wu-Tang Forever, you said immediately after that, hip-hop went from being about history, philosophy, and culture to being literally money cash and hoes.

28:20 Now was that you speaking at the time, or did it really trend that way? I think that’s a polarizing and extreme statement, but I think that’s sort of the way it felt at the time. It felt like there was this brief moment in the mid-90s, and I know a lot of people People think, position it even earlier. They would position it at the point of public enemy. They would position it, you know, at the point that NWA came out.

28:44 I’m saying for me, the final time that, group of what I saw, and of course, they had their street side, which I think was cool. What I loved about Wu-Tang was that they were reflective of the whole hood, in the sense that you had Ghostface and Rayquan rapping about selling drugs and rapping about that lifestyle that they lived and went through, and you had Rizzo on the total other side calling himself the abbot and rapping about philosophy. had the jizzo who rarely swears, and then you had ODB who played the group drug addict, who ironically, from what I understand in real life, was the only member of the group who was actually from a middle class home.

29:18 So he reflected this psychosis by where young African-American men particularly are encouraged by the stereotypes of the wider society to believe that they’re not from the ghetto and they’re not really black, they’re not black enough, right? And so it seems that ODB was playing into that a little bit rather than being comfortable with the fact that he was actually from quite a nice home. And so for me- And they were fairly anti-commercial. They were, but then they became so wildly commercially successful.

29:42 And it feels to me the last time that happened in hip-hop that a group who didn’t have choruses on every song, a group whose music sounded hard, a group who were rapping about serious issues of politics, philosophy, history, you know, a group that really reflected the culture of hip-hop and reflected hip-hop’s origins, you know, in the ghettos of America, also in the wider African cultural diasporic experience in the Caribbean and South America and what is meant to be black in all of those societies. Wutang seemed the last commercially successful group that was successful and that year they didn’t win the Grammy for Best Hip Hop. Puff Daddy won it for no way out. And to me, to argue that Puff Daddy’s album is a better rap album. We’re not talking about commercial success, we’re talking about best rap. I do believe the category was to argue that in essence Puff Daddy is a better reflection of rap or hip-hop than Wu-Tang I think is a fast stretch of the imagination but it made it very clear what the mainstream industry, in spite of commercial success, what it wanted to elevate and what it didn’t want to elevate, in my opinion.

30:42 Okay, and how did that direct your music and your career? Did you want to bring back? Did you want to not go in that direction? Well at that stage, the idea that you could have a career as a British rapper was kind of ridiculous. Because it wasn’t happening.

30:57 But there were guys doing it and respect to the guys who paved the way, respect to the London Posse and to Skinny Man and to all of these guys that paved the way so someone like me could exist, right, or Ty or whoever else. But the idea that you could actually make a living in a career, this is before YouTube, this is before the internet interacted with music in any significant way. It didn’t seem possible to do that and keep your integrity, certainly.

31:21 And so even though I wanted to do it, I didn’t know how I was going to do it yet, and I was still playing football. So I saw all of this politics of hip-hop, hip-hop was my life, it was something I lived, I loved interacting with it, I wrote lyrics every day, I was in battles, I did this, I did that. But if you’d have told me then that I’d do seven or eight UK tours, I’d release four albums and three mixtapes independently, that I’d literally perform in 30 or 40 countries all around the world as an independent artist, I would have been very pleasantly surprised, even though a lot of people were like, well, you should be more commercially successful, you should sell more records.

31:54 I see it differently. grateful for where I’m at because I feel like I’ve been able to achieve a certain level of success, but maintain that integrity and that message and I don’t see too many artists able to do that. And that doesn’t mean I’m dissing other artists because I don’t think every artist views it the way I do. If all you care about in life is buying Gucci and drinking champagne and your music reflects, that doesn’t make you a sellout. If you’re someone like me and you care about different things and then you make music about Gucci and champagne just to sell records, then you are a sellout.

32:22 I don’t think everyone should see the world the way I see it. I’m saying, for someone with my predisposition to then start making music I dislike just to succeed is something that would compromise my spirit and I’m not willing to do. But I am, like I said, very content with where I’m at in terms of my career. If you look at 2006 at that mobile award, whether you consider that a milestone or not, I guess it is an event that happened back in the past. I mean, what did it take to get there?

32:46 Well, one of the things I was able to do in 2006, I was probably one of the first and one of a tiny handful of independent hip hop artists that have ever managed to break a Radio 1 playlist. And the way the industry works in this country, if you don’t get onto Radio 1, they’re really the gatekeeper in terms of selling, being commercially successful. Still to this day. To this day. If you’re not on Radio 1, you’re not going to sell over X number of albums.

33:11 I don’t know what the magic number is, but let’s say it’s 30,000 or 50,000. And that hasn’t changed in 10 years. If you’re not on the… it hasn’t changed since forever. How is that even conceivable?

33:19 Well, because the playlist… In this information age. there’s Radio 2 as well, but Radio 2 doesn’t sell you as many records. You can literally correlate what Radio 1 playlist you’re on with how many records you’re going to sell. You can have a small independent fan base like me and succeed, it’s self-released, but you cannot be exposed to a wider, and the way that music industry works in this country, when you go to magazines, when you go to say MTV, when you go to any area of the industry, they ask you for what’s the plot. They don’t ask you is the music good or not. They They ask for it, what’s the plot, I, who’s writing about you, who’s playing your video, but ultimately, and most importantly, who on Radio 1 is playing your records.

33:56 And if you’ve got play from this guy and that guy and that guy and you’re about to go onto the playlist, then you’re going to get written about, you’re going to get talked about, and your status goes up. That’s the way it works. One of the things I was able to do in 2006 was to break that, which is not easy to do. I had one as an independent artist. I had a song called Shakespeare, get onto the playlist.

34:13 By the back door, really. It got played by a house DJ, by Pete Tong. So it didn’t come the traditional way that rap is supposed to go on the playlist. Pete Tong played it and then it got played by other people from there, by Zane Lowe and others and it made it onto the playlist, which not too many independent artists do. Then it meant the video would obviously get played a lot by MTV, et cetera.

34:32 And so it meant even as an independent artist, I had a certain level of visibility that I could be in a category with much more numerically successful American artists. And a lot of people dissed the mobos and there’s contradictions within the mobos, but For me, the only major award ceremony I saw supporting independent artists. I wasn’t the first independent UK hip-hop artist to win that award. Sway won it the year before me. And again, he was an independent artist.

34:54 There were no other award ceremonies giving people like him a look-in. And so for me, for such a commercial award ceremony, which does what it does, that was something that gave a lot of people an awareness of who I was and was away. And frankly, in economic terms, at that point, it sold albums. When you could put mobile hoodwinners sticker on your CD, this is back when you had record stores, HMB would rack you differently, you know, you have to buy a rack in, a lot of people who don’t know that.

35:24 If you want to be in books, you know, if you want to be at the front of the store, you pay the retailer thousands of pounds to be at the front of the store. But if you win a mobile, I mean, or a Mercury or a Brit or whatever else, you know, you get priority rack in. And so that debut album sold a lot of physical copies because of that. So there were consequences and it just meant I had a lot of people’s attention. Um, but you know, I think I made some mistakes and me and my team made some mistakes in the way we released that record in our understanding of the industry, we were new to things then.

35:53 It was your first album Nick. My first album, we didn’t fully understand yet. I mean, YouTube had just come around and we didn’t understand really how to use and embrace that. We spent a lot of money on videos that we probably didn’t need to spend, but we were just at that curve where you still needed to get on the television and to get on the television you had to have you had to make videos that look like they could compete with these big-budget US artists that have a millions of pounds better. They were hiring Hollywood directors to make their videos. Exactly right so I mean Channel U also changed that. Channel U was a big part of the industry back then where it was the first channel and it forced MTV based and other stuff and give more attention to UK artists but also showed there was a market for underground UK hip-hop. People like myself and Kalashnikov you know and others came out of that you know or Cano or Sway Or any of these guys in this period channel you was a big part of giving people a platform Which has an independent music television only independent music channel that basically played Anybody did the people vote that up at all or they just voted you know people voted people could request your video But the point was it was a non-playlisted Channel so it meant anyone with a decent video sometimes not even a decent video There was some terrible videos played on it the point was it was kind of democratic in a way

37:01 You know I had its own internal issues or whatever else But it certainly gave many many people who wouldn’t have been heard otherwise a platform the first way I know I heard someone like Kalashnikov for example Who was a you know was was his video murder and I’ve been watching that video I’m thinking right this guy can really rap right and it was channel you that gave him that Exposure to me even if someone was in the scene And so there were a number of converging forces in that period that allowed a few of us to break through and and many of Us are still here, you know 10 years later But the same challenges remain in terms of the way the industry works the way radio and TV works But what you do have is you have a the internet we use them right now, which is a way you can have a career with really Very little compromise. You can shoot what video you want to shoot You can make what music you want to make and if the music is good enough it will find an audience It might not find an audience commensurate with the quality of the music You might feel that you should sell X number of albums and only sell X But if the music is good enough, if the visual is good enough, if your online interaction is decent, you can keep your integrity and have a career.

38:03 I know because like I said, I’ve performed in, I don’t know, 35, 40, 50 countries all around the world. And what’s ironic, I don’t say that to show off, but I think what’s ironic and what’s important for young artists to see is that in this day and age, precisely because of the integrity in the music, precisely because I talk about things that other artists are not talking about, is why I’ve been invited to go to all of these places. It’s not an accident.

38:22 And so that’s not to say, again, that someone who doesn’t have my predisposition should just rap about the things I rap about, to try and be successful is to say and to encourage artists that there is another alternative, there is another way to market now that there wasn’t 20, 30, 40 years ago. If they curate a fan base, they can kind of make a living doing that. They’re not going to be flying jets and stuff, but you really do have to work at it, right?

38:45 Because the competition’s there. And you still, ultimately, for the big success, like you said, you need to be on the playlist. You need to have the label. A million percent. Have you seen this movie called Artifact?

38:55 By the guy that his name is Jared Lado. He’s the lead singer for 30 seconds tomorrow. So it’s this whole film about his fight with his label. I think it was BMG or something about how they had this whole, they had basically had like three or four number one albums. And after 10 years with the label, they owed the label $2 million or something. And yeah, go ahead.

39:14 But anyone who understands the way the music industry is designed, there’s a very simple book I should read. It’s called everything you need to know about the music business by Donald S. Passman and it breaks down loads of things that they do in the music industry like for example they have a system called free goods so they sell 85 of every 100 CDs to a retailer and they give 15 away free but they charge a higher percentage for the 85 so the label doesn’t lose money it’s literally just a way because the artist gets paid off a retail worry it’s a way of giving away 15% of the CDs so that the artist doesn’t have to be paid on those 50s.

39:49 They have another clause for breakages back in the day when vinyl used to break. Now they charge the clause for vinyl breakages on MP3 downloads. Even Eminem had to sue his label to get back the millions of dollars that he lost for vinyl breakages for sales of a digital thing. So there’s a lot of scams and ways in which, I mean TLC owed money after selling 10 million albums. So we know that this kind of shafting and robbery and thievery isn’t music industries in the toilet.

40:19 That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to go in that major label route. I’m not saying it happens to every artist, but I’m saying that if you can have three or four number one albums and owe your label money, saying if you study the mathematics in the way the industry works, that doesn’t mean the labels lost money on your product. People shouldn’t make that mistake. It means that the things that are charged to you, the things that are recoupable are unrecouped from your percentage.

40:40 So let’s say you get a 12% royalty. It means that production costs, the cost of making the album, 50% of the video budget, has to be recouped out of your 12%. So the labels already made their money four, five, six times over, but you’re unrecouped. Does that make sense? And so it’s this kind of bullshit that puts a lot of artists off.

40:58 Yeah, you would either love or hate this movie watching this because they talked about exactly what you just said. They’re selling digital downloads and paying for breakage fees, et cetera, et cetera. And now you look at 30 Seconds of Mars and they’re touring like madmen and then you realize oh it’s because the labels not taking a cut of the tour so that’s how they’ve made their money over the years but in this day and age most labels are taking a cut of the tour merchandise of everything now listen I think in an ideal world if the label spends money investing you in a fair world there’s a way of constructing a 360 deal which is the model a lot of labels do today that is fair if you’re the kind of artist that wants to be massively popular and sell millions of records only a major label has the capability to make that happen for you if they make that happen for you and they construct some kind of fair deal where they get a part of the things that come out of that I don’t see for that kind of artist that that’s terrible the problem is is people are so greedy they have to you know shaft you that extra mile they can’t just say you know what we’ve made a hundred million dollars off you you know we should cut you in a piece of the pie you know a fair piece of the pie that we’ll take 99 and we’ll leave you with one you know there’s just this propensity to just steal and steal and steal there isn’t necessary because

41:59 There is money going around but yeah most artists that are touring now on that scale the labels are taking a cut of that. Did you ever think about signing with the label yeah it’s something I contemplated because after the mobile you must have been approached by a lot of people yes I know you know there were whisperings but I think the general understanding was that I was a bit hard-headed and I’m not one that was really willing to compromise and I also because of my knowledge of the music industry I wasn’t gonna sign up for bullshit for the kinds of clauses that we went through so I kind of made a decision then I would do it myself independently and we’ll continue to do myself independent unless someone makes me an offer I can’t refuse and what What does that mean?

42:37 It doesn’t just mean money, it means creative license, it means complete creative control, it means no censoring on anything I say, et cetera. And I don’t think there are very many major labels in the world today willing to go for some life. If we use the analysis of my Bridging Loki, I know he sold thousands and thousands and thousands of albums with no radio, no TV, just off YouTube. Now if the music industry was just about making money, labels would be beating down his door.

43:02 Rock bands, very few pop artists that have sold the amount of albums he’s sold, that have been able to sell out the garage, both me and him, independently of one another, have both sold out the garage in Holloway, Venyana, what’s the capacity, 650, 700 or whatever in which. As an independent artist, no song on the playlist, my song on the playlist was seven years ago, eight years ago, so no one can say it’s because of the radio, literally because of a strong fan base online, because of YouTube, etc. We can sell that amount of tickets, we can sell the amount of merch we’ve sold, we can about albums we sold. Labels should be beating down his door if they want to make money, right?

43:33 But his political message is just never going to be played, never going to be played on the radio. Not marketable. But that’s the thing, it is marketable. Because how is it he’s able to sell that amount of albums and that amount of tickets just off YouTube? If people don’t want to hear all that political shit, how is his success or mortal technique’s success, you know, how is that explainable?

43:54 They tell us it’s not marketable. What they mean is, again, it doesn’t fit with with the agenda of the people who control the music industry. That’s not about conspiracy. What would be the consequence? If the song Terrorist, for example, was that popular just off a YouTube video, what would be the consequence if it was played daytime on Radio 1?

44:10 Do you think people would just suddenly not like the song and not listen to it? But what he’s saying is unacceptable to be played at that time of day to that audience, not because it wouldn’t resonate with them, actually quite the contrary, because if it resonates with them, what are the consequences of that? And what are the consequences of making someone like Kareem Dennis, AKA Lowkey? a national superstar in a country like this. He’s not harmless.

44:30 He’s got something to say. What are the effects on people’s consciousness of making someone like that a pop star? So he will not be made a pop star, even if he can generate money. And you’re saying that starts to break down other institutions, political, commercial, everything. Yeah, of course.

44:44 And this is not unique or new. A lot of people say it’s conspiracy. No, throughout the ages, even in the Bible, they talk about singers and players of instruments and their interaction with power. If we go from ancient Egypt to the Griots of West Africa, to the poetry of the Islamic world, the interaction between musicians and entertainers and power has always been there. If we talk about the classical world where certain phrases were banned because they were considered devilish and demonic or associated with infidels, with the Moors, et cetera.

45:13 So this interaction between music’s spiritual and esoteric and human power and the power of the state and the church and all these other stakeholders in society has always been there. just a modern manifestation of it. But when you talk about people, it’s like conspiracy theory. On that note, let’s talk about one of your favorite individuals, Shakespeare. You had a long association with him, whether it came from, didn’t you write some tracks on the fly and perform them originally about Shakespeare?

45:47 And then later you’ve got this whole Shakespeare project. Let’s just get your general read on Shakespeare. Now we also have here the English relationship with Shakespeare, we also have the rest of the world in America’s relationship, which is even different, but how do you break down that? Well, Shakespeare’s a genius, that’s fairly obvious, right? He’s not a genius without flaws, all geniuses have flaws, right?

46:10 And what I don’t do, even though I use Shakespeare to teach and even though I have a tremendous amount of respect for him, I don’t engage in this kind of, he’s the greatest writer of all time, that’s kind of culturally biased, you know, maybe he’s the greatest writer in English, that’s the only way you could even analyse it, because if you don’t speak and understand all those languages, how you could ever analyse their poetry is beyond me. I don’t not see the contradictions, you know, plays like The Merchant of Venice or The Tempest, quite xenophobic, you know, I don’t see his limitations. He also has fifteen poems to his black mistress that everyone’s completely ignored, they’re completely inconvenient, even though he refers to her over and over again as being black, even though a lot of people believe it was this lady called Lucy Morgan, you know, so there’s whole politics around Shakespeare. Remember, he’s living in his grandparents’ lifetime. Spain was an Islamic country governed by Africans and Arabs. You know, many of those Moors, when that empire fell, came all over Europe. Some of them even came to England. Shakespeare’s Queen, Queen Elizabeth I, issued a proclamation complaining there were already too many of these people and wanted to expel them. So even the world in which Shakespeare exists, the violence, the kind of grotesque lack of sanitation that existed in London and In London’s position within the world, London was not the trading and banking center of

47:19 The world in Shakespeare. It wasn’t the Industrial Revolution. No. There were cities all around the world, particularly in China, in India, and Islamic Middle East, even in West Africa. I mean, Timbuktu and others were sort of in decline by Shakespeare’s birth.

47:31 But nonetheless, London was not what it is today. In geopolitical terms, it was not the center of the world. But we retrospectively project that back into Shakespeare’s wealth, which I think actually gives him less flavor and gives him less of a real touch. I think analyzing the real world in which Shakespeare lived, trying to really understand the society, understanding even why people say, well, he didn’t really write the plays. People prefer Kevin Bacon or somewhere else.

47:56 They don’t consider that Shakespeare had the right education to be able to write this kind of material. I find even all of that interesting and how he’s become the ultimate symbol of British elitism in some ways. But for me, that’s the very reason why I claim it. Because… But he wasn’t part of the elite, was he?

48:10 Exactly. Right. He didn’t grow up from that. I took him into that realm, you know, and eventually he became, you know, his company became the King’s Men, et cetera, right? But his talent took him in that direction, not his birth.

48:23 And so for me, I find him an interesting character for all of those reasons, for his influence on the English language, and also because of the brilliance of his work, ultimately, withstanding all of those contradictions. And so I find that using his work particularly because it’s perceived that way, because it has this PR attached to it, because it is brilliant, because it is so widely translated. It’s about who’s gonna be the custodian of that knowledge. There are people who see themselves as the legitimate inheritors of Shakespeare.

48:50 Many of whom wouldn’t see someone like me as being a legitimate inheritor of that tradition, but I don’t give a shit. Do you understand? I see any writer in the world as my intellectual property and something I can interact with as an artist, and I see for young people in a school system like the one we live in where you have to study this guy. Having someone like me interpret him and someone like our company interpret him, Not in a way that it’s not about dumbing Shakespeare down and doing it in you, speaking, get or speak.

49:16 The musicality is right there in the words. I’m not feigning something. If you know Shakespeare’s work, you know all throughout his career, he’s experimenting with rhythm and changing rhythm, and you can see visibly, if you look at the Tempest, which is his last play, and you look at his earlier plays, you can literally see in the shape of the stanzas, right, where he’s made a conscious decision to experiment and change rhythms, right? So I’m saying this musicality is in there to not teach Shakespeare as what it primarily was, is performance poetry, right, to not see it performed and hear it.

49:44 They used to say back in the day, you’re going to hear a play, which is where the word audience comes from because the word was considered more important than the visual, right? So for all of these reasons, I feel that we have a position and a place that some people would like to use and a place that some people consider inconvenient. They would prefer, I think, I don’t know who the they is, you know, but there are people that that even though they say they want these traditions to be taught how much do they want young people from in a city like London from working class backgrounds from all the ethnic backgrounds to say well actually this is my take on it and my takes just as valid as yours that’s democracy we don’t really want democracy we want the people who are the owners and controllers of the society to to filter down their interpretation of the traditions our interpretations are not seen as valid so I’m aware and cognizant of the politics of this this guy but ultimately it comes down to the quality also of his art. You see Putin in Russia now and he’s almost rewriting history and kind of glorifying Stalin in a lot of the history books where note he was you know known for killing millions of people and you always see it with the ruling power how they either rewrite history or maybe in some ways try to reinterpret culture you know for their own means whether it’s intentional or No, I think ruling, I mean, I can’t speak to Russia particularly, because I don’t know

51:03 Enough of the history, right, but ruling powers will always flatter themselves. That’s no more natural. Or direct even the proletariat to do this or do that, or… Yeah, but I think that said, I mean, there are different types of ruling powers that interact with society in different ways, but ultimately, any power structure in the world wants to stay powerful, right? about human history tells us that people in positions of power just say I’ve had enough of all this power and wealth and privilege, I’m just going to give it up. You know there are individual occasions of it, there are individuals who’ve got enlightened and said actually I don’t need this, I’m going to go and study in the mountains or I’m going to engage with the working classes and be part of a revolutionary force, but as a general rule, a lot of the time privilege is invisible to you as well, if you’re born into it, it’s just, it’s normality, it doesn’t seem like a contradiction, it’s just what you’re born into. And so I think for me, what I’m more fascinated with and what I try and engage with in the teaching of history, which I also do, is reality, but it’s also the history of ordinary people, the ways in which ordinary people, not kings and queens and exceptional leaders, but the opinions, thoughts and actions of ordinary people, in my view, are actually what direct history.

52:19 But then the history is rewritten. I mean, the ending of slavery is the best example, right? The way that that’s the most clearest example to me, the way that’s rewritten as being the product of a few elite guys in Westminster and Abraham Lincoln, and that’s what happened. We don’t want to talk about the Maroons in Jamaica in their 80-year military engagement with the British. We don’t want to talk about the Haitian Revolution.

52:40 We want to talk about Palmeiras in Brazil, which was an independent African state that lasted almost 100 years against the Portuguese. We’re not going to talk about the change in requirements of industrial capitalism in in that period which Eric Williams outlined so well in his classic work, Capitalism and Slavery. We’re just gonna rewrite the history and say, and this happened to me, I went to school as a kid. I wasn’t lying about it. When I said in my fire in the booth about my school teacher, we went to the National Portrait Gallery and there was a picture of William Wilberforce.

53:06 And my teacher, she called me aside of all the kids in the class. Now I went, I was the kid who was a bit controversial. We went to the Pan-African Saturday School who had a big mouth and an opinion, right? And she called me and she said, this guy Kingsley, he stopped slavery. And I said, Miss, you mean he helped, he contributed?

53:21 Cause even at that age, I was aware that people didn’t just say, oh, I’m going to wait for some guy to come and save me. How old were you? 12, 10. I was not, I was seven. Seven, okay.

53:28 I was in year four. And she went, no, he stopped slavery. And she got angry with me and this has stuck with me my whole life, this, that she was, I mean, could she have been that unintelligent that she fought one individual, stopped this what in its own time would have been this multi-billion dollar industry? Or was she trying to impose on me particular ideal without even realizing it, I think it’s the latter. And so what I’m saying is that the rewriting of history is very powerful, because even very recent history can be rewritten very quickly and people forget.

53:59 Here in the UK, there were riots all up and down the country in the 80s. Every time the Tottenham riots, for example, get mentioned on the news, the ones in 85, they mentioned the police officer that was killed, yet they don’t mention the grandmother who was killed. The police enter the house of Cynthia Jarrett looking for her son, Floyd Jarrett, and Cynthia Jarrett ends up dead. Now, every time it’s mentioned on the news, they mention P.C. Blakelock, but they don’t mention Cynthia Jarrett.

54:24 This is a way of rewriting history by omission. When they talk about the Brixton riots, which occurred in the same period of time, they do not talk about Sherry Gross getting shot in the back by the police and paralyzed. Another grandmother, right? So it’s a way of just saying, well, there were riots. It was just crazy people burning stuff for no reason, right?

54:41 And the root of the frustration, not to mention what was going on in the society generally at the time, but the particular sparks are not included. And so you get rewriting by omission. And that’s the 80s, and that’s right here in London. Does that stuff make you angry? Yeah, but I understand it.

54:56 I mean, it does make me angry, and it used to make me very angry. Now it’s more a reserved pissed-offness. Like in a sense that I expect it, it’s predictable, it’s boring, I almost get shocked when I And I see something that’s alternative or a bit truthful, I’m like, what? Huh? You know, every so often a program comes in the telly and it leaves me scratching my head because it’s so honest.

55:21 You know, but it doesn’t happen very often. But I expect it, I understand it, it just, it’s part of the structure of power. And is part of your role to continually remind us or to challenge these things and to remind people that this stuff is happening? I mean, do you feel like that’s necessary for you to kind of wake up every morning And every week just to be like back to what I was saying this stuff You still need to understand it because if I don’t keep talking about this stuff. You’re gonna forget. Yeah I make no claims whatsoever to be objective a lot of people use this word be objective Which I think is just liberal hubris crap. It’s impossible to be objective You can try and be fair from within your own biases from within your own condition from within your own culture even your language Predisposes you to view the world a particular way So this idea, this kind of fluffy, fairy idea, that you can step out of all of that and speak on behalf of all of humanity, personally, I think, is bollocks.

56:14 So I am giving my particular bias. I’m trying to be fair, but I am absolutely conscious and 100% unapologetic about speaking from within my life experience, my studying of the world, my view of the world, my family and my cultural background. If I didn’t go to Pan-African Saturday School, if I didn’t grow up in the Empire, if I I didn’t listen to Wu-Tang forever or read the autobiography of Malcolm X when I was 9. Would I be the person I am today? Probably not.

56:38 If I instead grew up with my Scottish family in the Outer Hebrides, it’s entirely possible that I would view the world a completely different way, right? So I make no apologies for that. I’d rather just be honest about it and say up front, because I think when people talk about objectivity, it’s one of these ways of kind of fooling you into believing in the myth of universalism, this idea that we can, like I said, speak on behalf of the whole world. The more different biases you can hear, the more different biases you can see, the fairer picture you can build up of the overall picture.

57:06 I don’t want to impose my beliefs on the history of India. I’d rather study the history of India from the perspective of an Indian person. And then within the context of the globe, understand the history of India. But this idea that I can understand the history of India based on the history of Jamaica, two places with completely different histories, completely different ethnic makeups, completely different longevitys and religious beliefs and all these things.

57:27 Are some similarities but there are also many differences and to me the beauty is indifference a lot of human beings want to erase difference and say we’re all the same why can’t we all just no to me the beauty is in this especially these days yeah yeah it’s trending it’s trending that way that’s in a way of erasing people to the dominant culture they’re not saying let’s get rid of the dominant culture they’re saying when they say can’t we all be the same they’re saying why can’t we all just fit in with dominant culture in my view that’s what people mean when they say that oh we’re all just the same let’s just Let’s all be the same. Let’s all speak English and believe in this and wear these kind of clothes. It’s all like everything.

57:59 Yeah. No. There are people that are different. And to me, that’s amazing. Like what we were discussing earlier, we practice martial arts that are not from either of our respective ethnic backgrounds.

58:11 I don’t want to change Brazilian jiu-jitsu or Muay Thai. They’re not Scottish Jamaican martial arts. They’re just not. And no matter how… My coach is African-Caribbean.

58:21 The Ajahn, which is the grand master that teaches all of us, is also African-Caribbean. Guess what? No matter how many chumps of Muay Thai, now my only John Jones is Anderson Silvers, practice Muay Thai, it will still be Thai. And that’s OK. That’s one of the beautiful things that the Thai people have contributed to the larger pot of great things that humans have access to, for want of a better set of words.

58:43 But to distort it and pretend that we’re all the same and that we all produced that martial art, not that it’s the specific production of that culture. I just find a little bit dishonest and I find the beauty is in that difference of philosophy like we’re saying we’ve both been to Thailand right and the contradiction between the the fact that Thai people don’t shout you will not hear people in Thailand shouting this kind of non-aggressive warm culture and then fighting is their national sport that’s amazing it’s amazing that’s amazing right now the background I’m from is the complete opposite right I’m talking in fact both Scottish people and Jamaicans are loud right and And both of them can be kind of aggressive, but fighting is not the national sport in Jamaica and it’s not the national sport in Scotland.

59:25 So this kind of beauty by where Thai philosophy, philosophy of that part of the world, can have this kind of polite, balanced, meditative view of the world, but then be able to beat the living daylights out of you at the same time, I find that amazing. It’s a contradiction, especially if you don’t train martial arts. If you do train, you start to kind of see it. You understand it. Yeah, which is probably why you’re drawn to training.

59:49 Let’s talk about Jamaica, you just came back, your father’s Jamaican, the UK has a long relationship with Jamaica, which I don’t know if everyone is even aware of, especially in America, so tell us about Jamaica. Well, the UK’s relationship starts in 1655, Jamaica was originally, not originally, it was originally an inhabitation of the Taino and Arawak native indigenous American people. It then became a Spanish colony in 1655, and the British took it off the Spanish line.

1:00:21 They did it in many other places, and America would do later on in the Spanish-American war. It was a war over colonies. Britain took over the island. It became, in many people’s opinion, one of, if not the most brutal slave colony in the history of the world, and that’s not my interpretation of it. That’s many scholars who studied slavery in Rome, in Greece, in Viking slavery in Ireland, even transatlantic slavery.

1:00:41 Many, many people have come to a conclusion that Jamaica was particularly brutal. Why is it this is the economic reasons economic reasons where it was in the Caribbean the terrain So it’s incredibly hilly as are many other Caribbean islands, but say Barbados for example Barbados is much flower So when they’re rebellions in Barbados is relatively easy to crush those rebellions because you can see everybody When there’s a rebellion in Jamaica as we saw with the Maroons and many others is very very difficult And also it was very it was the richest British colony So Haiti or Hispaniola, which was again was originally Spanish and then became French Haiti was the richest colony in the Caribbean full stop But the richest English-speaking colony was Jamaica. So it was also the fact that it just produced so much wealth for so many people Obviously built on the back of slave labor. Is it sugar cane sugar cane primarily and sugar primarily But coffee is another major export on the island and today it’s bauxite, which is used to make aluminium and tourism again Much of which is not owned by Jamaicans. Most most of the money generated by tourism and bauxite leaves the island And this is one of the legacies of colonialism and slavery.

1:01:45 This is why when we talk about these things and people say, stop going on about it, it’s the past. The same people who want me to remember Shakespeare, who lived a long time before slavery ended in Jamaica, don’t want me to remember the history of Jamaica, which I find funny. But what they really mean is shut up, we don’t really want to see the correlation between the ending of transatlantic slavery, independence, and the neo-colonial situation of Jamaica today.

1:02:06 Because that gives weight to arguments for things like reparations. It’s not about complaining about an event 150 years ago, it’s about understanding how that event led to, and I, in light of Jamaica, that has tremendous resources, it generates tremendous wealth, still having such massive inequality, still being so massively indebted to the IMF and the World Bank, still having astronomical murder rate, and all of these other things that are quite distressing to me and sad to me about this place that where my family come from. On the other hand, has probably beyond, and I say this with total bias, but I think people can recognize what I’m saying, beyond any other place of comparable size, has also culturally influenced the entire planet.

1:02:44 Not just through reggae music and through sports, but through, even if we go earlier, through Marcus Garvey, who unified more people of African origin than any other movement before or since, who influenced every subsequent movement in Africa, independence movement, from the Malmaui in Kenya to even the flag of Ghana is Garvey’s symbol. That black star is Garvey’s black star, the flag of Malawi, et cetera. So this is a man who leapt beyond the island of Jamaica and had this massive, massive influence, and is a product of Jamaica’s particularly brutal, its particular history.

1:03:14 And when I was there last time, someone said to me, a woman who ran the festival, I was playing at a lady called Justine Henzel. She said something to me actually that stuck with me, and it made me look a little differently, and a bit more wisely at Jamaica Today. And she said, you know what? When you look at our history, you look at everything Jamaica’s been through, you look how recent this overt brutality, et cetera, was. And a lot of people say, oh, we have poverty, we have violence, we have these problems.

1:03:37 As if this tiny little island of less than 3 million people should have been able to solve all of these human challenges that the US hasn’t even been able to solve. There are plenty of neighborhoods in Chicago and Los Angeles and elsewhere that are just as violent as West Kingston, right? So her point is actually, as a Jamaican, she’s astronomically proud of what Jamaica’s become, of its influence, of its heritage, of where it’s moving as a society. And I suppose that was an interesting and unique and different way to look at it.

1:04:01 And I would say I’m sort of between the two, because I’m not. Because you’re naturally compared Kingston to London, and you’re like, well, this is so different. Well, yeah, no. I mean, I understand enough of Jamaican history to kind of not make that comparison, but at the same time, I’m accustomed, whether I like it or not, even with my anti-imperialist kind of pro-Furd world politics, I’m still accustomed to living a particular way. Yes, I saw violence growing up.

1:04:22 Yes, I saw many, many people get stabbed and things of that nature, and people I knew got shot, and I’ve been in clubs when guns have gone off court. That’s still not the same as living in West Kingston, you know, in Chinatown, in remote jungle, or Tivoli, or one of those places that I visited when I was last there. I’ve not experienced that kind of poverty. I’ve not experienced that kind of violence. I’ve not lived in a society where the police shoot pregnant women.

1:04:43 Now, that doesn’t mean the police in this country don’t kill people, because they have and they do. But the way in which it is permissible and can happen in a country like Jamaica, for all of these neo-colonial reasons, is not something I’ve lived for, and it would be very fake for me, just because I’m of Jamaican origin, to pretend that I’ve had that exact experience. Does that make sense? So I interact with it and try and articulate it, but I don’t also kind of step on the toes and pretend that I am the voice of it.

1:05:07 Jamaicans are the voice of Jamaica. I am a member of the African Jamaican diaspora who has my particular take on it. But I have also lived a different life than I probably would have lived if my grandmother stayed in St. Mary’s. In fact, I would never have been born, but you understand what I’m saying?

1:05:20 So I love so many things about Jamaica and about the Caribbean and even given all its crazy history. And I am too amazed actually when you study the history of the revolutions in the Caribbean. I am too amazed that societies that, you know, my grandmother’s great-grandmother would have been enslaved. You know, we’re not talking about a million years ago. So when I look at how quickly the Caribbean has turned from that to, St. Lucia has the highest amount of Nobel Prize winners per capita of any country in the world.

1:05:49 Now I’m not saying a Nobel Prize is a culturally universal way of measuring intelligence. What I am saying is the Caribbean, even given all of these constrictions, if you like, and these limitations has massively punched above its weight without colonizing other people. See, Britain, we talk about punching above our weight. And for sure, Britain has had a massive influence on the world. But much of that influence has come at the expense of military might, at the expense of colonizing and brutalizing other groups of people.

1:06:14 That doesn’t mean that Isaac Newton or Shakespeare or these guys were any less intelligent. But it also means that it’s kind of tainted because the cultural influence is mixed with brutality, right? Jamaica’s cultural influence is just cultural influence. Jamaica doesn’t have a military base in any of the countries where reggae music is popular. And reggae music has spread in spite of not having the billions of dollars that are spent on popular forms of American music.

1:06:37 Precisely because it’s revolutionary and imperialist love-centered music. Which is ironic because Jamaica is promoted to the world as the most, or at least Jamaican culture and Jamaican music culture is sort of seen in these kind of stereotypical terms The love and the peace and the almost kind of Buddhist-ish philosophy within Rasta that particularly that directs radio music that gives Jamaica this cultural power. So I feel that legitimately people can be proud of that whilst recognizing the sometimes horrific ongoings.

1:07:12 So I was introduced to Rasta Farianism by the recent Bob Marley documentary, which I’m sure you have some opinions about. But you know, I like to think I’m pretty well read and know a lot of things about the world, but I had no idea of the tenets of Rastafarianism, I had no idea any of the history. I actually didn’t know that much about Bob Marley, because it’s my generation, didn’t it? And so I didn’t even know how big that music was, I didn’t know all those issues.

1:07:40 So how did you find the movie, what did you like about it, what didn’t you like about it? Well, even when we talk about Rastafarianism, Rastafarian would call it Rastafari. They don’t like isms. Just little things like that, for example, that most of us don’t know they would refer to it as Rastafari, but um, I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie. I felt that the movie was more aimed at selling Bob Marley, in a kind of sanitized, acceptable, but still revolutionary enough to be caught.

1:08:11 It’s trying to be a major motion picture, right? It was shot beautifully. Which, I mean, from what I understand, I’ve seen interviews and read. his own mother doesn’t believe the version of events around his death for example how you can make a movie about a guy and not comment on the fact that many people he was shot not long before it’s not you know remotely controversial to suggest that someone was trying to have this guy killed right then he dies of toe cancer fine maybe that is true but maybe it isn’t and if his own mother has a suspicions that would be worth entertaining I would have thought I’m dressed that at all in the movie no no it was just cancer died in Switzerland.

1:08:47 And then this kind of attempt to present him as this kind of slightly confused mixed race guy who suffered racism from black people in Jamaica, anyone who’s been to Jamaica knows one of the sad legacies of neo-colonialism is that actually people of mine and Bob Marley’s colour are elevated in a majority black society, we’re not oppressed yet, I’m sure some people said to Bob growing up, you look a yellow boy, a red boy, I’m sure that he was mildly But there is not discrimination. It’s reversed. In fact, being black, even in Jamaica, works against you.

1:09:17 That’s the irony of it, right? So someone who looks like me is automatically assumed to be educated, automatically assumed to come from money, et cetera. And that’s one of the legacies, because that is what happened. The former planters gave property and privilege to their illegitimate children. Sometimes they remain to be slaves, but often they created a buffer class.

1:09:38 And then at the end of a period that we call slavery ended, And you had a period called apprenticeship, where basically people were told, you got to carry on working for five or 10 years, right? Africans were like, no, no, no, we’ve been enslaved for how long? We’re going to the hills. They thought it was a way to re-enslave them. So Chinese and people from India were brought in, and they did the apprenticeship.

1:09:55 But at the end of their apprenticeship, they were given land and tools to move forward, something Africans in Jamaica have never been given. Yet people ask, why are black people still at the bottom of this majority black society? But this leg up, the other groups of people, the Lebanese, the Syrians, et cetera, not taking anything away from their hard work, because they were not the enslavers, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Chinese, and the Indians, right?

1:10:13 But they were also given that leg up coming with a different history and in a different time. Africans in Jamaica have never been given that to this day. And so I felt the movie lacked that political clarity. It lacked an honest analysis of O’Malley’s politics and his music. His music was pan-African music.

1:10:31 Rastafari comes directly, I mean, I don’t even know if the film mentioned Marcus Garvey at all. No. I’m trying to remember. No, because I would have, I don’t remember. film about Rastafari and not mentioning Marcus Garvey. It is literally like doing a film about Islam and not mentioning Mohammed. Let’s go one step further, maybe not Mohammed because he’s at the centre, but if we take Christianity and you don’t mention Moses, you don’t mention Abraham, you don’t mention any of the other prophets, you only mention Jesus. I think Selassie might have been, his visit was mentioned in that film. But Marcus Garvey, after Selassie, is the most important person in the Rastafari police system.

1:11:08 So it had holes in it, the movie? For me. Did it do a good job of at least introducing Rastafari to the world, if you had to just do one broad swipe? Well, again, I don’t think so, because I think it avoided so many things. It gave people a polite introduction.

1:11:24 But I would recommend, if you want to learn about Bob Marley, there’s a very good autobiography called Catch a Fire. You know, that was the original book, you know, the main book written on him. It’s a good book. It’s got a good analysis. Or if you want to learn about Rastafar, I read Rasta and Resistance, you know, or there’s a book called the Rastafarans.

1:11:41 There’s many ways you can learn a deeper insight. It’s what people want to learn and what they don’t want to learn. But like anything, this isn’t specific to this culture. A lot of people just want surface information. They want the polite, easy to digest, kind of.

1:11:53 Again, back to humans. We crave a simple narrative. We crave the end of the Civil War, it was Lincoln in four years and they fixed everything. Anyone who dives into American history realizes that it was a lot of things going on there and it had a lot to do with money and a lot of other things. I do think as humans we like to compartmentalize these little narratives and sometimes they’re very oversimplified.

1:12:14 Yeah, for sure. Especially when there’s, I mean, the Bob Marley estate is worth how many, a couple hundred million? I don’t even know what the number is, but when there’s so much money attached to this man’s image, but when he was very clear in his own lifetime, what did he use his money to do? Go to Jamaica and ask anybody. He was like, I don’t really care about money. And as a guy who was rich, he was not poor. He bought a massive house, which I visited when I was there, a 56 home. And he said, anyone who wants to eat, drink, and have some fish, come.

1:12:42 All right, there’s footage of that. He dedicated his life to helping people, even though he had become, unlike many, many, many poor people who become rich, who become just, especially in a society like Jamaica, move up to Beverly Hills or Long Mountain and be like, hell, I’m forgetting where I came from. What was that now? His exact words were, my life is not important unless I can help plenty of people. That’s a great quote from the movie where he says, money make a man rich, and I mean it really resonated with me, you know, it’s quite a question.

1:13:08 Whether or not the massive economic wealth generated by Bob Marley’s estate and by his image for Jamaica is being used to help the communities that produced Bob Marley is another question. I went to Trenchtown. Trenchtown is not developed. The only part of Trenchtown that has even had a lick of paint put on it is the culture yard. The place where Bob Marley grew up, where him and Rita conceived Ziggy, where he got his first guitar lessons, where he wrote Three Little Birds.

1:13:33 You know, there’s been a little bit of renovation that’s been turned into a museum. The rest of Trenchtown hasn’t improved one iota in 30 years. So this man’s music generates enough wealth to renovate the neighborhood he grew up in to do massive amounts of things for his community. And we know where he alive, that’s the work he would be doing. So I see the contradiction of selling Bob Marley’s image, but not doing what Bob Marley would have wanted people to do with that image.

1:14:00 Right, right. So earlier I told you I had never been to Jamaica, and you said something like, that’s a shame for you. Yes, for sure. So tell me why… In total Caribbean arrogance.

1:14:11 Is that a Caribbean arrogance? Why go there? Why are you going back? Why are you looking into it? I was asked to go to a, this will give you an example of how much people want to go to the Caribbean, right?

1:14:22 I was asked to go to a literature festival, Calabash literature festival, run by some people I know. It’ll be my first performance in Jamaica. This literature festival doesn’t pay people the way it has to run. It’s a free festival. Obviously, it covers your expenses, it takes you out there, but it’s quite unapologetic in that it lets everyone know it’s a free festival, yet it’s been able to draw literally Nobel Prize winning authors.

1:14:41 I mean, just this year alone, and Googie Wafiongo, one of the biggest writers in Kenya was there. Simon Rushdie was there. Did you interview Salman Rushdie? I did indeed. Zadie Smith was there.

1:14:50 You know, this is the level of writers they’re able to attract year in, year out, year in, year out. If it was set in somewhere that isn’t Jamaica, I don’t wanna diss anyone’s country, but if it was set somewhere that didn’t have that sun, that didn’t have that culture attached to it, that didn’t have that lifestyle, people wouldn’t come all across the world for free. So the Caribbean still has this massively attractive pool that you can assemble a literature festival like that and have 3000, and all of the audience pretty much is Jamaican.

1:15:14 That’s another part of Jamaican culture you don’t get to see the intellectual side. 3,000 people turning up three days in a row for six hours to hear people read books It’s not something we are led to associate with what goes on on the island And so the Caribbean for obvious reasons because of its weather because of its history because of the good food Some of which is being eroded by import export policies but for all of these reasons is a very attractive place for people to to visit but Again, the tourism has its shortcomings. Okay, and I would I would what would I notice most?

1:15:44 He said it was a shame that I’m not there, but what I noticed most about Jamaica is the people is it a cultural ness? Is it a vibe about like we talked about Thailand about that? It depends where you went on what you did just like in Thailand Right if you go to a resort one of these plush resorts in kosumui, and you don’t interact with any Thai people You’ll have one experience right whereas if you’re a Muay Thai student You go to Bangkok and you go to different places around and you interact with the local culture You’ll get a much fuller experience Jamaica’s the same.

1:16:10 If you stay in the Grill or Montego Bay and you stay within the little kind of tourist resort, Jamaica is dangerous. I’m not going to lie. You know, there is violence in our problems there, but tourists are certainly safer in the country than the locals anyway, right? It’s very unlikely and very slim chance of something happening to a person that’s perceived to be a foreigner. You might get problems, but generally foreigners don’t get killed because the people in the ghetto understand that when that happens, usually the government in the army comes and flattens the neighborhood, right?

1:16:38 So there is a certain amount of safety even within it and I’ve been all over Kingston, I’ve been to parties and raves and things in dangerous parts of Kingston, blah blah blah. You know, I’m not telling anyone else what to do, I’m just saying for me you get a much fuller experience if you actually interact with the culture and you don’t even have to go to Kingston. You could go to somewhere like St. Elizabeth which is very quiet, very sunny, very idyllic part of the island but again interacting with local people gives you a much fuller sense of what Jamaicanness is, what is specific about that island, what it has produced, Why reggae music came from there and not somewhere else?

1:17:10 Why Bob Marley and, I mean, Bob Marley, Usain Bolt and Marcus Garvey are all from the same village, which is crazy in and of itself, right? And so I think that if you endeavored to have a full experience, you’d get a sense of just how far that place has come in such a short period of time, but you’d also get a sense of some of the shortcomings in the contradiction. Recently we saw Snoop Dogg go down there and I watched his documentary, he did with Vice and change his name and did he do the Rastafari any favors?

1:17:39 Not from my perspective. Okay. I mean, I’m not a Rasta per se, it’s the spiritual system and belief system that I’ve been most influenced by because of my proximity to it, but there are things within it I’ve been unable to reconcile myself with like every other belief system that exists. That said, I know that I don’t speak for all Rastas when I say that because there are many people who consider themselves Rasta who do not, for example, see Haile Selassie as divine.

1:18:03 See him as just one leader among many, but they still consider himself Rasta. So even what Rasta is and means is going for a transition at the moment. The position of women in Rastafara is going for a transition like any belief system is updating. And there are many different schools of Rasta, and what I find most interesting about Rasta is that the different schools have not approached each other with the same kind of antagonism that we see in other religious beliefs and the kind of sectarianism.

1:18:27 The Bobu Shanti and the Nayabinghi and the 12 tribes are not at war with one another. They have a council together and they talk together, even though they’re different interpretations of the same belief system. But I mean, to me Snoop Dogg saying he’s the rest. I mean, I don’t like that this individual artist are way more successful than I am. People call you a hater for that.

1:18:45 But personally, I found it Snoop Dogg’s take on it a bit disrespectful as a Jamaican, to be honest with you. I don’t- I did too, and I’m not a Jamaican. Yeah. I just, I know that if he were, if it were any other belief system, you know, he went to the so-called Middle East and said I’m now a Muslim because I’ve changed my, I’ve changed what I wear, or I’m now a Hindu because I’ve changed what I wear, I’m now a Sikh because I’ve got a turban on, I’ve put a dot in the middle of my forehead, somehow that means I know something about Sikhism.

1:19:14 All of those cultures would have enough self-respect to say, no, that’s disrespectful, snoop, don’t do that. And I feel a little bit like, not saying there has not been pushback, there hasn’t been pushback, but there hasn’t been enough of a, that’s a bit of a liberty, a bit of a disrespect of a belief system that had such a role to play in freedom struggles, in liberation struggles throughout the pan-African world. And so I didn’t think it was very tasteful, I thought it was very gimmicky.

1:19:42 Yeah. I thought he was being a tourist. Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. It was the kind of thing that if a white person had done, they would have got loads more stick for it, if I’m honest with you, right? He got stick, but almost not as much stick because it would have been perceived as, To be honest with you, so racist.

1:19:54 If a white American major artist came and did that, there would have probably been even more blowback. But I find it just as disrespectful when that kind of lack of self-respect for black theology comes from a person who is also black. I don’t think he would do that with Judaism. He would have enough respect, or at least know that maybe messing with Judaism wouldn’t be that bright for his career, perhaps. So I felt it was a bit disrespectful.

1:20:22 Yeah, also Snoop can get away with a lot so. Yeah, Snoop’s a great entertainer. Listen, I’m not trying to I’m not trying to sit here and Cuss Snoop. I’m just saying I thought that particular thing was not healthy. Point made. Let’s talk about Brazil really quick because you went there in 2010 Was that the first time? I’ve been there a few times. I went in 08, 2010 and again in 2013. Okay. I’ve been to Rio I think my first time was in 05. I did some jujitsu training and some training in boxing at a fabulous place. I was talking earlier But I remember when I went to, my first time in a favela, and I went to Hosina Favela, which is, you know, you’ve been there, and it’s huge.

1:20:57 I mean, there’s got to be 100,000 people there. And I took a bus up to the top, and I went into someone’s house, and I walked out on the terrace. And it’s one of these images I’ll never, ever get able to get out of my head. And I didn’t really fathom the size of it, and I looked over everything down into that valley next to that mountain. And I was just, it was just hard to conceive, and in Brazil, such poverty lives right next to such wealth, and it’s this, it’s hard to conceive what goes on down there.

1:21:26 And then at the very base of the favela was the whole SWAT team and the full guns. I got guns pulled on me by that same SWAT team, coming out of Russia and all that. And no one explained to me what was going on, but for me, I was like, something’s going on here. It looked like they were just trying to plug a leak. That’s what it looked like in such a horrible way.

1:21:45 What were your first impressions? Well, I knew a little bit about Brazil before I went. I’d read a very good book called… Also, it’s massively multicultural in a way that it’s just hard to conceive of in America because we have a very big black divide, Mexican divide, white divide, but there it seems to mix, but maybe I was being naive. Well, I think that’s one of the beauties and the contradictions of Brazil.

1:22:07 There is this multicultural mix, but then if you look at who’s at the bottom of Brazilian society. You look at who’s being killed by the police and who’s dying most frequently, you’re still going to find that same color gradation. Right, the presidents are light and they’re not black. Brazil is not going to have an African-looking president any time soon, even though the majority of the population is of African origin. Brazil has more black people than any country in the world except Nigeria, so more than any African country other than Nigeria, yet the image of Brazil is not that.

1:22:36 The image of Brazil is not people that look like Pele. Pele is seen as… Pele is a big individual. There’s an individual image of Brazil. So he’s the outlier.

1:22:43 But Brazil’s face, the more people in Brazil look like Pele, they look like Giselle Buncham. Right. I forgot Giselle was Brazilian. But Pele’s face is not the projected face of Brazil, is what I’m saying. And so I’m saying that, yeah, there is a fantastic and beautiful and inspiring amount of cross-cultural pollination.

1:23:03 You go to somewhere like Salvador de Bahia, where the main religion is an African religion, most visible religious practice and people who are not of African origin practice this religion that’s a beautiful thing and that’s in some ways unique I know there are other parts places that haven’t been like Cuba where I’m told similar things occur right but that’s that’s fantastic and beautiful but there are still there is still a legacy of racism and slavery and fascism we forget that Brazil was an ally of Salazar is Portugal we forget that in 1888 Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery The government had an open policy of what they called getting rid of the black stain You know and this is how the favelas a number of things came to exist where they were like We’re creating and we’re about to newly create an industrial economy The last thing we want to do is give a foot up to these people that we’ve been enslaving for the last few centuries So let’s pay for people to come from anywhere in Europe that are lighter skinned with the express purpose of whitening the country Nobody in Brazil likes to talk about this today when I won’t say nobody but scholars who know their stuff are talking about But this is the legacy that has led us to a favela like Roshina where yeah, it is multicultural But the majority of people that live in those places and favela and Roshina is in the south zone

1:24:11 So it’s one of the more as poor as it was from your perspective It’s not one of the posh. That’s one of the posh favelas Yeah, yeah You go to the north zone where I’ve been or parts of Salvador if you go to Vigario Gero in the north zone or the west zone of Rio de Janeiro and you Visibly see it gets blacker and blacker and poorer and poorer and so there is there is that contradiction in Brazil which which I find hard to reconcile you know geopolitically I see that Brazil is trying to make some moves I read recently that they cut the debts that many or all of the African countries owed to them don’t quote me on that because I can’t remember the exact figures in that right now. I’ve had a big boom. They’re part of this BRICS initiative trying to promote South-South trade. Cool but I also believe charity begins at home and if you are for charity and justice and things like that I’m not saying you can wave a magic wand and solve it, but the internal contradictions within the country are so humongous and so gapingly obvious to me that I love Brazil, but I can’t ignore.

1:25:21 We talk so much about the racial history of America, the racial history of Brazil is just as if not more horrific, yet it’s not spoken about, for what reason I don’t know, maybe because it’s in the non-English-speaking world, maybe because there’s a whole different philosophy, maybe because there’s so much more gradations of mix. But I think it’s one of the dialogues that needs to be had, and I know Afro-Brazilians would be the first to say so. Many other groups of people would say no.

1:25:43 And the World Cup is about to start. And the World Cup. Who stood in that nation? What? And it’s protests and…

1:25:49 I couldn’t believe it. I’m saying they had like a 34% approval rating football in Brazil. I mean, when I was there, football in Brazil always has a 90% approval rating, but everyone actually seems to be fairly outraged because people are not stupid right they love football yes and football is a national religion but when billions of pounds come into a country or generated in a country by this national religion stadiums are built in the middle of the Amazon that they’re not going to be used afterwards and and I was there like I said in 2010 they were beginning to pacify the favelas from then which means basically go in kill a bunch of people that you deem to be drug traffickers without of course offering them any alternative economic possibility, ignoring the fact of how drugs get in and out of Brazil, because it’s certainly not people from Roshina or any other favela in Brazil flying around the world, importing these millions of tons of drugs.

1:26:36 So ignoring all of that, ignoring where all the guns come from, ignoring how an Israeli Uzi submachine gun, I saw so many of them when I was in Roshina and other places, ignoring how all of that manages to magically work its way into a favela, let’s go in and kill the drug traffickers, and I’m not saying that there are not people in their favelas that do bad things, but again, they’re doing bad things on behalf of who, and in relation to what economic relationship to the state, and who’s buying the drugs. So let’s go and kill a bunch of people, build a police station, pacify that favela so that when tourists come, the country is safe for tourists. Let’s not redesign the society so that there’s not such a massive divide between rich and poor so that people are not as pissed off and not potentially as much of a danger to the stability of the country.

1:27:20 So there is a legitimate frustration that even though people love football, they can see they’re being mugged off again before their very eyes, and poor people are being forgotten while stadiums are being built. And many of these people, they’re not gonna be able to afford to go to the World Cup. And these are the communities from which most of the Brazilian football team come, which makes it even more ironic. I went to Ronaldinho’s hood. I went to where Adriana comes from.

1:27:44 These guys are from real poverty, Ramario, etc. These Brazilian football legends come from the slums and Maybe I don’t know what the footballers are saying. I don’t know whether there’s people that are outspoken I don’t I don’t know enough I don’t read catch up enough with the Portuguese newspapers to know if the football players are being outspoken but there is that contradiction and Is as yet unresolved we’re gonna it’s gonna be interesting to watch what happens out the next few weeks And I’m guessing once the fever catches up in Brazil with the football it will get quickly brushed against under the rug But there will be violence, let’s be clear.

1:28:17 When we say brush down, there is daily police brutality in Brazil, and that will continue and be worse. So it won’t make the news if it’s just poor, overwhelming black and brown people dying. It didn’t make the news when the massacre at Candelara happened and children were shot dead by the police. It didn’t make the news when people were thrown in the sea. That bus 147 didn’t make the news here.

1:28:38 There’s a documentary made about it. Very brilliant, brilliant documentary. It’s intense. But that guy’s life isn’t newsworthy outside of Brazil. And it barely is newsworthy in Brazil.

1:28:47 Of course, if tourists become affected, then it will become newsworthy. So these things, the brutality is still going to go on. But it’s just, depending on who it affects, depends how much international attention it will be given. Right. Can we talk about language really quick?

1:29:01 You wrote an article in the Huffington Post talking about the language we use. And you are what you read, which is a great title. We, on this show, have actually done a few episodes about psychedelics. And we talk a lot about the use of language and whether something is a drug and what a drug means and alcohol in this country compared to tobacco and other things, just a little bit more. And so we’re always talking about language and then this whole thing like you said about yourself, whether you’re self deceiving yourself by calling yourself something or by calling something something.

1:29:29 And even you, your past where at one point you were using the N word and you decided not to use the N word. And what are your thoughts? I know it’s a big- language. Language is very powerful a lot I mean there’s some people that would disagree with me and say that language is not that powerful and that we can reclaim this word or that word and we can change the means of things to some degree that’s true but language also retains its power there are things I could say to you which I’m not going to right now that would offend you if I is that if I were to talk about your mum or your sister or someone in your family that’s dead there would only be words but they would offend you for sure and maybe provoke you to use someone to just do that you know So, I think because words have energy, I believe it’s physics, you know, it’s like radio frequencies, right?

1:30:14 The more and more something gets played on the radio, the more and more that frequency, that sound is being amplified. And words are used in a particular context with a particular energy attached to them. We might not be able to quantify that yet in terms of physics, but repeated over and over again in a certain context, a word begins to take on power. If your parents tell you the whole time you’re a child when you’re growing up, you’re an idiot, you’re stupid, you’re never going to be anything, you’re going to internalize that belief.

1:30:39 Consequently, or additionally, if they say to you, you’re wonderful, you’re amazing, you’re intelligent, you’re beautiful, you’re probably going to internalize that. There are many people who’ve never been physically abused, but they feel that even just the way they were spoken to growing up as a young person is a form of mental abuse. So language has massive power, and I think to tell ourselves that it doesn’t is just deceiving ourselves. One of the reasons, let me be clear, I’m not against people using the N-word.

1:31:04 I’m against people pretending that it’s become a term of endearment. The conditions that the N-word was used to justify creating still exist in many parts of the world and certainly still exist in parts of America with the prison industrial complex and police brutality and things of that nature. What I’m saying is I don’t believe that it’s wise to kid ourselves to believe that it now means brother, it now means I love you, it now means because the behavior of people that use this word towards one another, doesn’t reflect that.

1:31:32 I know when I was growing up, when we wanted to compliment someone, that’s a word we use. We might pretend all that, but if we look at, even in London, the young boys in Hackney and Tottenham or Brixton and Peckham that are warring each other over nothing, sometimes even over inherited Americanisms, blue flag, red flag, we have that over here too, something we’ve obviously… Check from the LA case. Yeah, I mean that… Let’s be clear, if they weren’t fine over that, they’d be fine over something else because that’s a product of their socioeconomic circumstance and many other things, right?

1:32:00 The point is, we’re not treating each other like brothers. So this argument, this word we’re using, when they want to go and kill someone, which word is it young boys are using? They’re not saying, when I see this brother, I’m going to kill him, you know? When I see my cousin, I’m going to kill him. When I see this, some of a complimentary word, I’m going to shank him, or I’m going to … No, it’s this particular word that we’re using.

1:32:22 So to say that it’s been turned on its head, it just doesn’t seem to be reflected in the world. People that still use it are trying to tell you, no, no, it means this, and you’re saying, no, no, it doesn’t actually mean that. Absolutely. It doesn’t, because the behavior of young black men towards one another, for a whole bunch of complicated historical reasons for sure, but isn’t reflective of that to me. If we want to call each other brother, the word brother is perfectly adequate.

1:32:46 Family, blood. I mean, at best, by reclaiming this word, you can have one other way to refer to people like you. At worst you can be regurgitating this negative energy, so I just wonder why do it, if you’re going to use it. So if people have proper reverence and respect for the pain that’s attached to it, I would only use it in its real context, which is an unapologetic product of some of the most brutal racism in human history. And that’s the context in which I believe it should continue to be used.

1:33:13 If people want a history of the word, they can have some photographs of lynching, they can understand what the Ku Klux Klan was and how popular they were, they can understand How racism was used to create a group of people, to be wealth producers for another group of people and all of these things. And I think usually when I give people that history properly, they don’t want to use it. But the best example I give to people is my mother’s white, as people know, my dad’s black.

1:33:40 When I work with young boys… Do people surprise me, Tom, that sometimes? Sometimes, yeah, yeah, sometimes. They feel I gravitate more towards the African Caribbean side of my family, which is true. That’s the side of the family I grew up around.

1:33:50 That doesn’t mean I don’t have respect for both sides of my family. It means I grew up around one side, I didn’t grow up so much around another side. In fact, my mom’s dad was kind of unpleased about, to put it mildly, about my dad’s presence, you know? So it meant that I didn’t have as much interaction with that side of my culture. That is what it is.

1:34:05 But when I go into prisons or schools or elsewhere and young boys write their raps in the workshops I’m doing and they say, nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, I say, okay, cool. No problem, I’m not gonna criticize you. I used to do the same thing, but let me ask you this, right? My mom’s white, my dad’s black. My mum’s, the white side of my family are from Scotland.

1:34:22 Scotland is one of the most violent places in Western Europe. You know, a lot of violence in Scotland, dumb violence, knife violence, et cetera. Now, even though the words like honky or cracker don’t have any of the kind of racial domination history attached to them, if I start saying, you know, I’m gonna kill honkies, I’m gonna kill crackers, what would you guys think? And with that exception, every single black boy has said to me, no, you can’t do that, that’s racist.

1:34:44 Now, my white mother raised me, right? Yet me using that kind of language in relation to white people would offend the same black boys who have no issue using it in relation to themselves. So what does that say about how they feel about themselves and the value of their life and the value of offending them and their own sensibilities in their history? So when people try to convince me that this language means nothing or that it’s a positive term now, I just, I just, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t agree.

1:35:14 And I had a similar conversation with one of my elders, a guy called Thuyen. I did a radio show around the world when I was, I don’t know, 2006, and he just gave me this similar spiel on it, and I just stopped. And that was it? I just, I thought, yeah, he’s right. And that was 2006, 2008?

1:35:28 2006, 2007. So for my second album, which came out in 2007, you won’t hear the word in there so frequently, or not at all, actually. Let’s talk about Akala in 2007 and the one today. Yeah. For the obvious stuff, you’re not using that word, but other stuff, when you tell me certain points of view, you’re like, and this is just my opinion, and I am not saying this, would you not use those seven years ago? How have you changed? As you get older, when you’re young, you think you know everything. When you get a little bit older, you still think you know everything.

1:36:08 But you don’t really know everything. And the more I’ve travelled, the more I’ve studied, The more I’ve realized I don’t know. So I think I went for a period in my mid-20s where I first started really reading a lot, a lot, started first like traveling a lot and really thought I was wise and I knew so much about the world. And then as I’ve traveled more and read a bit more, I realized I don’t really know that much. And that’s not to say I don’t offer my opinions and I don’t usually offer opinions on stuff that I haven’t at least researched a little bit, which is why, for example, when you spoke about Russia earlier, I didn’t know enough to contradict you or disagree with you or agree with you because I don’t know enough about Russian history.

1:36:38 I need to do my research there, but I would never offer an opinion publicly on something I haven’t studied relatively thoroughly because I believe that’s my responsibility. And that’s always been the case with you. You’ve always done your own things. Ish, I’m sure when I was younger, I spoke about stuff I didn’t really know about, even when I was in the public. But I think that mainly you just, you become less aggressive as you get older, especially coming from the kind of background I came from.

1:37:00 Up until about 25, there’s this energy, particularly among young African-Caribbean men in this society and in the States, that exists, which doesn’t exist, say, in Africa. does exist in the Caribbean to a degree, but not so much. Even in the Caribbean, there’s not this, I see another young black boy, and there’s this immediate aggression, which you feel in parts of America, and you certainly feel here. You won’t feel it in West Africa for all the problems in, say, a country like Nigeria.

1:37:23 You’ll see grown black men walking down the street holding hands, swinging hands like little kids, which is something you would never see here, right? And so, again, that’s a pause for reflection. But I, around about 25, 26, that energy starts to dissipate. You either don’t notice it anymore, Or people, the young youths are just not looking at you like that anymore. You’re an old foe, you know.

1:37:43 You’re not part of this rivalry between, unless you put yourself in it, between Hackney and Tottenham and Brixton and Peckham and this ends and that ends. And so you can sort of breathe and reflect on it and see how intense it felt and how real it felt and how much you really felt like you could lose your life walking out of your house, which may have caused you to behave a particular way, but how much it was also, in another sense, stupid. And then you try and offer those reflections to people younger than you, Just like when I was 21 or 19 and I was aggressive and I was behaving a certain way, older people would offer me those reflections, but it didn’t mean anything.

1:38:15 It didn’t stop me from getting into certain trouble and making certain mistakes because that felt like my reality at that point. And that’s the main way in which you change it. I think it would be very fake for someone like me whose passport has to get replaced every three years because I go to so many places. To then pretend I’m exactly the same as I was when I was 19. And I spent most of my time in the ends kind of thing.

1:38:36 Like, I just, I think one of the reasons rappers get a bit shit as they get older is because they try and, I don’t see anything wrong with evolving. But trying to pretend you’re still on the block, surrounded by people selling drugs and block when you’re in Monaco or St. Tropez or wherever, but I mean that’s equally, in my view, dull if all you do is rap about that too. But you should evolve as an artist and I’ve tried to evolve while still staying true to my background.

1:39:00 And your fan base is comfortable with you evolving? Yeah, I think they’ve grown, I think they’ve grown with me and I think one of the reasons actually why my message has resonated with people from the backgrounds I come from is because I started off that way. Think if I started off the kind of artist I am now, I’d be seen as a bit more of an alternative political conscious. I started off, my main inspirations were like Mobb Deep and DMX. If you listen to my first mixtape, you can hear that, all right, there was a bit of the Wu Tang influence in there, there was some level of consciousness, but overwhelmingly my first mixtape is just about violence.

1:39:28 And I think one of the reasons that my message carries weight is because people say, well, he was kind of like us. We know his friends and his cousins and his uncles. We know that they’ve been involved in just as much unsavory shit as anyone else’s yet he chooses not to rap about those guys. He chooses not to imitate and big up the organized criminals he knew growing up to make himself look cool. I don’t do that.

1:39:50 A lot of rappers do. Cool. That’s good for them. I don’t have a need to do that because actually many of those same people are the people who said to me now, but you’re bright. Don’t be like us.

1:39:58 Which I said in my phone. Literally, this is real life. That’s what happened to me. And these were people who had money. These were guys who were doing well in the street, but they’d spent so much of their life in and out of prison, et cetera.

1:40:08 So they were like, you don’t wanna be like us. You’re clever. In fact, if you drop out of school, we’re gonna give you a hiding. So one of the first people to say to me, well, guys, other people would call gangsters, right? And they were, I don’t wanna do that because they actually were gangsters, right?

1:40:20 So I don’t try and make myself look cool by begging it with that lifestyle. I had certain opportunities that made me fortunate enough to actually not go in a particular direction as much as some of my other friends or other people did. And I believe that’s something to be celebrated and something to be amplified. There’s this idea that this community, that the community worships that, not really, I get respect in every hood in this country, precisely because I took sense.

1:40:46 That’s the irony of it. If I was around saying, I’m a gangster, I’m so tough, I got so much money, people, when they saw me, would wanna rob me. Like happens to many gangster rappers from America that come to this country. They get robbed, people attack them. I’m not saying nothing can happen to me, I’m invincible, I’m not Superman.

1:40:58 But I go to the same neighborhoods and in the same places And people are like, oh, I respect what you’re doing, you know? The same guys who are in the street doing madness. I’m like, no, but I respect you. So that’s the irony. People know wrong from right.

1:41:08 And when you walk a certain path, I don’t attract nowhere near the level of negative attention now that I did when the war mix tape came out. The first war mix tape came out and I was not constantly in conflict, but people was like, oh, I want to test him. I want to see where his head’s at. Is he really about blah, blah, blah? And as I have, people are like, oh, actually, my man’s calling.

1:41:24 I respect what he’s doing. I know he’s not an idiot. And that’s why we listen to him. But at the same time, We respect what he’s doing and we support him. What does America think of Akala?

1:41:32 Well, we’ll see. I’m going in October. I haven’t been since 2007. I performed at South by Southwest and in LA and in New York. Seven years since you’ve been there, why?

1:41:42 Just cause. I mean, I’m not one of these rappers who’s like, oh, I have to be big in America, why is what I’m doing is not valid, you know? Just like when the West Coast guys came out, they weren’t like, oh, we have to be big in New York. I don’t see hip-hoppers having one definitive location. Absolutely, no one’s taken away from the fact that the pioneering MCs and the main influences on me came from, partly actually from the States, but actually also from Jamaica.

1:42:05 As people of Jamaican origin, we have a different relationship to hip-hop. It was like a triangular thing. Some of our cousins went to New York and influenced hip-hop. Other of our cousins stayed in Jamaica and made dancehall. Other of our cousins came here to London and created jungle, garage, et cetera, right?

1:42:18 And consequently, crime. So we have a different view. We didn’t learn hip-hop on MTV. I learned hip-hop because I grew up in a sound system, albeit hip-hop with a Jamaican actor. That said, obviously they’re some of my favorite MCs and some of the most influential people on me come from particularly New York.

1:42:34 So going back to New York and doing shows does have its attraction, but I don’t define myself by it. So we’ll see. So you’re going to New York? Yeah, I’m going to Philly and to New York. But I mean 15 to 20% of my online fan base is in the States.

1:42:48 I think that’s partly reflective of the fact that American people have so much access to internet, but also a reflection of reality. And it’s a big country as well. One more thing before we go, I have to ask you, I got here in 2002 and there was a video that was playing on MTV bass at the time and it just really caught my attention and I don’t know, for some reason I just, I would wait around hours just trying to watch it and it was won by someone you probably know, the song was called It Takes More by Miss Dynamite which is your sister and I watched it a couple days ago in preparing for this interview and video fucking holds up, it probably holds up more now than it did then and it’s super deep and it’s saying so many different things obviously the video and the song are all about questioning a lot of like behaviors of people in the city or people you know from the neighborhood but also there’s a lot of level layers there and it was a successful pop song it went to number six or seven in the charts album sold Welsh won these prizes again it shows you music can have a message as long as it’s good music and be successful was that and did that where were you at that time were you I was in the video you probably don’t spot me I was in it very briefly. I was on the shoot the whole day. In fact, it was friends of mine who helped the director come up with the concept for the video.

1:44:00 It was like a short film, really. Yeah, it was. It was just trying to show some of what she’d come from, trying to show some of the things she wanted to provoke people to think about, etc. And I think she succeeded in doing that. And I think as a young artist at the time, she was 19, 20, and she had so much strength and determination to not be what the label necessarily wanted her to be, but to be who she wanted to be, and I have to give some of the people at her label credit to be fair, unlike many labels, they were kind of like, you’ve come to us as an artist who’s already hot, artist who’s already had boo, who’s mashed up the underground, who’s got a fan base, you are a garage artist, you now want to make an R&B record, cool, let’s do it.

1:44:38 So they did kind of support her making that transition. There was resistance, but not the level of resistance that might have been on a different record label. And it was just, it was a crazy time for me, you know, I was 17, I went to the MTV Awards in Barcelona, I was at all these big after parties and blah, blah, blah, and you know, I’m not going to name names, but this pop artist and that pop artist and this person was there. And then very early, I got exposed to a lifestyle that on the one hand, for 17 year old, was kind of impressive.

1:45:04 On the other hand, I thought, I don’t know if this is for me also, you know, a lot of drugs, a lot of things of that nature, not saying my sister took drugs, because she didn’t, I’m saying that in that environment, there was, there was a lot of that going on that never really appealed to me, and so it was also a lesson in the music industry very early. But it was a great time, and that video was great, many of that was great. Dynamite was a great video, even though it was a stylistic video, I still think visually Jake did a really good job on that one as well.

1:45:33 You never seemed to have your Justin Bieber moment, even though you were exposed that early to all that craziness, regardless of your own career, even being brother to Miss Dynamite. Why? Why? I don’t know. What did you and I don’t know about it?

1:45:46 I don’t know. If I did it, it certainly didn’t make the press. I mean, I’m nowhere near as famous as someone like him, so I don’t think people care that much what I do with my private life, hopefully. I mean, you had a lot of success early on. Yeah.

1:45:58 Yeah. I made mistakes. Just not all of them got into the press, which is probably lucky for me. And not the big ones. Yeah.

1:46:07 But that said, I mean, it’s not like… Listen, I haven’t got… I didn’t kill four people. Do you know what I mean? It’s not like I’ve got some huge secret in the closet.

1:46:14 But at the same time, yeah, I think we all make mistakes. Depending where you’re at in your career, depends how much they get amplified and depending where you’re at in your age. But I was lucky A, to be forced to grow up very early, but B, to see my sister go through many of the cycles in the music industry and know what I’d have to come up against, even though I trud a very different path by being independent. Right, last part of the show, we always ask a couple questions at the end.

1:46:36 If you had to make a phone call to the 20-year-old Akala and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Calm down, bruv, relax. Would be, yeah, I mean, it would be mainly that, the aggression I had at that age nearly landed me in big, big trouble many, many times. Really? What, in a confrontational way?

1:46:52 Oh, yeah, you could, most people who knew me then, there are people who knew me then who think I’m a complete fraud. Now, they’re just like, this guy is chatting shit, he’s not a nice guy. Like, not saying I was some gangster, because I wasn’t evil, I don’t wanna act like I’m trying to give that impression, but I was on to confrontation. If there was confrontation, I was up for it, and I wasn’t the guy that would really fizzle it out either. I was just rude, I was aggressive, I didn’t want my manhood or what I perceived to be my manhood to be challenged, and I would react if it was challenged.

1:47:25 Verbal-y confronting? Mostly verbally. Sometimes things got out of hand, but generally it was verbally, but occasionally there were physical confrontations, but again, at that age, violence becomes such a part of daily living even if you’re not directly doing it you know like I said the first like I’ve told people the first time I saw someone get stabbed I was 12 and it wasn’t a little poke it was a meat cleaver in the back of a guy’s head you know four times. In a barber shop and people didn’t react. Yeah it was my best friend’s older brother and so someone I knew well as well it was so it was and then throughout your teenage years you get used to seeing people get stabbed and you violence becomes part of the daily dialogue and so you internalize that I’m thinking if I’m not aggressive, maybe it’s fair, but at 20, you can’t admit it’s fair, right?

1:48:12 You have to pretend I went gym, I got a hench, I had a screw face, I had a bald head, I did everything I could to make myself look tough, right? Because at 20, that’s what you feel you need to do. Right, because you’re scared basically. Yeah, at this age, if someone disrespects me, if they don’t put their hand on me, do I really care? If they don’t trouble my family, now I’ll still react to certain things, I’m not gonna lie, I’m not, I don’t believe he didn’t turn the other cheek at all.

1:48:36 Okay, just to make that clear. Well, that aggression I used to work with helped me prisoner. I don’t have in the same way. It’s dormant in there somewhere, but I’ve got it under control now. I would say to the 20 year old of college, getting it under control.

1:48:51 Just chill out a bit. I can imagine one of your verbal confrontations, Jesus. Yeah. Second part of that, best advice you’ve ever received could be musical or life advice. That’s a good question.

1:49:07 The best advice I’ve ever received probably wasn’t from a person. No disrespect to all the people that gave me advice. It’s from a book called The Tao Te Ching. And what The Tao Te Ching talks about is learning to cope with quote unquote loss or perceived loss or disappointment. You know, taking things as they come and go.

1:49:22 And not, you know, when I first began, I felt I’m so talented, I should be this, I should be that, I should sell this many records, I should win these awards, blah, blah, blah. You know, I’m the shit basically. As I got older and some of those things didn’t materialize, at first, in the industry, there were people that I felt were, you know, I’m quite blocking me and this and that. And I used to get really angry and then I started becoming cool with, you know what?

1:49:44 People way more talented than you have been killed earlier in life. You know, becoming philosophical about what you do and don’t achieve and not letting success get to your head and not letting disappointments defeat you. And for me, walking that path and using that book, among others, but that particular book, I feel like really changed the way I look at the world the way I treat disappointing news when it comes. When anything that isn’t related to someone I love being hurt or dying, I kind of pretty much fob off.

1:50:14 If I don’t sell enough tickets to a gig, if my album sales and all that, you know, I’ve got economic reality, I’ve got bills to pay and I’ve got rent to pay and whatever else, but I try not to let any of that stuff, I’m kind of a bit like, whereas if something bad happens to someone I love, then yeah, I will be disappointed. I’m not zen enough to just view that as part of the universal cycle of creation. You’re checking in 10 years with you and see if you’re there yet.

1:50:33 Yeah, I don’t think I will. Probably not. Last bit, to the 20-year-old that’s listening out there that wants to get into the music business or get into some of the things that you’re interested in, what advice do you give to them? Well, it depends who. If it’s the artist that wants to be a successful multi-million selling pop artist, I probably can’t advise that person because that isn’t what I’ve done.

1:50:52 If it’s the artist that wants to be an independent artist, create their own career, I would advise them to learn to ache up with disappointment. Life is full of disappointments, don’t watch that. Perseverance, learn to play an instrument. I started learning very late in life, it limited my understanding of music greatly. I would say the younger you are, learn to play an instrument, try and get very good at one, particularly if you’re a rapper.

1:51:13 If you’re a rapper and you can play piano very well, or guitar or bass or the choral or whatever else, it just puts you in a different artistic sphere and space. Listen to a broad range and array of music, but ultimately get out there and gig. The way you’re gonna get good is by performing to people and the way in this day and age going to make your bread and butter is from putting on a show, and so that’s what you should do. Perform live for the experience.

1:51:35 Perform live all the time. Any way you can perform, if there’s two people, it’s important. Learn to perform to two people the way you performed to 2,000. And if you can do that, if you’ve got the confidence in front of two people, you can give it the same energy as you give 2,000, you’ll be neat. And anyone who’s ever seen me perform to a small audience will tell you, if there’s six people in the venue, I’m still going to sweat.

1:51:54 You’re bringing it on. As long as the audience is cool, I’m cool. And you’ve got to develop that confidence for the stage to be a place where you have no inhibitions. What’s next for you? Next couple of years?

1:52:05 Is it all about another album? Are there other projects you’re working on? I mean, you’re doing TED Talks. You seem like doing a lot of different things. So I’m working on a new EP called The Ruins of Empires that will be out probably August September.

1:52:16 It’s a long historical concept story over music. It’s also coming in graphic novel format. Tweet me at Akala Music to find out more. There will be a Knowledge’s Power Part II in 2015. Working on a few other projects, the Hip Hop Shapes with Things Still Evolving.

1:52:32 We did Richard II, the tour of it last year. We did a production, three shows of the production at the Purcell Rooms in March. They sold out. We’re probably going to do that again at some point and try and develop that production a little further. There’s things in the visual space going on.

1:52:46 I’m working on some TV writing and things of that nature. Not film yet, but we’ve done some short films. We’ve done some short films which we’ll release soon for you pop Shakespeare just you know follow me on Twitter I call it music and I’ll keep you updated awesome. Thanks so much for coming. No, thank you. It’s been again, I’m really lucky because I get to have these fantastic conversations here and we happen to record them but Thanks for dropping science and giving us a lot I’m sure I could ask you questions for another hour But I won’t if you’re listening to us on iTunes come see our faces on our channel at YouTube as we say in London Real It’s about the journey. I wish you all in yours. Thanks for coming. Thank you very much All right, be well.

1:53:22 Take care.