Lowkey - Uncensored Truths

Full transcript: Lowkey on London Real

5:57 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is the London-based hip hop artist Lowkey, born to an Iraqi mother and a British father. He began rapping at 12 years old and soon after released mixtapes which gained critical acclaim for their politically charged lyrics and smooth flow. You would go on to play Glastonbury and be featured on the BBC and become well-known for your political activism.

6:19 You then took a four-year hiatus, completely removing yourself from music in order to focus on your education. In 2016 you returned to the scene by dropping tracks addressing the European refugee crisis, police brutality and the Grenfell Tower fire in London that killed 71 people right across the street from your home. Lowkey, welcome to London Real.

6:38 Lowkey: Thank you from me.

6:39 Brian Rose: It’s a pleasure to have you here.

6:41 Play now after four years, people are gonna stop asking me to have Lowkey on the show. So thank you so much for your time.

6:49 Lowkey: No, thank you very much, and also thank you, you know, for sharing your journey, which I think is one from moving from, and I hope you don’t mind me articulating it in this way, from selfishness to selflessness in terms of your previous life, and I think that sharing that process with a huge amount of people is must be a daunting thing.

7:11 It also must take a large amount of perseverance, but also a large amount of generosity in order to open yourself in that way and kind of expose your vulnerability in that way. And so I thank you for sharing that journey, and it’s something I have enjoyed kind of discovering.

7:28 Brian Rose: Okay. Well, I think you were saying that. Appreciate it.

7:31 I find that they’re more vulnerable. I am the more human connections I make, and the more my life is enriched. So Yeah, and I encourage all of the people I meet and the people that watch the show and our students that vulnerability can be one of their greatest assets.

7:49 Lowkey: And I agree, and I think also one of the most ultimate acts of selflessness is the act of listening, and I think that that is really the birth of so many wonderful things, and it’s something that I think, as we’ve spoken about a little bit before we went on air, is so under emphasized.

8:08 The value of listening within a society where everything seems to be at our fingertips, where we have an omnipotent like relationship with information. The act of listening, the act of humbling oneself in front of another human being and hearing their story and their perception is deeply, deeply undervalued.

8:27 Brian Rose: Yeah. I say that we’re teaching the art of listening here. Mm-hm.

8:31 We’ve got a lot to talk about, and I want to hear about your history and how you started music and what’s been going on for the last 20 years. But I just finished watching a video of you that was filmed on June 15th, and it wasn’t a music video, and it was a video where you had these, these dark circles under your eyes, and I think it’s because you had been up until 9:00 in the morning, and it was, it was the day after Grenfell happened, and I didn’t realize that that was right across the street from where you live. And I was wondering, especially to people in North America, in the US and other countries that probably really don’t know much about this, not as much as they should.

9:14 I was wondering if you could tell me about that day, what would that was like, and what this whole process has been for you?

9:23 Lowkey: Well, I think firstly it’s important to contextualize Grenfell as a tragedy of regulatory bodies that were penetrated by captains of industry. So when we look at the refurbishment that took place on Grenfell and the draping of it with Celotex, the Celotex cladding, which was the equivalent according to studies of 30,000 litres of petrol draped on the side of the building.

9:51 It took place at a time when the area in general was really under the microscope in terms of potentially being sacrificed. The construction companies, it’s not a process which is unique to the area, but it is a process which is particularly vicious in that specific area. You’re talking about a neighborhood which exists on the doorstep of global capital, a neighborhood that exists within a stone’s throw of Roman Abramovich is a hundred and twenty five million pound mansion.

10:25 So what that means is that you have this attempt to extend global capital and encroach upon the social housing within the area. So according to one fullest philosophical way of perceiving the area, it’s a goldmine that’s being prevented from being mined, the gold by people that live there on social housing. And so the important thing is for the area to be regenerated, and so this was something people were active against, the regeneration of the area. However, the refurbishment we believed at the time was going to keep growing for safe from the regeneration, and so the way we perceived it is that all of the rest of the homes were under threat but Grenfell wasn’t.

11:15 Now where that came from, this situation where you have this poisonous cladding which is flammable, but not just on a building like Grenfell but also buildings, hospitals and schools all over the country, was originally Kyoto agreements. The British government came out of that committing to lowering their carbon emissions. Now what they looked at as one of the ideal ways to do that was to insulate buildings, because they saw it that if we insulate buildings then the energy consumption within the rooms will be less because people will have to consume less heat, therefore carbon emissions will go down slightly.

11:59 So what that meant was at that point that you had companies, Celotex, who a subsidiary of Saint-Gobain, which is a massive French construction company, they saw opportunity to come in and sell this type of cladding, this foam cladding, to the British government. But in this period they also, also were able to penetrate the regulatory bodies, and it was something that they were even boasting about. You had Rob Warren, an employee of Celotex, post on their website in 2011 with a blog titled “Celotex now enters government,” and in the exact quote from the post, which was taken down, “Celotex is now shaping building regulations in this country to maximize profits for our company.”

12:46 And so what that meant was, you also had on top of that BRE, which is the regulations authority, previously was privatized in 97, and they became partly reliant on funding from the foam manufacturing insulation industry, shall we say. And so you had all of these incestuous relationships between big business and government. You had Mark Allen, who up until today is actually an advisor for Sajid Javid on building regulations. So what that meant is near of 2014 you had the refurbishment that included the demolishing of a green space by Grenfell and the replacing of that area with a new school in the Academy and also the demolishing of the car park which was outside Grenfell, for which you know the fire services said, look, this is going to prevent us being able to have access to the building in the in the situation of a fire.

13:43 You had the cladding put on there, you know, and this is post Lakanal, which is in Camberwell in 2009, in which six people died, and the coroner’s report afterwards said, look, you need to address this issue of flammable cladding on buildings, and also you need to retroactively refit sprinklers in in these big buildings that have this cladding on it. It would have cost around a hundred and thirty thousand pounds for them to retroactively refit the sprinklers in the building. Bear in mind this is in the same borough when they’ve just announced their 370 million pound refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.

14:20 You can kind of see the underlying issues which are here.

14:23 Brian Rose: Yeah. So in time you thought the cladding might save Grenfell, because this is one of the richest boroughs in the country, and the goldmine you’re referring to is the real estate. Yeah, and the value of. Yeah, so obviously it looks as if the developers would want to get all the social housing out here filled, and at the time you’re thinking, wow, maybe this will actually keep the social housing here and the community here.

14:46 Lowkey: Now, we were thinking it would keep Grenfell specifically towers safe from being demolished, because the rest of the place, the only reason the council have backed off on demolishing the rest of the blocks now is because Grenfell happened. It’s the same, is their only reason they backed off on selling off the library. They’ve made a concession of that. They were going to do that before they sold off the youth center. They’ve sold off the college.

15:09 The only reason they’ve done a few concessions, which are only temporary, and that’s quite important that people are aware of, that this situation is something that’s going to come up again and again and again, but what will be different is whether the community has the visibility that we’ve had for the last six, seven months. Okay. So the point is, on that night I looked out the window around 1:30 a.m. and saw that the building was on fire, and the fire was spreading in an unnaturally fast way, and went down onto the street, and you know none of us really slept properly for the next few days.

15:45 We had bits of the cladding in our hair. The smell was everywhere, and death was, and is, ubiquitous actually, in the area now. From that day onwards, was it very difficult for me on the streets and watch that happen and know that you didn’t know what was happening there but you had to assume that people were dying, and we saw them. We saw people calling to us from the windows. I think this is one of the interesting things about London.

16:11 It has a history of fires in in to it, to an extent which is some would say, and some perceived to be, unnatural. Moreover, the extent to which, say, during the Blitz when the Germans were bombing, under the Nazis, were born in London, of the areas they bombed, la boca was included. You had this phenomena of people coming and watching the spectacle, and I think that within that spectatorship of suffering there is a profound dilemma, and the dilemma is when you know that human beings are dying in front of you, is the right thing to do to continue watching it or to turn away?

16:52 When you know that you’re lost in a state of paralysis and even if you wanted to, you can’t get near there to change things. There were people who saved lives that night by calling up to the windows, advising in terms of running the bath. You know, there were a million, I’m not a million, but there were many, many unsung heroes that night, but the point is that in that situation we came out onto the street and were, in a way, oblivious to the wider superstructure that had created this problem.

17:24 We knew that there was something desperately wrong, you know, and it has several, several situations. You know, one of them is what neoliberalism has done to regulatory bodies, in a way making them tools with captains of industry to sell their products. Another point is the philosophical basis with which specific figures in the council view social housing, or something. This is a direct quote from the New York Times, something which embeds disempowerment and dependency upon the state.

17:59 This is a certain perception that is had by people in the council. The other side of it is the culture really has been of austerity, whereby you had, according to Loosing Us, Oh London, represented with the Fire Brigades Union, a hundred million pounds cut from fire funding. You had ten, ten thousand jobs cut from the fire service, despite the fact that fire deaths have gone up 20 percent in London. He had 29 fire engines lost. You had 10 fire stations shut down in, you know, in the city.

18:32 And so all of these things, like a confluence of issues that are not immediately apparent, which come together to cause absolute devastation.

18:42 Brian Rose: Or were those those following weeks and months afterwards, like for you and for the community?

18:49 Lowkey: Well, I mean, I can’t speak for everyone, and it’s not, I want to atomize the community, but everyone has a different proximity. So it also, you know, our proximity is not that of somebody whose family member died in it.

19:04 The people that I loved that died, but it’s not the same as family members. It’s truly, truly harrowing and horrifying, but at the same time I think that we need to directly combat the forces which brought this into this situation into existence, rather than us focusing on flagellation or platitudes or seeing this as something as horrifying as it was.

19:37 Brian Rose: Yes, we’re in agreement.

19:40 Lowkey: There is consensus about that. However, what were the direct policies that brought this into being?

19:49 That there needs to be that level of interrogation on a societal level, rather than us just leaving on the sides. You know, we have hospitals and schools all over the country that are draped in this stuff and people that are sleeping in death traps.

20:05 Brian Rose: So you don’t want to just get angry and get emotional. You want to systematically go after what what created this thing.

20:13 Lowkey: Yeah, and I mean the point is that you’ve got an inquiry that has access to between 240 to 270 thousand documents, but you’ve got a police investigation which is employing 184 officers working on it and has access to 31 million documents.

20:29 You know, you are looking at five layers of outsourcing on that building. This is, you know, the problem is systemic, and this will go up to a very, very high level. I find it absolutely ridiculous that Sajid Javid has not really issued a coherent statement on the fact that the technical director of Celotex, the company that was the last layer, the last layer of the outsourcing on the building, that were responsible for this cladding, a company that were bringing liable cases against people that had gone on the Internet as early as 2007 and said, look, this cladding burns.

21:04 There’s a company called Rockwool, who do cladding, which is not flammable, who put something out saying, look, this Celotex cladding is flammable, and they’ve been, this is back in 2007, and they were dealing with a liable case about it. How is it that Sajid Javid can come to the front row of the memorial, but yet he cannot actually issue a coherent statement upon his relationship with Mark Allen. That’s what needs to be interrogated within this situation.

21:33 Brian Rose: You said there’s been some temporary measures. What do you mean by that? As in they’ve done this temporarily. They decided to not sell the library, but you’re implying that five years from now, yeah, maybe there won’t be these changes.

21:47 Lowkey: That’s considered the march of industry, you know, sooner or later they’re gonna sacrifice that area, two construction companies, the same as they have sacrificed potentially hundreds of different areas in London.

21:59 Two construction companies. It’s big business that we are rendered ants in this equation as people that live there, but at the same time ants do have collective power. So it’s, it’s ways in which we can kind of negotiate and and contradict those waves of power.

22:18 Brian Rose: Why is that community important? Why are the people that live there in the history, why is that important and important to London?

22:27 Lowkey: Well, I mean, Ladbroke has a really exceptional history. You have just the stone’s throw from Grenfell and Rillington Place, where a killer called John Christie in post- Second World War era murdered many people and stored them in the floorboards and in the walls of his house, and even in the garden. He even used a bone as a doorstop in his garden after that. And the discovery of all these bodies, that house was completely demolished, and nothing has been built upon that place, and that’s literally a stone’s throw from Grenfell.

23:02 You have on the other side, a stone’s throw from Granville, the Freston Road, which was there where the movement of Frestonia was formed, who actually called for independence of the United Nations as their own state, and largely a squatters movement. You of course have the massive legacy of the Notting Hill Carnival, which itself comes out of, you know, four days of race riots at the behest of Oswald Mosley on the road which is overlooked by Grenfell, in which houses of people that come from the Caribbean, in Windrush and afterwards, their houses were firebombed by these people. But that was resisted.

23:39 Celso Cole Crane, a plumber from Antigua, was murdered in Ladbroke Grove, and nobody was ever held accountable for his murder, despite the fact that the racist their gangs were quite well known, and out of that out of that violence and out of that projection of a presence of people that, you know, had roots. It’s being, you know, colonies of the British, you know, Antigua for instance, the British cut off people’s feet and castrated them, you know, despite this rejection of this presence within their society, there came this massive assertion assert assertion of Caribbean presence in London, which is the lying of Carnival. So it has a legacy of turning tragedy to triumph, of turning personal tragedy into collective power, and and so I think for that reason that growth has a really unique place in in the history of this country, and also the history of this city.

24:43 So we need to keep it around to remind ourselves of our culture, of the history, and that if we turn this place into, you know, a Canary Wharf and just mow it all down and build buildings, and we’re gonna lose part of ourselves. I mean, it already has largely. You look at say the Mangrove Nine is a very Frank Critchlow, a very well known case in this interaction between the newcomers and the state, and you know, in the place of the Mangrove restaurant, you now have Bloom Burger, which is, you know, an example of appropriation by the people from here of a culture of people coming in from outside.

25:25 You have Falafel King next to it, which is owned by an Israeli, you know, and this is Palestinian Arabic food. So this, the culture of appropriation of building on top of it, another version, and homogenizing the population. This is a process which has already taken place and has been taking place in Ladbroke for at least the past few decades. I agree, it’s something that we should mobilize around defending, but unfortunately I think it’s more a case of us historicizing and narrativizing that process than really necessarily being able to stop it in a major way.

26:03 Brian Rose: Your song Grenfell, what were, how did that happen in the video, and what would you, what was your thinking behind that?

26:13 Lowkey: Well, really the process that I went through afterwards was trying to find a way to, you know, on an individual level, do something that was cathartic, but at the same time I wanted to forge a a coherence and a cohesiveness within the community in a modest way, but also it was my contribution to a wider trend, which was the pushback to what happened. So where you have public space being privatized, you actually have a counterculture of space claiming going on in the area as we speak, and so I would view that song as kind of a part of it, and attempt to bring distant jakers directly face-to-face with, in some way, those afflicted by their decisions, because I think as a society becomes increasingly complex, as our society does, you know, it’s probably the most complex society that has ever existed.

27:16 What there then comes is big gaps between human beings and the results of their actions, so you can make a decision today and it can affect someone a year later in a very, very drastic way, and so it leaves more space to obfuscate responsibility. Now, through the song we’re attempting to achieve something, which, you know, in the physical realm is possible but to a lesser extent. And so really that’s what the song was about, you know, and now we’re in a situation where seventeen conservative councillors have resigned or been deselected and not going to stand in May, so I think that if you look at the song, if you look at, and that’s not to attribute that to the song, but it’s the song is part of something else, which is a cultural movement which encompasses many different elements,

28:12 Brian Rose: and you specifically put the victims right in front their faces right throughout that video.

28:18 Lowkey: Yeah, I mean, you run a risk, you know, in some way that can be seen as a kind of pornographication of trauma, and this is something that I kind of deal with. I think we, in this era, have increasingly, increasingly pornography at almost everything, whether it’s violence, whether it’s crime, whether it’s wealth, whether it’s poverty, especially on where you’re vying for people’s viewership on YouTube, is there is this tendency to pornography things, and so I’m quite conscious of the potential pitfalls of doing something like that. You also run the risk of, you know, people don’t necessarily want that done with their loved ones.

29:02 They don’t necessarily want those pictures, but you know they wish it never happened in the first place, so anything you do with it is could, you know, not necessarily be received in the best way. So I think it’s, it’s hard, and it’s important to try and be as sensitive as you can with a situation like that.

29:22 Brian Rose: Were you happy with how it turned out?

29:24 Lowkey: I would change some of the lyrics. So we changed the lyric where, say, this corporate manslaughter particularly will haunt you, now hear them scream, because corporate manslaughter entered the lexicon of this tragedy early on, when David Lammy so jet suggested that this is what had happened.

29:43 Necessarily disagree with him, but the point is that legally, corporate manslaughter would give impunity to individuals, and it would just be the corporation in this case that would pay a fine. So in the case of our BKC being considered the corporation and then paying a fine, what that would be is the money of the citizenry being paid to the government, and nobody would be held accountable for it. You’d have people like Robert Black, people like Rockford and Mellon, you know, these people would, would, would get away scot-free, when that’s definitely, definitely no semblance of justice, and that’s definitely not something that people in the community would be receptive of.

30:27 So when putting the word corporate manslaughter in there, I was thinking about it conceptually. I wasn’t thinking about it legally, about the legal implications, so I would change that.

30:37 Brian Rose: Hmm, you are missing from their video. You know, it says a lot about your whole career. That’s what it says to me, a lot of things.

30:44 Why aren’t you in there?

30:46 Lowkey: Several reasons. I can’t just simply say it was an artistic aesthetic choice. I was actually not in the country at that time. I was in Jordan, you know, and the people behind the video, film pill, they work very hard to make it happen.

31:01 People, Lowkey, he worked hard to make it happen. But I do think there’s also something to be said for V on one hand, the death of the ego, the death of the self, the perception of in in a way. I think Lowkey, the name Lowkey is in a way part of that, because I think it’s in this age where ped with the idea there is a permanent version of ourselves within us, and I think I’m more subscribe to you could say the Buddhist conception of the self as something which is not a permanent, set and stone ego-based being.

31:42 And so I think the more you can do things which kind of, especially in this age where visibility is you know, young people are having it drummed into their heads that visibility equals self-worth. I think that finding ways in which to make your points and to not necessarily feed their sort of self-consciousness that comes with all of this stuff, and the investment in the big I am, you know, to be kind of cognizant of that process and feed it as little as possible.

32:13 Brian Rose: Yeah, it made sense that you weren’t in there, and I thought it was very powerful that you weren’t drink What do you think when the Queen and the royal family come by Grenfell like days afterwards?

32:26 What do you make of that? Because I’m sure you have various feelings about that.

32:31 Lowkey: Um, Well, in the immediacy I was thinking about it from a perspective that the royal family are sent all over the world as coaches of BAE Systems and the things that BAE Systems sell, you know, not to mention the fact that the taxpayer, its defense currently being, it subsidizes BAE Systems to the tune of about 1 billion pounds per year. That’s what BAE Systems does. That other homes in other places in Yemen for isn’t, as we speak, that’s what this company is doing, and you have a royal family which is in service to the interests of that company.

33:08 You know, I made a remark afterwards that seems to have been kind of commented on on the internet, but I do think that you know you have a difference in life expectancy of 20 years between the area of the borough which houses Harrods and between North Kensington, wherever there’s a difference in life expectancy of 20 years. You have, as I said before, a refurbishment of Buckingham Palace which would cost the taxpayer 370 million pounds, in comparison to retroactively fitting sprinklers into a building like Grenfell Tower, which would have cost around 130,000 pounds. You know, that juxtaposition is obscene.

33:47 That juxtaposition is obscene.

33:49 Brian Rose: Didn’t make you angry?

33:51 Lowkey: Of course, yeah.

33:53 Brian Rose: Okay, yes. And everyone else?

33:55 Lowkey: No. I can’t, I can’t speak for, you know, kind of people. There were people that that we’re happy to see them and welcomed them.

34:02 Brian Rose: Okay, that’s their right. Neoliberalism.

34:04 You mentioned that earlier, and then you have a song by that name as well. How would you define that to people listening who might not understand exactly what you’re talking about?

34:17 Lowkey: Okay. So neoliberalism is the product of thought that took place in Paris in the 30s, and it was based around the contradiction of totalitarian ideas and collectivist ideas. Originally it was not what it came to be in the 70s as peddled by Milton Friedman to receptive politicians like Reagan and Thatcher.

34:38 In its original inception it left some space for social security, ie benefits as we now call them, but the way that it was translated by the 70s was it became the tyranny of the free market, as they call it, but essentially we know it’s not a free market when we see that those people are bailed out with government subsidies, taxpayer subsidies. We actually see it is the domination, the market domination of the government. It’s the subjugating of the government to the interests of corporate power.

35:11 And so when we look at the IMF, really is an instrument of this. You know, in 76 the Callaghan government took a 3.9 at 9 billion dollar loan from the IMF. It wasn’t the first time the British government went to the IMF. You had Anthony Eden in 56 after the debacle in Egypt, and Eisenhower, who, you know, himself, it’s worth noting, was responsible for the coup against democracy in Iran. He was responsible for the coup against democracy in Guatemala in the 50s, but he at that point came to Eden at the time of the tripartite aggression.

35:50 I guess I’m the NASA’s Egypt, and said to Britain that they have to pull out, and if they don’t pull out then Britain won’t be able to get the loan from the IMF that they need to stop the collapse of the pound, and so when Callaghan, if we fast foods in 76, and took the loan from the IMF, what that meant is that the IMF, whenever a state takes loans from it, they come forward and have these, so these structural adjustment projects, whereby they say, okay, this element of your state function needs to be privatized, this element of state function needs to be privatized. And so what happened was, you had, you know, while Thatcher and Reagan were the implementers of neoliberalism from the political class, the harbingers of doom were Jimmy Carter and Callaghan in this regard, because they paved the way for those decisions by Reagan and Thatcher, and you know, with Thatcher it led to the selling off of gas, selling off of the railway, selling off of water, selling off of Royal Mail, selling off all of the traditional functions of the state to transnational corporate interest, and so what that means is that the transnational corporate interest doesn’t have the same obligations to the citizenry that the state does, and it was a kind of neoliberal counter-revolution against Keynesian economics, as you know, represented in Lucifer Roosevelt’s New Deal.

37:14 And you know, in a way the state committed suicide in slow-motion, and I think that that’s the development that we’ve seen, and that’s what neoliberalism represents. And Grenfell is a product of that.

37:26 Brian Rose: Precisely right, because the corporates pushed the agenda, the Blair administration wanted to promote building, and the regulations were lowered, and all of this happens, and we get evidence of it ten years later, 20 years later, with, you know, 70 some-odd people dying, and now we’ve got this, you know, sarcophagus there that we have to look at every day.

37:47 Lowkey: Well, so people died inside ways on a daily basis as well, if you’re in a situation where, because of the government austerity, they’ve cut, for instance, disability benefits, so they’ve made benefits subject to sanctions. And so if you’re a human being, that your direct relation to material reality, to your ability to sustain yourself, sustenance and stuff like that, people die every day in silent ways, you know, and and on the other hand of it, you have what is called, you’d by some, the manage decline of social housing, but also to manage decline of the NHS, whereby you’re opening up for Richard Branson to come in there, subjugate it in that way. And you know, this is the process that we’ve seen.

38:31 We were born into it, you know, people of my generation, but it’s a a process that we see play out in front of our eyes, and it’s about recognizing the way power operates over human beings. You know, it’s, it’s not just something that is a kind of abstract thing. You know, power operates through our bodies, through our tongues, over our head and under our feet, and so it’s about identifying those ways in which that happens and keeping an eye on it and trying to check it and raising your voice.

38:58 And what it means is that we absolutely continuously have to keep checking corporate power and keeping tabs on it. You know, you look at Carillion, for example, you had them sending profit warnings to their shareholders, many of their shareholders leaving, but yet at the same time the government were giving them billion dollar contracts for essential functions of states, so you’re talking railways to the hospitals, you’re talking about prisons, you’re talking about even the military. They were still giving them billion pound contracts.

39:27 Sorry, even while a lot of the shareholders were leaving. You had Philip Green as a adviser, Theresa May and David Cameron, and corporate responsibility. It’s about an incestuous relationship between corporate power and the state, and it’s one of the things that, you know, Eisenhower, for his sins, in his exit speech, he actually mentioned the domination of the military-industrial complex, being, you know, he coined the phrase the military-industrial complex.

39:56 Originally he wanted to say the military-industrial congressional complex, but he took out the congressional complex part of it in and, you know, but the fact that he wanted to include it in the sentence was an acknowledgement of the extent to which members of Congress were also, as the political class, kind of involved in this subterfuge. You know, hmm.

40:19 Brian Rose: I know these names of these companies. You speak up because I used to work in the City as a banker, and I know Saint-Gobain, and I know BAE Systems, because these are big companies.

40:31 Lowkey: Yep, and so most people never heard of those, and this is the point. Is that within all of these stories there’s human beings whose lives are lost by the wayside, who, you know, the corporate media are not going to want to tell us their stories. The corporate media are not want to focus on this micro example of somebody that has been harmed by British taxpayer money, and and and the royal family being turned into coaches of this company. What that means in a direct material way, because this is the other thing, as I was saying, when societies become more complex, they also become more brittle, but it means that the the the gaps between action and the effects of the action are far wider than ever before.

41:20 And so I think that’s the place that the poet potentially can step into, to say, well, actually, let me introduce you to this person. You know, this is a human being that in some way has been harmed by something you’ve done. Meet this human being. So I think it’s an interesting, is a facilitator of that, of that meeting, that the poet can play.

41:39 Brian Rose: Is that what you consider yourself?

41:41 Lowkey: I try to. Yeah, that’s what is it, humming? It’s a big question. I mean, I think I would place myself. I choose to place myself upon the lineage of someone that has, he’s a D, or someone like a Jawara T people that constantly saw their role as going against the dominant power of the time, because you also have the potential to be a sycophant as a poet.

42:05 You have the potential to be a court poet, you know, and I would rather die than do them.

42:12 Brian Rose: Can you take me back to Carnaby Street? The Real Deal record still room. The records were 12 years old.

42:20 Lowkey: Oh, well, I wasn’t told when I first, when I was 17, 17.

42:24 Brian Rose: Okay, yeah, yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about that guy?

42:29 Lowkey: I think I was a product of a narcissistic society. I think I was hungry for validation. I think I bought to some extent into what I consider a kind of Gilgamesh complex, where the story of Gilgamesh, if you’re familiar with it, after the death of his friend Enkidu, who, you know, when they first met they had their, they had done battle physically, but then they developed a friendship, and when Enkidu died he realized the kind of sorrow of mortality, and so he took it upon himself to search for a way to transcend that human mortality.

43:10 And I think when you look at and you trace human thought, so many of the things that humans have done over thousands of years of existence, especially following the cognitive revolution and also following the invention of writing, because writing obviously, the majority of human history is read through stone, but writing opened up a new possibility for human existence, whereby you could commit yourself to a page that would exist longer than you in the physical realm, shall we say. And so I was imbued, I think, in some way with this idea that to immortalize myself was to kind of go beyond human hood. You know, this is something, of course, I was in no way, shape or form conscious of at the time, but it’s something that now maybe I’m back projecting onto myself in my teens at that time, but I felt, you know, a hunger to to be heard and also for validation, and so that kind of drove me to, um, you know, to shout from the highest rooftops about pretty much anything that came to mind with very little critical thinking.

44:23 You know, it’s actually something that I probably would warn young people against, because you, the visibility there’s not equal work. You know, they say that the unexamined worth, the unexamined life is not worth living, but at the same time I think that you should give yourself time to really think about what it is that you, that you think. You know, it’s like Confucius says, thinking without learning is, is thinking without learning is useless, but learning without thinking is calamitous.

45:04 And so I think what I was doing was I was thinking without learning at that stage.

45:09 Brian Rose: And yet it got you to where you are today.

45:12 Lowkey: Yeah, I mean, they say youth is wasted on the young.

45:15 Brian Rose: Yeah, exactly. Maybe that’s where you had to be at the time.

45:19 Yeah, that’s what you had to do. Yeah, yeah. And yet you know, so you’re a little harsh on yourself as a teenager.

45:25 Lowkey: No, not necessarily. I think it’s just thinking critically about the way that you were thinking.

45:30 Brian Rose: And yet at the same time you choose the name Lowkey. Yeah, which is kind of the antithesis of some of the thought you just described. Can you tell me, it’s interesting?

45:41 Lowkey: I would actually also say that even the thinking of the name, who is more kind of instinctual at that time than it was a thought-out decision. But I went there and had to battle another emcee who had the name Loki, and I defeated him, and then therefore I was able to keep me.

45:59 Brian Rose: He still didn’t tell me why, why I chose the name.

46:03 Lowkey: Um, maybe a shyness. I think one of the things about London as a city is the extent to which anonymity is possible. It is quite unique. About London, T.S.

46:16 Eliot calls it the unreal city, and I think in some ways people can masquerade. They can build for themselves a veneer with relative ease, you know, in a way that’s different from say a society where the last four to five generations and family have lived in the same house, you know. And so I think that in some ways maybe Loki was part of that as well, but I think also I was just full of youthful vigor and enthusiasm and not necessarily knowing where to throw that enthusiasm and where to throw that energy.

46:52 And so I found something which was in some way an outlet for that.

46:55 Brian Rose: Right, and that was the art and the poetry, but still the name is still, I mean, now you look at it and say there’s kind of almost a Buddhist element to it, of where I don’t need to necessarily be out in front. The message is about the message and the effect, and not about the person giving it. Do you think somewhere deep inside you maybe we’re thinking that at the time? Yeah.

47:15 Lowkey: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think that’s definitely an element to it, potentially, potentially in their, in their kind of unconscious way.

47:25 Brian Rose: Okay, and the anonymity of being in London. I mean, the name doesn’t give you that. Did you enjoy? Well, maybe it does.

47:34 Hmm. I mean, it’s also a different, an alter ego you don’t become. Can you speak on that?

47:41 Lowkey: Um, I don’t feel it’s really any different to me as a human being. I do think opening yourself up, as we spoke about earlier, regarding yourself, to, to kind of having the ability to open yourself up and be vulnerable and be fragile and and display your development as a human being and your growth is quite a powerful thing to do, and I think that act of doing that, though, can be quite brutal.

48:11 And I think the young people growing up in a world where constant visibility is completely normal, they don’t necessarily realize the positives and the negatives of that process.

48:28 Brian Rose: Iraqi mother, British father. What’s that dynamic like? I’m sure it’s not as simple as I’m describing it.

48:38 Lowkey: I think that for me growing up in a society where I had an increasing awareness of the colonial relationship between Britain and Iraq, historically, and then you had the contemporary reality of massive projection of violence, not just in 2003 but then in 1991.

49:03 Brian Rose: It gave you the the sense of being an outsider everywhere.

49:08 Lowkey: I think, and that also comes with positives and negatives, because it allows you to get to the point where you cannot view the issue of identity in such a either raw binary type of way. It allows you to get to the space where you think, okay, if I can have a fluidity in my concept of who I am, then it can allow me to better empathize with people in many different ways. I think for me one of the difficult things has been getting away from the tyranny of the present being projected upon the past, so seeing history really in the shadow of the past is something that is quite a debilitating process, because it’s not really allowing you to gain an appreciation of the hybridized reality of the present.

50:04 You know, when we think about so many things that we take for granted in our society, they are the product of a hybridity, especially when you’re talking about whether is part of data, you’re talking about London. You know, you’re talking about places which are the product of hybridity. You know, London previous to the Roman invasion in 43 AD was called Londoners, the Celtic word meaning fear, so crew, but then when the Romans came, they beyond military base included Londinium.

50:33 He then had Vikings. You had Anglo Saxon, she had Normans in 1066. You know, you have a history of hybridity in this country, even as far as, you know, at the point when England was a heptarchy in the seventh century, at the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Saxon King Offa of Middle England struck a coin which had written on the coin La ilaha illallah, because he wanted to trade with, but that at that time, so the extent to which places are enveloped within each other, the identity is relational, that human beings are interconnected.

51:09 I think that when we look at a tamale G of words, when we look at history in a way that is, where, if we can extract it from the dominance of the present, then we can build a greater appreciation of the the high, the hybrid ik nature really of the present and of all human beings. You know, and I think that’s a quite an important thing. You know, we grow up in the shadow of the mythology of a sort of pseudo-scientific concept of race, which has very little correspondence to actual biological fact.

51:45 Brian Rose: You love history, we would if people haven’t figured it out. You obviously are fairly, fairly well-read, and is that something that came to you young, or is that something that you realized was important, to put everything in context around you?

52:04 Lowkey: I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m well-read, but thank you for a kind compliment, but I would say from an early age I did, I did have an interesting relationship with reading, because I think it’s something that it cultivates the imagination, you know, and I think one of the tragedies of, you know, what Chris Hedges refers to is the death of literature and literacy in the triumph of the spectacle means that human beings are not training that part of them which focuses on the imaginal sphere of thought.

52:44 You know, it’s so much based in the material, it’s so much based in the spectacle, it’s so much based in the scene, other than giving themselves the chance to cultivate their own imagination.

52:57 Brian Rose: Hmm, need to read more, listen more. So you’re 5 years old when the Gulf War happens, so when you can pretty much, um, you know, talk and maybe even read yourself, you know, half of your history or your upbringing is already now known as the place that gets bombed, and this is also tortured embrace, to bring into, you know, the colonizer and the colonized.

53:20 Lowkey: While it’s an embrace, it’s tortured, and while it’s torturous,

53:24 Brian Rose: what do you mean in that?

53:26 Lowkey: The person that’s being violent with the other human being also leaves the situation with trauma, but I think it’s important to be, to be aware of that. And so I think that, you know, when I said in the Ahmed song, when Ahmed dies we all die, I think that that’s something that, um, home there’s truth in it, maybe truth with a small t and not a capital T, not a dominant truth, you know, because of course what is truth?

53:54 But there is a truth in that.

53:56 Brian Rose: I think that’s a hard concept for people to understand, because you have to go a little deeper. You have to get away from your immediate reactions of victimization or anger, and then think, oh, maybe there is a trauma when America does all these things to their citizens or to other countries, that maybe they live with this guilt and trauma. Yeah, and it, it comes back in other actions. Yeah, I don’t heard many people talk about that, though.

54:21 Lowkey: Well, it requires an acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of human beings

54:27 Brian Rose: growing up. How did this shape you? I mean, anything other thoughts on that? With mom, mean this, and father and dad being this, or was it an identity issue? How did that change?

54:40 How did that make who you are today?

54:43 Lowkey: Well, the way that it now translates to my conclusions about things is that I don’t necessarily subscribe to this idea of the purity of belonging, in that there is any such thing as a pure anything. You know, if you look at the history about that, when, which African sort of built the city Madinat al-Salam as it was originally called. He brought people from Khorasan, so he brought people from, you know, what is today, you know, considered Persian people.

55:15 So even within that mix you see that this idea of any type of pure being is actually an impossibility, and more often than not it’s weaponized and instrumentalized by a state power to try, and you know, because I find interesting in this country the way that you have a political class that can sell off the railway to a German state, calm, and could sell off all functions of the state, Sephora state companies. It’s the same group, so it’s the same Tories that will peddle in this idea that you should care about your meat, for instance, having a Union Jack on its packet, or you should care that your apples have a Union Jack on their packet, because somehow it has to do with this identity that you’re supposed to subscribe to. And I think in times of permanent war, identities become sharper and sharper, and so I think it’s allowed me to kind of liberate myself from that.

56:13 Brian Rose: Okay, I know. So from boxing people within those categorizations and seeing them as defined by that. Used to rap with an American accent when I was eight. What, what were some of your hip-hop influences, and, and that probably started off a long relationship with America, and where has that gone?

56:37 Lowkey: Well, I think for me it was a product of cultural imperialism of looking at this society as, you know, because it was also the most visible, you know, in English language certainly then, and probably now, it’s the most visible, you know, the second biggest export of the United States is Hollywood after arms.

57:02 So it’s on that level, you know, the ubiquity of images of, you know, the accent, and so we kind of took off, took after it and kind of copied it in that way without thinking critically about what was happening, but I was only 12.

57:20 Brian Rose: Okay. Early hip hop influences, and later, once, okay.

57:25 Lowkey: So I would say that I really, I really liked Ice Cube. I liked Ice-T.

57:30 I liked Dr. Dre.

57:31 Brian Rose: Why those guys?

57:33 Lowkey: And because of the rebellious nature of what, of that particular period of their musical output.

57:41 Brian Rose: Ice Cube is quite historical. He said yeah, he has some very deep messages, he does, you know.

57:49 Lowkey: I wish I loved the stories. I love the storytelling aspect of it. Okay, in which you could look in a kind of forensic way at situations, and then I got a little bit more philosophical when I got into people like Nas. I liked Aly Vegas as well.

58:07 Brian Rose: In a way, though, I think that partaking in the practice of hip hop, what made me stop listening to hip hop?

58:15 Lowkey: I haven’t listened to it for really many years. Listen to it anecdotally from science. It’s like, why is that? Partly because I feel that we have to build our own curriculums. We have to think critically about what it is that we’re digesting and we’re taking in, and it’s been a kind of incremental development where the corporatization of hip hop has become more and more pronounced and more and more acute in that way.

58:41 So I really want to protect myself from, you know, exposing myself to detrimental ideas, and choosing what I want to listen to. You know, I think we have like I said, such an omnipotent relationship with information. You have to be clear about what information is that you’re going to welcome into your thought space, and, and I just don’t view it really as essential for me to really expose myself to stuff that’s being sold to me by these massive corporations.

59:13 Brian Rose: Back in 89, 91 wasn’t as much like that, pretty pure, I mean.

59:17 Lowkey: But then again, we come back into the idea of purity and authenticity when we say that something that is completely engineered in one way or another by corporate interest is inauthentic. It’s authentic for what it is, right?

59:31 Brian Rose: But when Cube went solo, and when Ice-T dropped, is the first couple albums, it was pretty much him and the mic, and it pretty much went to your ears. Yeah, and they were less trying to sell you European cars and, and alcoholic drinks, you know.

59:46 Lowkey: Right there was less of that. It still existed, but to a far, far, far lesser extent. You know, these are adverts that people are listening to now. These are mantras that are being created in people’s consciousness. There are already adverts.

1:00:00 Brian Rose: Talk to me about the mixtapes that came after Deal Real, and then, and now, how this started. People start hearing about you. Yeah, what’s, what do you remember about that time? How did it happen?

1:00:12 Lowkey: Well, I had a manager at the time.

1:00:14 Brian Rose: You’re smiling. It was his.

1:00:15 Lowkey: Well, the mixtapes kind of came up around the same times, the open mic, and I had a manager who encouraged me in this regard, of the Asian making mixtape. Should send it outside the shop, if you’re there rapping, you know, whom I should send it off to? Its.

1:00:28 Brian Rose: And so, okay, which you didn’t want to do necessarily. No, this was never a compare commercial endeavor for you.

1:00:35 Lowkey: I mean, it was, and it is, you know, it’s, it’s my livelihood, but at that stage, you know, still a child, really, and yeah. I mean, at the same time, I in retrospect, I do think people should think twice before committing their voice to potentially, to Eternity. They should think twice about what it is that they’re gonna be propagating through the music.

1:00:59 Okay, Steven, I wouldn’t necessarily advise my children to do the same, to go ahead and release tracks, though I don’t think is necessary. I think you can take that time for contemplation. You can say that time for locating yourself, you know, understanding the world as well, reading more, really, to foster your curiosity, actually, more than feeling you have to be acknowledged, you have to be validated. Ooh, you have to be seen. Give yourself the chance to satisfy your curiosity about the world.

1:01:26 Brian Rose: Okay, where did the mixtape to bring you, what happened with those things?

1:01:31 Lowkey: Well, I mean, relatively at that time, you know, the hip-hop magazines, this is before really the Internet, so the hip-hop magazines kind of acknowledged it, gave it good reviews and stuff like that, so it did what it did for that time.

1:01:45 Brian Rose: Okay, and why did they find you popular or interesting? What was different about you?

1:01:51 Lowkey: It’s a good question.

1:01:52 Probably I had a forceful spirit at that time, and my spirits tired now, but it’s still forceful, and I think that at that stage, like I said, I had, they need to be validated was really the number one, you know. My actions were in many ways a slave to my ego as many of us, you know, now I would, because myself, or less so.

1:02:22 Brian Rose: Why is your spirit tired? You had four years off because of the brutality of the moment historically, politically,

1:02:32 Lowkey: I think my naivety allowed me, allowed for a certain level of optimism.

1:02:39 You know, I’m not an optimist, I’m a possibility, but the the parameters of possibility seem smaller today than they were then. I think exposure to consecutive traumas, exposure to an intimacy with death I didn’t have at that point, inevitably it will lead to a kind of sense of impending doom and a haunted future. And I think that, you know, I think if you don’t have a sense of a haunted future in this stage, you know, when you have 97% of scientists that work on the climate, you have NASA, you have the US Army, you have ExxonMobil, actually in consensus that the carbon emissions that we are creating, our civilization is creating, are leading us to a stage where organized team in life as we know it may not be possible to the extent that we used to.

1:03:41 You know, you can’t help but think if you think generations ahead, you can’t help but worry, you know, and you can’t help but feel that these things are really important and need to be resisted, and their stuff weighs heavy on you.

1:03:59 Brian Rose: Of course, yeah, and sometimes that sense of art, the optimism, if you hold it for too long, it can, it can drain you.

1:04:08 Lowkey: Yeah, I mean, also we are in some ways victims of the happiness industry, which is constantly pumping us ideas that, you know, it attempts to transform economic and social problems into psychological and emotional problems, so you can be happy regardless of these over superstructures which exists.

1:04:31 You know, and the fact is, is that we are doing the work of intergenerational, hundred years’ work. You know, when you look at, say, the Levellers, and you had Oliver Cromwell and the Putney debates, they were talking about universal suffrage, right? This was the 1600s. He had the Peterloo Massacre in the 1800s. He had the Chartists.

1:04:54 William Cuffay was sent away to Tasmania with eggs out at Tolpuddle, marches, suffrage in this society for men and for women over the age of 21 who were not landed gentry, who was not granted until 1928. You know, of course women had the right to vote in Azerbaijan before they had the right to vote here. You know, this was from the 1600s to 1928. This was the work of, you know, and that’s not to kind of depict this society as an ideal society. I don’t have that chronological arrogance, as C.S.

1:05:30 Lewis called it. I perceived these things as generational struggles, and so the things that I’m spending time thinking about and struggling for in my life are very unlikely to be ameliorated or fixed within my lifetime, so it’s that knowledge that you’re planting seeds for a tree that you won’t be able to see in the shade of,

1:05:53 Brian Rose: but you’re okay with that.

1:05:55 Lowkey: It’s not a matter of being okay or not okay. You just have to accept it and do it, because you take action.

1:06:03 You put these tracks out there, you make these videos, you make these statements. I mean, you’re organized, you know, that’s the important part. These things are part of a wider political organization. They don’t exist in a vacuum, you know. It’s not just the images on the internet, you know, you are a component of a wider social struggle.

1:06:23 You are part of that, and you are an organized, when you create that music, a, you are a component of that struggle, and I think that’s important. You link yourself and connect yourself to those movements in the right, and you don’t want to just make music and make videos. You want to organize your movements and make change. Yeah, and I view it as a tool. I view the music cause it’s all.

1:06:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, purpose. Just want to go back a little bit. 209, dear listener. I just want to kind of find out, like, you know, that was the full release. That was when we finally got kind of an album from you.

1:06:56 Well, when you look back and listen to that, you know, what do you see, and was that an important part?

1:07:03 Lowkey: Again, I think it was rushed in that clarity.

1:07:06 Brian Rose: Okay, you were trying to get the voice out.

1:07:09 Lowkey: Yeah, well, I’m egoic. Moves, I think so.

1:07:12 Yeah, okay. But I think it’s important that you find a way to know your convictions and to have clarity about your convictions, and know that what you’re doing serves a specific purpose. Okay, and that song is music for music sake.

1:07:25 Brian Rose: Okay. And it did serve a purpose because it got you a platform, and it allowed you to make more music.

1:07:31 Yeah, and do other things. Yeah, okay. You’re not convinced. Okay, um. Palestine.

1:07:39 Yeah, why, why Palestine? Why are you interested? Why are you an activist there? How did this come about?

1:07:49 Lowkey: Well, I think if you look at the history of the Palestinian tragedy, it was something that in 1948 encompassed Iraqi people in one way or another in 67.

1:08:04 It also involved them in one way or another, and I think in some way I inherited a a trauma in that regard to the planting of a colonial settler entity in Palestine, and the ramifications for the planting of that entity. What that led to, that led to millions of refugees. That led to, you know, in the direct acting at 750,000 refugees, but those people have proliferated massively, and there’s been more and more displacement of people. I also think on some level that when you are in a desperate situation, you look at sort of symbolic and emblematic causes to define your identity, and think at some level, and at some point part of it was about defining myself through that.

1:09:01 But you know, it’s the f no territorial struggle, and I think that it’s also something that you know, so many people have found it quite easy to ignore within my lifetime, within the lifetimes of the last few generations that I’ve come from. So for me it’s been something that I felt, you know, this is deeply unjust, and absolutely at least you can do is when you have a song in a situation where people are risking their lives on a daily basis, you know, for an idea of freedom, as you know, as nebulous as that term may be, the least you can do is contribute artistically.

1:09:46 Brian Rose: What do you remember about your first chapter at the Gaza Strip?

1:09:51 Lowkey: I went once in 2010. Yeah, at the time when President worked was the president of Egypt, and so for six days they didn’t allow us in, and then we really in and only really got into another for a few hours. But as there is, you know, an open-air prison, when David Cameron has defined it, is that, you know, and the UN say that by 2020 it will be uninhabitable. So we are looking at really one of the most,

1:10:22 Brian Rose: it’s the capital of Gaza?

1:10:24 Lowkey: No, there is.

1:10:25 So what you have is you have the State of Israel, yeah, as founded in 1948 in the neck bar, and then you have the West Bank, which is on the other side, which is now split into Area A, B and C, and then you have Gaza, which is a small strip of land, you know, by the coast, by Egypt really.

1:10:48 Brian Rose: And you’re saying it’s an open-air prison? It’s that bad?

1:10:52 Lowkey: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, down to, I have a few hours of electricity daily, down to every calorie of what is allowed in.

1:11:01 Is it goes before the Israelis, you know, and they’ve used language like putting them on a diet when, to think about what they’re allowing in and out of, because in terms of food. So you know, we’re talking about one of the most tragic situations of our time when we talk about what’s happened to the people in the past, and a lot of them are refugees themselves, internal refugees from what is now Israel. You know, that we’re even out there. It used to be on the Egyptian jurisdiction until 1967, when it fell under Israeli occupation, direct occupation, and supposedly they pulled back when I was sure and took out the settlers.

1:11:43 But the fact is, is that it’s, to digitally occupied, is still occupied by C, it’s occupied by air, it’s occupied by land in terms of what can come in and can’t come out. And you know, people are, you know, just, it’s again, it comes back to this idea of the spectatorship of suffering, because we are now aside, just observing this, this situation, and I think, yeah, it’s absolutely heartbreaking, and very little space for hope.

1:12:13 Brian Rose: It doesn’t get talked about enough.

1:12:15 Lowkey: No, of course not. Of course not, because it’s a kind of war of attrition against your sense of empathy. You know, within our lifetime the Palestinians among others have been monster iced by this sort of manufactured other press idea, that has this other, that the differences are emphasized, so extraordinarily for you to see such a wide chasm between you and this other person.

1:12:41 Brian Rose: Jimmy Carter had some very harsh things to say about you. know the dude, the dual states and the segregation of this.

1:12:49 Lowkey: And I wouldn’t say harsh things to say, I can say I would say fairly tame. Okay, but that since he’s come out of the president’s, yeah, when he was the president he was really responsible for seducing the Egyptians into, into surrendering their army to U.S. domination, which really took the Egyptian military out of the equation, with is, you know, and to turning them into a client state of Israel, and so now they are the enforcers of the, of the siege of Gaza to this day.

1:13:27 Brian Rose: You were detained at Ben-Gurion Airport for a while.

1:13:31 What was that like?

1:13:32 Lowkey: Oh, I go in Tel Aviv to get to Gaza. No, no, was to get to the West Bank, to the West Bank.

1:13:39 Brian Rose: Okay, course that makes sense,

1:13:41 Lowkey: and it’s interesting because you start to think more about the place that you occupy in somebody else’s imagination, especially when you analyze the types of questions that you’re asked. I think it’s something that I’m going to write about in a book one day, but it’s not a unique exceptional experience.

1:14:01 You know, thousands and thousands of people have gone through the same thing, and but they have probably a lot more information about me than they’d have about somebody else, because of my music, and because of the visibility of what I do, and more of them.

1:14:18 Brian Rose: So they were gonna stop you anyways?

1:14:20 Lowkey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think one thing they said to me, which I found quite interesting, and it kind of speaks to the materialist aspect of Zionism, and the way in which violence was a, a prime mover of the Zionist movement, into the understanding that this was the ultimate decider of, of people’s faith.

1:14:40 Was when during interrogation, when them said to me, well, when we don’t feel you’re talking or doing, and so there’s this idea that the role of the musician or the poet is almost inconsequential in the face of, you know, massive military, nuclear armed military prowess, which is what the Israelis have, which I found quite interesting, and I have, you know, found it hard to think of examples where music has actually had an effect on the tangible lived reality that was worthy of mention. You know, you have the example, because it’s something that you can’t really quantify. It’s quite hard for you to really put it down to something to say this equals this.

1:15:24 You know, you have the example of John Lennon in the period when he got close to the like Panthers, and he closed the Bobby Seale and stuff. He actually made a song for a activists couch on Sinclair and activists who worked on the legalization of marijuana, who was imprisoned in the United States for ten years, and John Lennon made a song about it, and a few days later, because of the uproar, it seems the decision was made to free John Sinclair. So you do have examples where music can play a role, but I think it’s finding a way to maintain faith that what you’re doing is not just superfluous navel-gazing and is actually contributing in some tangible way.

1:16:06 It’s improving the lived reality.

1:16:08 Brian Rose: Yes, a bit of a nihilistic way to look at, you do,

1:16:12 Lowkey: but I think all of us, if we, if we, you know, we’ve seen the emergence of so many nihilistic movements within our lifetime, and we understand where that nihilism comes from. It comes from a despair, comes from a despair.

1:16:28 Brian Rose: Do you really think that Israeli interrogator believed what he said? It was he just getting under your skin?

1:16:36 Lowkey: No, it was a statement of fact.

1:16:38 Brian Rose: Okay. It wasn’t that he believed what he said. Oh, he was getting under my skin.

1:16:42 Lowkey: It was a statement of fact.

1:16:43 They, they, the creators of coach and cultural ambience, to bother them. You do have precedents. We’re golden mind, 70s, they assassinated your son. Kind of funny. They assassinated other figures who it was clear will not involved militarily in any way, shape or form and did not have any relationship to even military training.

1:17:04 These were people whose weapon was the pen, and they were still assassinated in the seventies. Campaign by Golda Meir. So you do have that, but you know, today it’s, it’s not the same. It’s not the same.

1:17:19 Brian Rose: Do you hate Israelis?

1:17:20 Lowkey: Hmm, that’s an interesting question. Do I hate Israelis? There’s an interesting book by that. Sound kind of funny. It’s a short story, so he could return to Haifa, and in it he talks about a family that were driven out in 1948 from Haifa, forced to leave, and in that situation they left their son in a car in a house.

1:17:49 Now that six-month-year-old child was raised by a family who had left Eastern Europe, and they raised him, and so to the family that left him, his name was called Dude, but to the family that raised him, his name was Dove, and the idea is that he was raised, for all intensive purposes, in Israeli, unaware of his Palestinian heritage. And the short story is about this couple’s return to Haifa, which is enabled by the annexation of the West Bank in 1967, and they find him, and they meet him, and they see the way that this human being has obviously been brainwashed, but been socialized into being a soldier, you know, in the Israeli army, and that he was, you know, their son, and now this is what he is. I think that speaks to the way in which identity is quite a fluid process.

1:18:51 I think that realizing that Zionism was a multi-faceted movement, that there were different trends within it, sees different even just anecdotally, different possibilities for things that could have happened. But what I would say is that someone that connects the way those ready to themself, even if they are a Palestinian, are connecting themselves to a particularly violent form of nationalism which is directly detrimental to other human beings’ aspirations for life, for freedom of movement, for so many things. It’s not a matter of me personalizing the situation and saying I personally, you know, I try to hate nothing actually as much as I can.

1:19:44 I try to understand things rather than to hate them, but it’s also an understanding that you know, this is an entity which implanted that entity where it was implanted meant disastrous consequences for many, many human beings, and if someone associates themselves with that entity and that nationality, they have to take responsibility for the actions. No, certainly it’s not necessarily responsibility, but at very least I would try and impress upon that person the juxtaposition of a reality, so that where they exist with this, you know, identity and possible, which gives them access to certain things. There are those who are disqualified and excluded from that process who don’t have access to other things, and it’s because of the manufacturing of that entity, you know, probably a lot of trauma there.

1:20:46 There is, there is a lot of trauma there in, in many different ways. You know, I think about the Iraqi Jewish community as some of the Jewish victims of Zionism. What do I mean by that? You know, you had Nebuchadnezzar moving people from Jerusalem around 500 AD, and dumping them in Babylon, and the Iraqi Jewish community, a lot of them go back to that point, so their presence in the country is traceable, as far as they would argue, to that point. Now what you had during the Zionist movement was the idea, and Zionist emissaries in Iraq actually used the language of human material.

1:21:30 They perceived, to some extent, the people that were coming from Eastern Europe, you know, the way you had in the days of Auschwitz, 12,000 people being killed a day, being burned a day, and their fat being used for soap, and their hair being used for pillows, the people that were coming out of that situation, surviving from that situation, being referred to as bad human material. Yet the people that had existed in Iraqi society, and you know, you had the Sassoon family, Vidal Sassoon, you had finance minister in the 20s in Iraq, was a member of the Sicilian family, they had relatively existed in a, in affluence really, shall we say, to the experience in Eastern Europe, so it came to 1951, and you had the necessity of importing these human beings from Iraq to quote-unquote Israel.

1:22:24 Now at that point there was an agreement between the Iraqi prime minister, a time Delphia cosa, ad to pass a law which was the denaturalization law, which would allow Hiroaki Jewish people to let go of their citizenry, their citizenship, and, and board a plane which would take them to, to Israel. Now they couldn’t persuade people to do it. People were refusing to do it. Now what followed that period was a campaign of bombs placed in positions of importance to Jewish people, from synagogues to cafes in Baghdad.

1:23:01 Now the United States, the Brits and the Iraqis had a consensus that the cause of this campaign was Zionist mercenaries. It was not completely different from a campaign that was later launched in the 50s in Egypt by the one who was the Minister of Defense in Israel against Abdul Nasser government, in order to cause a wedge between Egypt and the United States at that point. So there are those that say it’s very clear that the people responsible for this campaign in Iraq at the time, in order to encourage people to leave, was was the Zionist Secret Service really at that time.

1:23:42 And so you had many Iraqis then, eventually leading over a hundred thousand or so, you know, when they got to Israel, they were placed into camps and sprayed with DDT, and they had to protest in order to be given housing. So you see, you know, and as answer back, that is a beautiful documentary that I would recommend to anyone. Could forget about that, about the Iraqi Jews who are now in in Israel and, and feel this nostalgia for an Iraq that they lost and that they can’t go back to because of the relationship.

1:24:18 So I think you know it would be slightly hyperbolic and hysterical for us to jump around saying I hate anyone. It’s not a matter of hating anyone. It’s, it’s about understanding political realities, understanding the way ideology functions to alienate us all in different ways. Mm-hmm,

1:24:37 Brian Rose: and you talk about trauma. I mean, there’s trauma from World War Two.

1:24:41 There’s trauma you know, displacing people. There’s trauma, but the offense they make, I mean, you know, trauma goes all sorts of different ways you know, do you think some of that builds on top of each other? People that suffer trauma, maybe induce trauma in others,

1:24:57 Lowkey: and of course violence of the violated, as they call it here, with that down. But then you also have this idea that when love is rejected it returns back to the self as hatred, and then sometimes those same people can strike out as a form of misdirected self-flagellation.

1:25:14 And you know, I think that’s one of the, the tragedies of human hood is the extent to which we, I partake in self-flagellation without realizing it, as in blaming ourselves, hurting our self.

1:25:27 Brian Rose: Yeah, because of what, what has happened to us, rejection of love, you know, trauma of our own trauma.

1:25:34 Lowkey: Yeah, but it’s also north of systick position and Huson ostracism is something that’s so deeply encouraged within our society, but yet we forget what happened to Narcissus.

1:25:45 You know, he fell in love with his own reflection in the river, and his two versions of the story. One is that he fell in and drowned, and the other is that he literally stopped eating, looking after himself, and he died there by the river, and, and then the flowers popped out, which will not, you see here, which the Narcissus. So the point is, is that the Narcissus doesn’t necessarily love themselves. They might hate themselves, but what it means is they sent to their self and everything they sent to their own ego, in everything.

1:26:12 And so I think that when you feel rejected in some way, you can subscribe to the idea that there must be something deeply fluid about you, and that’s the reason that you’re in this situation, and so therefore you must repeatedly punish yourself and ruminate upon your own victimhood.

1:26:29 Brian Rose: And yet we’re in the age of narcissism now, big time.

1:26:33 Lowkey: Yeah, and it’s getting more than ever.

1:26:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, more than ever, and it’s growing.

1:26:38 Lowkey: This is very profitable.

1:26:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, in the short term I guess.

1:26:41 Lowkey: Yeah. I mean, not necessarily for the person that’s the narcissist, but it’s that profitable for big business. Yeah, because then the more self-conscious you feel about yourself, the more things can be sold to you to improve.

1:26:53 Brian Rose: I went to Israel last year to film a movie with, you know, Portal, the movement, you know, movement expert Reigns caught him McGregor.

1:27:00 I’d never been to the Middle East. I still have never been to Gaza or the West Bank, and yeah. We had a hard time getting in as well. I’m sure everyone gets a little stress going in and getting out of that place, and yeah, I took it all in, tried to observe what was happening, and you know, and just see what the people were like, you know, and how I was treated, and it was very interesting to see what goes on there, and what’s normal and what’s not normal, and you know, when people are people and stripped of nationalism, it’s there, they’re people really, and yet a lot of people, I’m American, and a lot of people associate everything that America does bad with Trump.

1:27:39 I still remember when I first moved to England and went to Europe, it was Bush this and Bush that. The first Bush, I think, and so it’s another thing with trying to separate someone from their nationality, and yet maybe also hold them accountable somewhat.

1:27:54 Lowkey: Hmm, well, there is the argument that the early Zionist thinkers, from Theodor Herzl to Leo Pinsker, actually subscribed to a form of anti-Semitism, in that they saw anti-Semitism in Europe at that time.

1:28:06 They were coming out of the Russian experience, where you had people in the Pale of Settlement. You had people they didn’t have the right citizenry. We’re talking about Czarist Russia. You know, actually around the same period you had the first-ever suicide bombing, which was used to kill the Czar of Russia at that time. Guy was trying to assassinate him.

1:28:29 I ended up walking up to him with a grenade and blowing himself up next. This is our, but the point is, is that you had people like Leo to and Theodor Herzl and Leo Pinsker, who perceived themselves as spending their life invested in assimilatory gestures, whereby they were trying to fit into the society that the argument is, is that they internalized this authorization to such an extent that they saw a kind of fatalistic determinism regarding the other nests of Jewish people, and so therefore they had to exist separate from all other societies. There’s also potentially a clairvoyant way that you could interpret the way they perceive things, because maybe they saw something that other people didn’t.

1:29:14 Maybe they saw something coming that other people didn’t, but I’m sure you know, I’m interested to ask you that. While you were there, did you feel that this was a healthy society, or did you feel that this was a society with multiple elephants in the room and with ghosts?

1:29:33 Brian Rose: Did I feel like doing more elephants in the room than New York City or Los Angeles or London. Yeah, I mean, it’s a very concentrated place, you know. I feel like everything is turned up a few notches there because of, I don’t know, I felt there was tension energy.

1:29:52 Also high growth, a lot of the same economic disparity that it feels like in London.

1:29:58 Lowkey: Did you feel the society was more militarized?

1:30:01 Brian Rose: Yes, I mean, you see 18-year-olds with machine guns in the mall, and you see very young children that go into the military.

1:30:10 Lowkey: Well, I find interesting is the way that that militarization of human beings, which could be, for example, an 18-year-old from Finchley here, has you know, legally nothing stopping him going and being trained to kill people, and then coming back here.

1:30:27 He can even partake in a campaign where he kills people at the push of a button, or otherwise, you know, he might have to go in by land, and in that situation a lot of them, you know, leave seriously traumatized by their experience. Some of them hurt themselves to avoid going into that situation, direct confrontation. But the point is, is that an 18-year-old here could go and get militarized here. I mean, or someone from here, from anywhere in the world.

1:30:51 Ya know, there’s the grandfather clause in Israeli law, which says therefore a person has a grandparent that they can prove is Jewish, then they are able to go and join the army and, and get citizenship. Right now there are certain people disqualified from that militarization. You know, Palestinians are in a situation where they have an authority which is imposed upon them since Oslo, which is actively disarming them, not let alone the only time they can get trained militarily is under the auspices of the CIA, the General Dayton and his ilk.

1:31:25 This is the only time they can actually get, in any way, shape or form, militarized. But yet you have a society where conscription is for everyone, and people are invited from all around the world to, right, become militarized, which they see is a necessity to the survival of their country.

1:31:42 Brian Rose: Really? So it’s, I mean, I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t actually believe that’s the case. Maybe it’s a, I think it’s a survival of the country.

1:31:51 Lowkey: I think that that is a, a way of, of rationalizing or justifying, is, know, about the survival of a country. It’s about the maintenance of domination. Okay, and a mentality, but it’s about literally the physical military maintenance of the domination.

1:32:08 Brian Rose: Okay, you know, it’s not as that, and as that not equal survival.

1:32:12 Lowkey: No, of course it doesn’t.

1:32:14 The maintenance of domination doesn’t equal survival.

1:32:16 Brian Rose: Survival is the end product of that, but it’s overdone, is what you’re saying?

1:32:20 Lowkey: No, it’s not about survival. Okay, it’s about the Cantonment domination of land. It’s about the continued displacement of people.

1:32:26 It’s about the continued confiscation of resources. It’s about the continued dominance.

1:32:33 Brian Rose: You know, it sounds like America and the UK as well.

1:32:37 Lowkey: Yeah, but of course it’s slightly different, because you know, the United States, the thirteen colonies fought off the British, ostensibly, and you know, then there was the Louisiana Purchase. There was Spanish-American War, there was Mexico.

1:32:55 You know, you’re dealing with a melting pot and a different kind of landmass. You know, they’re different type of, they are different, but America’s, the job is to project power around the world, militarily and economically certainly. You know, in this corner West says you have 53 cents of every dollar that the US taxpayer place goes to the military-industrial complex, 700 billion a year going to the military industrial, to the military, and that’s that.

1:33:22 You can’t look at that’s data that we can’t see how it’s actually spent. We can’t analyze it, and Trump wants to increase it to 54, 54 billion per year on top of that, you know, and you look at the US military spending, it’s more than the next 10 military powers combined. So it’s, it’s very vulgar and obscene. Yeah, but, but they are, they are different. They are different, and, and I think that in terms of settler colonial precedence, I’m not necessarily arguing for us to over-exceptionalize the State of Israel, but at the same time we should be cognizant that it’s not the same as, say, Britain, which by 1914 occupied 12 million seven hundred thousand miles of the globe.

1:34:05 You know, there’s, there is a difference.

1:34:07 Brian Rose: It is a difference, but there of course are elements of similarity.

1:34:11 Lowkey: Yeah, in the ways that colonialism is further just to finished with Israel.

1:34:15 Brian Rose: I also found two people to be extremely amazing and warm and friendly, and you know, yeah, I really had an amazing time there, and I was very impressed with that.

1:34:24 Lowkey: I think there are amazing people there, but they’re the refuseniks.

1:34:28 They’re the people that refuse to serve in the army. They’re the people that are, you know, willing to be completely shunned and ostracized within the society because they refuse to view Palestinians as inhuman. I think those are the amazing Navy.

1:34:43 Brian Rose: I thought I didn’t live it. I don’t, I didn’t necessarily meet those people.

1:34:47 So yeah, I found, you know, is it on a human level? I found people that weren’t refused next to be, you know, very genuine.

1:34:55 Lowkey: Well, all human beings are walking miracles, and all human beings have beautiful things about them, but I’m interested in the way in which power and technologies of power can function to entomb us into relationships and social relations that we may disagree with, and what I also find interesting is the way in which social arrangements which we live through can live on in us, buried deep in our subconscious, and can also be reflected in the ways that we interact with other people, and though, and, and I think that that social arrangement, it doesn’t just cease existing because we don’t see it, and that social arrangement doesn’t stop existing because it ends.

1:35:40 If you’ve lived through that social arrangement, it will in some way manifest in your behavior, in your thought process, in your way of viewing people, and in your way of treating people. And so I’m, you know, it’s, it’s interesting, it’s interesting the way that these mythologies that we connect to ourselves and we invest so much in maintaining can have disastrous and calamitous effects.

1:36:04 Brian Rose: It sounds a bit like race relations in America, and we’ll get to that you mentioned Trump, and obviously he wants to move the embassy to Jerusalem, and just thoughts on that, and just thoughts on Trump in general?

1:36:17 Lowkey: Well, the US Congress voted in the 90s for the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem, but consecutive presidents have signed a waiver, because it was something that they viewed as potentially disastrous. There’s a few different ways of perceiving Trump’s decision. There are those who argue that it is about defending himself from the intelligence services by getting the Zionist lobby on his side. That’s an argument that people make, I think. There’s an article by John Glubb, who was a British imperialist who actually led the Jordanian army in 1948, and essentially, in collaboration with the British and the Israelis, organized the annexing of the West Bank to Jordan.

1:37:05 So John Glubb has an article called The Cycle of Empires, and he argued that throughout history, when we analyze the movement of empires, there are six stages. So there’s the age of the pioneers, there’s the age of conquest, the age of commerce, the age of affluence, as the age of intellect, and there’s the age of decadence. Now, within the age of decadence he argues is the point where the spectacle becomes more important than everything. Bread and circuses.

1:37:38 Celebrity class becomes massively bloated and more highly paid than any other sector, often, and the argument that some make is that now we are living through their age of decadence, whereby we have a weapon of mass destruction in a weapon of mass distraction, sorry, and of destruction as well, in Donald Trump, who couldn’t have got elected without peddling an anti-neoliberal ticket. So what does that have to do? That has to do with two things: the externalization of production and industry that took place thanks to Bill Clinton’s NAFTA.

1:38:19 3.7 million US jobs were sent abroad, seventh of US assets were and now owned by foreign companies and governments because of NAFTA. So what that leaves for someone like Donald Trump is you also have on the other side an inversion of the external violence, so when a state is calling upon citizenry to enact quite extreme violence around the world, as much as that violence is depicted as victimless, there has to be a psychological setup which informs that violence and a way of viewing other people, and so that does return home when people are done with wars abroad. They return home, so that comes back, so you have the inversion of the external violence.

1:39:06 You have the externalization of production and industry, and you also have an exasperation with the neoliberal model. So look at the presidency of Obama, we can actually identify three uprisings against this corporatism. We have the Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter, and we have the elect doctrine. All of these same things speak to an exasperation on a societal level with corporate civility. Now what happens with Trump is he comes in on this anti-neoliberal ticket.

1:39:37 He said about Ted Cruz, he said Goldman Sachs owns him. All of the people that aren’t going to be able to vote for Bernie Sanders now gonna vote for me now. Donald Trump, the spectacle, the celebrity, celebrity celebritisation of politics in a major way. But what really happened? So he gets in, he brings with him straight away, for example, he’s not there now, but Steve Bannon X Goldman Sachs, who does he have?

1:40:04 Rex Tillerson X ExxonMobil, who does he have? He has Mike Pence, the Koch brothers backing him. He has Betsy DeVos, who’s very close to, they bringing in around her the same people that are in charge of student debt peonage that they have in the United States, right? And she’s the education minister, and she’s also backed by the Koch brothers. The, Mike Pompeo is the head of the CIA, who’s backed by the Koch brothers.

1:40:31 You know, fossil fuel barons and tyrants and oligarchs, that they are. He is neoliberalism, but at the same time he appeals to this sort of trended nativism that comes from it, but he couldn’t have been elected without coming in and mounting a neoliberal ticket. It’s like the Emperor’s clothes, you know. Neoliberalism is dead and is unelectable now. You have to find other ways to be electable.

1:40:58 You can’t peddle people the same mythology that you did before. And so I think that he’s kind of symptomatic of it, but it’s important to make clear that that cautioning of the soul that he represents, that that abrasive, obnoxious deification of wealth, of porn, if a graphic pornographic wealth is, is a symptom of the sickness. It’s not the sickness itself. You know, and I think it’s important to be cognizant of that with Trump. So it’s showing us we’re in the age of decadence, and we need to look at our own narcissistic behavior, our own interest in that porn, our own interest in that distraction, not necessarily returning it to the self, but I think it’s also about looking at a systemic structure, you know.

1:41:42 What are the levers of power within the government and fossil fuel is, you know, according to the IMF, the US government subsidizes them to the tune of 700 billion a year. You know, they are the military-industrial complex. That’s the, they are the intelligence service. You know, they are, you know, the whole justification for the lobbying system, which is legalized bribery in the context of the United States. It’s the citizenry petitioning the government.

1:42:04 That’s the way that legally is justified, but there is no way that you can tell me that these lobbyists are citizenry petitioning the government. They’re corporations. Corporations aren’t human, as much as you try and force this false camaraderie between corporations and familial, you know, because one of the other things that celebrities benefit from is the build-up of intimacy and trust in a way that politicians thought. So celebrities have that intimacy and trust with their quote-unquote fans,

1:42:35 Brian Rose: and lack of consequences as well, right?

1:42:37 Lowkey: And lack of accountability, how politicians couldn’t dream or,

1:42:41 Brian Rose: yeah, actually makes perfect sense that you would kind of meld the two. So is Trump a mastermind, or is he just a, is he just the end product of that process?

1:42:50 Lowkey: He’s an absolute imbecile, who’s far too narcissistic and and egotistical to have any coherent ideology that he is pinned to. When you look at the discussions of the TPP, which Obama failed on passing, and what that meant, right? That was about isolating China on one hand, but then on the other hand it was about allowing corporations to sue governments.

1:43:12 Now when they asked in the Republican debate, Trump why he had a problem with TPP, he said because it empowers China. The whole point of TPP was to isolate China. The whole point of it was to combat China. You know, this man is a complete and utter imbecile, unprecedented in his imbecility, and so he’s just a product of fees of the anti-neoliberalism stance that came because of the Obama administration, and he’s the guy. It’s not even because of the Obama administration, because of Reagan, and then because of Clinton and the demo, that’s enough, then the selling out of their voters.

1:43:50 Brian Rose: Okay, you know, an easy comes right, the other side, the right guy at the right time, with the right guy at the right time.

1:43:58 Lowkey: But also, you know, it’s, it’s the kind of the death of verifiable fact. People no longer care. People are interested in the spectacle, in the kind of pantomime that we can’t act herself, then theatrical. Yeah, yeah, we can, but we, you should see it as a product of a systemic trend.

1:44:16 Brian Rose: Is he gonna do something that we’re gonna regret?

1:44:19 Lowkey: Well, I think the fact that he is talking about creating jobs by building pipelines, and that he’s completely serve out of the fossil fuel companies, that he’s giving tax breaks to the Apple and, and the highest earners in the society. These things have fatal consequences, whether we see the fatalities or not. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Use all of these policies have fatal consequences.

1:44:44 Brian Rose: Are we going to see something really bad happen?

1:44:49 Lowkey: We live it, man. This is it. It’s, it’s it, it’s it is really bad. It is really bad.

1:44:58 Brian Rose: 2010, your home was raided by the police. Why’d they do that?

1:45:03 Lowkey: Well, this is something that I’m gonna write about later on, but really this situation was to do with the movement regarding the, the further exclusive-ization and quarantine of further education in Britain. You know, of course Tony Blair introduced 1000 pound tuition fees, and then from here make up about three thousand, and then the Conservatives put it up to nine thousand, and so in that situation we took to the streets.

1:45:38 You know, but it’s also important to note that in regards to the consequences of those demonstrations, you had a friend of mine, Jody McIntyre, who was assaulted by the police and actually compensated for what happened to him. And so the situation was with me was in the aftermath of that event on that day, but it’s something that I’ll write about, you know, a later date. The ins and outs of that.

1:46:03 Brian Rose: Did it make you angry?

1:46:04 Lowkey: Who did what, make me angry?

1:46:06 Brian Rose: Damn, coming to your house. Obviously it makes you uncomfortable, because now there’s a voyeuristic type of relationship with all types of aspects of your life that you wouldn’t necessarily welcome. They didn’t power you know. Okay. Why would I, don’t know.

1:46:25 Lowkey: It’s not, it’s not the purpose of it. The purpose of it is, is repression. Yeah, purpose of it is neutralizing political dissent.

1:46:32 Brian Rose: True, but that’s not always the result. I mean, I’m fresh out from six days speaking, demo Azam bag, and I’m not comparing you to him, but cause his experiences, but for him he said, you know, I want on mo channeled all of his efforts and everything became clear in his life, to come back and do a specific thing, and he said to me that if you weren’t an extremist before you went in, you were afterwards.

1:46:55 And so, look, I know these are convinced unfortunate turn, the phrase potentially taken out of context. What that is, yeah?

1:47:03 Lowkey: Well, you just said I would say, if that is what he said, I think it’s unfortunate because it can be instrumentalized by people that have really negative intentions.

1:47:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, it could be, but I guess the point he was making was sometimes they can enter the opposite effect.

1:47:20 Lowkey: Oh yeah, yeah, no, of course, and I guess it, more importantly, it speaks to that process of ostracization really within the society, and the way that it can lead human beings in different ways.

1:47:33 Mm-hm, but it’s a confluence of issues, you know, all at once. So for me yeah, and I wasn’t, it wasn’t a pleasant experience in any way, shape or form.

1:47:45 Brian Rose: Mental health in males, and you’ve talked about it quite a bit, and they lost a brother to it. I don’t know if this was around the same time, but what are your thoughts on that, and has, have things changed in the last six or seven years as a society, or or your, or your views on it?

1:48:07 Lowkey: Well, I think if you look at my demographic within this society, the biggest killer of us is also, I think, we have to look the ways in which we psychologically mutilate ourselves in the name of manhood, which in essentially is about human hood’s ass, and so we see that by kind of disfiguring the extent of our emotional communication of emotional expression, can lead to these kind of underlying buried issues, which can manifest in all types of harmful ways.

1:48:43 I think the linking of our human hood to our ability to project violence on to other people is, is dangerous and damaging, not just for us but for other people as well. I think the worship of violence is also linked in an intrinsic way to the modern idea of the state, in which the state is the force which has the monopoly on the use of violence, and so I think that it’s all part of that. You know, being called upon to exact violence on other people meant that there had to be fostered and cultivated within us this sense that we were less human if we weren’t able to, you know, project this kind of vulgar violence, and yeah, I see it and I see people suffering from it as well, and I think the music plays our role in it.

1:49:39 The, you know, one of the things that’s interesting to me is how little introspection there is about the cultural ambience that creates human beings, that, you know, like that ex-president, who, you know, for the record is an accused rapist, can speak about, you know, grabbing other people’s genitalia, where you have, you know, seemingly an epidemic of you know, you’ve got three women yet, who’s this Clinton know, who’s a Trump? Oh, Trump. Oh, ex-president.

1:50:10 Okay, the president, a person. Yeah, you have three women every single day in the United States being murdered by their partners, you know. What is the cultural ambience which brings that into, into effect? You know, where is the interrogation of the things that contribute to human beings communicating in this way, because there’s tortured as it is, violence is a form of communication, but why is it that we’re feeling we have to communicate with each other in these way?

1:50:39 Brian Rose: Can you tell me what happened to your brother?

1:50:43 Lowkey: I mean, it’s something I’d really not prefer to get into too much in the interview, but you know, he was someone that in many ways was a genius. He was someone who, you know, by the age of 13 was capable of building a computer with his hands, you know, and in many ways it’s, it’s quite difficult to understand, because you can’t really, the problem with the way that he died, in that way of dying for people, is they leave so much unsaid and I’m done and unfinished, and so I think really to find any type of closure with it, it’s kind of an impossibility.

1:51:28 Any attempt to understanding it is her best conjecture, so you know, I’m obviously in the past, you know, I made music about it, but I think it’s so it’s something that I’m not sure that even making music about can really do it justice, but it’s, it’s something that you know, it’s hard. It’s hard. People go through, you know, these things every day actually, but as young males we’re probably so hard on ourselves, to a point where it can make us just become depressed and doubt ourselves.

1:52:04 Well, I think also Wordsworth called it the blunting of discriminatory powers, so I think there’s an extent to which our critical thinking is common. Did you know, it’s a contested space, so we have, so we are bombarded with so much advertising in so many different ways, that telling us what we should be, in what to be, that sometimes we, we lose our fact, he’s of critical thinking. We never really engage with them, and so we were kind of left hostage, so all types of power operating through us and above and around us, which is why you’re very careful for what you let inside your brain.

1:52:44 I think we should try to be here.

1:52:47 Brian Rose: Yeah, can you tell me about 2011-2012, before you, you really stepped away? What would those years like for you, musically? Touring, yummy, more famous, you got that other, that sly smile at me again. What do you remember from those times?

1:53:07 Lowkey: Hard work, was it fun? Yeah, it was fun, by was pregnant times as well, because they were full of challenges and full of things which now we understand as products of that time. But yeah, it was.

1:53:24 Brian Rose: Does that mean products at that time?

1:53:27 Lowkey: Well, so we look at the exclusive-ization of further education for university students at that time.

1:53:36 We didn’t know exactly what would be the ramifications of it, but you see something which is socially violent like that, and the way it plays out now, from 2018, we look back, it 2010, 2011, and see decisions then, now are playing out in the present.

1:53:51 Brian Rose: Yeah, okay, so you see that that was pregnant, but then how did, how did you feel as an artist? I’m still, you’re young, you becoming more famous, at or loving your music? You’re putting on a message that you’re proud of?

1:54:05 Lowkey: Yeah, but also I had a fearlessness, and AM, but part of the naivety in the fearlessness of that kind of time for any artist, I think, is linked to a lack of cognizance about the ramifications of what they’re doing, and so who that’s gonna rub the wrong way, in the right way. And so I think that it was a good time in that in that regard. Working hard, traveling a lot, I was able to go to many countries. Yeah, interesting experience, not sure that it’s one I could necessarily live every year.

1:54:43 Brian Rose: My life would be loosely the album soundtrack to the Struggle. You have strange relationships with your music.

1:54:51 Lowkey: Why, I don’t know.

1:54:52 Brian Rose: When I invention these things, you smile, and he like that. That’s silly, kid.

1:54:58 Lowkey: Yeah, definitely this, but, you know, they say that the, the death of the writer is the birth of the reader, so in that regard that something that you make, and you create a long time ago can then be looked upon by somebody else who’s coming into it with all of their lifetime of experience, and all of their baggage, potentially, so it takes on a new life of its own. It’s kind of like him. I try and adopt the attitude of Gibran Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese poet, who his argument was that your children, they’re there from you but they’re not yours, and so you are just the archer that shoots the arrow, but you’re not the arrow.

1:55:42 You don’t have control over where the arrow goes, and I try and adopt the same attitude with the music.

1:55:48 Brian Rose: Okay, but yet you’re still a little judgmental on yourself about the music?

1:55:53 Lowkey: No, I just try and understand what is not yours. It’s not mine, it’s not mine, but also I try to understand what was going on in what was my thought process in the creation of that.

1:56:04 Brian Rose: Okay, what was it like touring with Immortal Technique and playing with the color, and what do you remember those times?

1:56:11 Lowkey: Yeah, amazing. I mean, they was great to do the shows I did with Immortal Technique. It was great to do something I did with him. Amazing. You know, this is a blueprint of how an independent artist can force their own way in that particular period of time.

1:56:30 It’s slightly different now as well for an independent artist, but you know, what he did was exceptional, and you know, she’d stand really as a testament to artistic power for other arts, and they don’t have to connect themselves to this. It’s bigger superstructure in order to be heard and to be visible in the hallway, because Immortal didn’t have the power of the internet back then.

1:56:52 Brian Rose: Well, he did have the power. In today, it was integral in the process of, but, but it’s different if they exactly house different.

1:56:59 Well, then it was probably all of the little mp3 programs that people would pass along songs. There was YouTube of course, but everything the same kind of Instagram, Twitter.

1:57:10 Lowkey: Yeah, but barely YouTube. Yeah, exactly. So that’s exceptional.

1:57:14 You know what he was able to do? He’s very intense.

1:57:17 Brian Rose: Certainly, they had, I had him on the show about four or five years ago. Very intense. Yeah.

1:57:22 Amazing, amazing person. He has a dad person. He has that bit in The Art of Rap, Ice-T’s documentary where they’re out on the streets in New York, and he starts quoting back to him, you know, lyrics that he did, and this really powerful, yeah, yeah. A caller, yeah, what do you remember about, you know, him or performing with him? What did he teach you?

1:57:46 Lowkey: I think I learned about time. I think the best people that you’ll meet in life are people that give you a real concept of time. So with him a wonderful thing about him is his conception of our lifetime is not, you know, when you’re still a young person. So say you’re 12, six years is half of your life, so six years is a long time, but the older you get the less a year becomes, because it’s less of a percentage of your life, if that makes sense. So with him, his conception of our lives’ work is not that okay, this small better part of a hundred years that I may exist in is the be-all and end-all of everything.

1:58:41 His idea is that, look, we come into this, we have a short period of time in this physical vessel to make our point. We can make our points and we’ll go, and I think that obsess acceptance is is is a beautiful thing and something that I kind of strive to to apply in my whole life. I think his work ethic is inspiring, and an all-round special person. You know, I’m glad that he exists. I’m glad that he exists in the world.

1:59:17 He’s very much a student of history.

1:59:19 Brian Rose: Certainly, if you had some late-night conversations with Hannah Be, what it is, Anthony, and Axel, or in there somewhere as well. I don’t see them three of you, you know.

1:59:29 Lowkey: I love him too. Yeah, I am maybe these voices are really vital.

1:59:33 This time permits, and there’s so few and far between, and I think that’s why they need to be supported and appreciated and glorified and elevated in some, in some cases.

1:59:45 Brian Rose: Is that why you’re appreciated so much?

1:59:48 Lowkey: That’s for you to say.

1:59:50 Brian Rose: You are appreciated very much. You say that.

1:59:53 I mean, you said a few and far between, but you know, when people talk about you, they see a guy who never went commercial, who doesn’t use profanity in his lyrics, who spends time putting these messages together, you know, which seem like simple things, but I think to do it all and live a life doing that, it obviously isn’t simple, because there’s very few doing it.

2:00:17 Lowkey: Yeah, and of course you’re bringing yourself in contact with complications. You know, Rachel Corrie was run over by an Israeli bulldozer, her husband killed, her family will being spied upon by Caterpillar.

2:00:30 You know, the story came out who were the company that made the bulldozer. You have examples of other companies spying on people, you know, from British Airways spying on environmental activists, and otherwise, you know, you have the example of Dave Morris and Helen Steel, who, with the McLibel case, whereby they were distributing a pamphlet that was talking about McDonald’s being damaging to the environment, as a company mistreating workers and stuff like that, and so McDonald’s launched a libel case against him, and the price that these people paid for their activism there. Is a price to pay for what we do, and I think it’s important for people to realize that it’s not just the spectacle of the internet.

2:01:21 There’s, as you say, a real life that has to be lived behind it, and I think especially when you’re involved in an organic way, when you, you play the role of the organic intellectual in the gram she understanding of it, it means that it’s not necessary to say we, its electrodes, but it means that our function is linked in an umbilical way to the people that were attempting to represent through our work. There is a price to pay.

2:01:46 Brian Rose: What do you mean by organic?

2:01:48 Lowkey: It means that, you know, rather than you’re speaking about people in an abstract sense, you make sure to be part of those movements, like the day-to-day, right? So you go to, you go to Gaza, your act or NFL, you’re, you’re, you’re in there with this line, so our lives, right? So it’s a part of you that goes out there. Yeah, it’s painful. It’s a painful process.

2:02:09 It’s a brutalizing process. Yeah, but it’s beautiful at the same time. You know, you’re attempting to, you know, convert personal tragedy into collective power, that is, it’s the road less traveled. It’s never, but at the same time I don’t want to labor the point too much, they, it’s, you know, this big sacrifice is not, but, but you know, you look at say someone like Aziz Ali, for instance, the, the poet I mentioned earlier, he was imprisoned by consecutive governments.

2:02:37 You look at somebody like Joe Ali, he died in exile and was also arrested and imprisoned by consecutive government. So it’s that type of lineage that we choose to associate ourselves with. It’s that lineage of the rebellious, the rebel poet, you know, and, and I think that that’s, that’s an important decision to make as early as possible. Does it, do you want yourself to be an agent of big business, of power? Do you want yourself to be an agent of human beings?

2:03:08 Brian Rose: Do you have candid discussions with hip-hop artists and say, what are you guys doing? I don’t really listen to hip-hop, but I mean, you ever meet someone and say, why are you doing that?

2:03:21 Lowkey: No, I don’t. I’m not condemnatory in particular. I take to other people.

2:03:26 I may have been in, you, years, unfortunately.

2:03:30 Brian Rose: But now, is the government watching you?

2:03:33 Lowkey: It’s watching you. It’s watching all of us. The meta government, the medics I said before, has accessed the information that government’s torture for, and so the extent to which, say, Facebook will allow themselves to be used by government still remains to be seen completely, but we’ve seen examples where by they shut down the the president Chechen Republic.

2:04:00 Glenn Greenwald has a great article about, they shut down his Instagram because he’s put on a sanction list by the US government. They’ve shut down numerous Palestinian accounts at the behest of the Israeli government, as has been revealed by Glenn Greenwald. Big data is watching us, is analyzing us in order to sell us stuff, as, as you know, but also, you know, Tim Berners-Lee, who’s actually credited with the, sorry, Steve Benelli is credited with the invention of the World Wide Web.

2:04:36 He said there’s three things that he fears for the way that the Internet is today: the extent to which, through algorithms, companies are able to manipulate us into buying things, the extent to which there’s been a death of privacy by the internet, but also the extent to which governments are now, are now able to monitor us. So I think that, you know, to suppose that there’s this sort of benign Big Brother that merely, you know, we are the most surveilled population in the history of existence. We’re also the most market-sized and corporate-sized commodified society that’s ever existed as well, so you know, there’s all these things that have a part to play in it.

2:05:20 Brian Rose: Are they specifically monitoring you?

2:05:23 Lowkey: I think it would be very, very surprising if somebody has made them so visible in the way that I have, in made them, do you know, have some type of monitoring going. It would be very, very, it’s counterintuitive, right?

2:05:38 Brian Rose: Do you ever see signs of it?

2:05:40 Lowkey: Yes.

2:05:40 Yes, I’ve been detained in numerous airports. I’ve been interrogated. I’ve had you know, attempts of psychological warfare affecting in the type of questioning that I’ve had.

2:05:54 Brian Rose: You know, how does America feel about you?

2:05:58 Lowkey: I don’t know.

2:05:59 It’s impossible for us to attribute to that massive, massive landmass.

2:06:05 Brian Rose: One, how do you feel about America and the American flag while we’re at it?

2:06:10 Lowkey: Well, we’re leading on from the conversation that we had about the Union Jack here, in a way in which I felt that these kind of the icon iconography of Prague nationalism and of Empire is a kind of, you know, in a place where we are miss educated by design, so we’re not educated about the British Empire. We know, educated about the potato famine in Ireland, about the Bengal famine, about the Diego Garcia being sold off to the Americans and the population being threatened with bombing and having their dogs killed, and the population being moved to Mauritius.

2:06:54 And you know, we’re not educated about the opium war in China. We’re not educated about the Durand Line in Afghanistan, between Afghanistan and India now. And so when we take this flag, we interpret it in quite a benign way as, as young people growing up, because we haven’t really had an education in that regard. So what I would think is this kind of obsession with pledging allegiance to the flag in the United States is, you know, it clearly, we’re seeing it play out in front of our eyes, is that it means different things to different people.

2:07:30 You know, some people view it as something that they should launch some kind of protest against the glorification of the flag, of the national anthem, and what these things stand for, and, and yeah, and I think it’s interesting, the kind of regalia and the the clothes of nationalism in that way, you know, and the role that these things play in kind of brainwashing people into apathy. So we should be careful before we throw a flag up, or watch the symbols that we worship, either subconsciously or consciously.

2:08:05 Brian Rose: Yeah, precisely.

2:08:06 Okay, I agree. Hmm, you see it in the World Cup, everyone’s flying their flags and they go up and you could ask him why, what’s going on here, and you probably couldn’t get a good answer.

2:08:19 Lowkey: Yeah, that’s something to be guarded against.

2:08:22 Brian Rose: In 2012, everyone knows you checked out. You turn Facebook off.

2:08:26 Yes, and decided you didn’t want to be part of the music industry. I guess. Mmm. Can you tell me what happened then?

2:08:34 Lowkey: Well, the perception I had at the time was that in order to play a useful role in the way that I wanted to play, I had to kind of extract myself from this process of, you know, as I said before, the kind of Gilgamesh complex, trying to go beyond human hood.

2:08:51 In a way I had to extract myself from that process.

2:08:57 Brian Rose: Okay. Yeah, was it painful?

2:09:00 Lowkey: It was painful to a certain extent, in that I was letting go of a kind of a outlet of expression. So of course.

2:09:12 And I also felt that I was kind of no longer useful artistically. I wasn’t able to play a role, so then my, the extent to which I was able to really play a role within the social movements and political struggles of the time was decreased slightly.

2:09:28 Brian Rose: Okay. Should we take a bathroom break if possible?

2:09:32 Lowkey: Yeah, let’s take, right now, come on, let’s do it.

2:09:35 I’ll be one sec.

2:09:36 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, no worries. Sometimes you gotta take a bathroom break, otherwise, cuz there’s more things we got to talk about, that’s for sure. That’s good. I’m glad I got you’re cute.

2:09:51 Lowkey: Yeah, seems so good. I’m fine. Yeah, okay, cool. Thanks.

2:09:54 Brian Rose: All right, that wasn’t much needed break.

2:09:57 Yeah. I’ve been there too. I was asking you about the time you took off. Yeah, so 2012. Yeah, you decide you need to remove yourself from all this.

2:10:07 Yeah. Was this something you’d been thinking about for years?

2:10:11 Lowkey: It’s a bit like the Dave Courtney book, Stop the Ride I Want to Get Off, and you start to feel that it’s bringing out of you probably the least positive aspects of your personality. You know, I’m aware how much, you know, a platform like this can play into kind of conversational narcissism on the part of the interviewee, the person being interviewed. But yeah, I would say at that point that I felt that I needed to extract myself from an environment which was in some way that tormented to me, in order to kind of recharge my batteries and also kind of gain a better understanding of the world in order to play a more effective role.

2:10:57 Brian Rose: Who were you becoming?

2:10:59 Lowkey: I was becoming someone far more self-conscious than his health. If I was also becoming someone far more invested in the kind of maintenance of the big I am rather than someone who, as I say, was playing a useful and effective role in a wider political moment.

2:11:19 Brian Rose: What did your friends and family say?

2:11:22 Lowkey: Everyone advised against it.

2:11:24 Brian Rose: Yeah. Did you have label at the time?

2:11:27 Lowkey: It was really just me.

2:11:29 Brian Rose: Okay, just me. We did it take a while to come to the decision?

2:11:34 Like years?

2:11:35 Lowkey: No. It was probably around for four or five months.

2:11:38 Brian Rose: Okay, yeah. And what was that like, because you shut down the Facebook page, and yeah, you had to deal with one clean break.

2:11:46 You didn’t want to fade off?

2:11:49 Lowkey: Yeah. Yeah, I had to.

2:11:51 Brian Rose: You had to do it cold turkey, really. State.

2:11:56 Okay. Okay, how did you feel, like, three months after? Did you think you made a big mistake, or was it a relief?

2:12:03 Lowkey: No, it was partly a relief, but at the same time, like I say, I felt a kind of trapped in what Martin Luther King called the paralysis of analysis, so whereby you are at a distance and I’m perceiving things, and you feel less and less useful. Okay.

2:12:19 Brian Rose: And the plan was to go study.

2:12:21 Lowkey: Mm-hmm. That was always the plan. Yeah, of course. I mean, ideally I would love to, you know, do a PhD at some point, and it was really building up towards that and really taking the time for introspection, because there’s so much pressure upon us.

2:12:37 We feel anyway to come out and announce where we stand on this, that, and the third, but there’s very little time that’s being given. It’s a kind of introspection.

2:12:46 Brian Rose: Did you feel inferior at all because you didn’t feel like you had proper education to, like, learn more about these topics?

2:12:53 Lowkey: It’s not that I felt inferior. It’s felt that literally I didn’t have the time.

2:12:58 I didn’t have the time to sit down and, and dedicate five hours, say, to say, reading that book. I was constantly, constantly, constantly on the road, and the thing is about the campaigners that do do that, they have had time to to really, and they’re able to compartmentalize, I think, more effectively than I was at our stages.

2:13:18 Brian Rose: Okay, yeah. So you become a student at, so as, yeah, what is SOAS, and what did you set aside to study?

2:13:24 Lowkey: So the School of Oriental and African Studies.

2:13:27 It was originally founded as a tool for these guys. Okay. They really project their power across the world and to understand the society, so is an Orientalist institution focused on extending the Empire, really, in one shape or one way or another. However, it has numerous radical alumni, from Paul Robson, Ivan van said tomorrow, Walter Rodney. It also, on the other hand, has alumni like Enoch Powell at home.

2:14:03 Brian Rose: But it’s a secret agent going in?

2:14:05 Lowkey: No, not really in that way. It’s, you know, because in the sort of present time, it’s institution that’s often used by diaspora populations to kind of educate themselves in a less Eurocentric way, but at the same time it’s becoming a more and more neoliberal institution. But even while it’s becoming more of a neoliberal institution, you do have victories, that SOAS Justice for Cleaners campaign, whereby rather than it going the traditional way of the outsourcing, going outside of the university, they’ve been brought in house from being outsourced to being brought in house, so that’s a considerable, significant victory.

2:14:51 Yeah, it’s an interesting institution. I joined this period, also got a qualification as a personal trainer, and also a qualification as an English teacher, but the Masters I’m doing at the moment is near in Middle Eastern Studies, and basically it allows you to do, say, modules on philosophy, modules on economics, modules on political theory. It’s there’s a lot of possibilities there. So I think as an institution it’s, it’s what you make it, you know, and you’re able to kind of form your own curriculum, but at the same time there are still battles which need to be won, certainly, you know, and also you see the way in which the city, you know, London has become more and more trans-nationalized and globalized, in the sense that, you know, the student body now is more and more made up of people, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but people with a kind of international American accent, you know, for the simple fact that, say, in the United States, if they want to go and get an education, you’ve got Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration, you know, and the superstructure behind them putting people into hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, so they come here, and it’s, you know, maybe foul tens of thousands of pounds of debt, so there’s a difference, and that changes the student experience.

2:16:17 Yeah, it changes, it changes. This also renders the kind of in stitute in a kind of transnational bubble in the middle of the city, which, you know, London has the most billionaires than any city in the world. Population of about seven million people, you’ve also got one in five workers in London that are below the living wage, so you know, there’s these social stratifications which are clear, but also it has really some interesting and strong and original thinkers as well who have benefited from studying with.

2:16:54 Brian Rose: So, what’s been your biggest surprise about being a student?

2:16:59 Lowkey: Hmm, biggest surprise about being a student. I think what I love about is the continual process of renewal, the continual process of confrontation with your, with your blind spots, the continual striving for improvement, the extent to which you are always able to kind of adopt the position of a student with everything, and adopt a position of humility. So in a way you’re training yourself for the rest of the world in the way that you learn.

2:17:38 So the way that you learn is, doesn’t have to be this sort of systematized thing to turn you into a million economic unit. It’s, you know, a way for you to demystify things, to discomfort your certainties, and to, you know, to delve into taboos.

2:17:59 Brian Rose: Really? Hmm. What’s it like to be the professor of logic?

2:18:04 That’s it. So I just see, I see you at school just arguing with everybody. I see being like, no, actually that’s not how it happened. I mean, like, that’s a compliment, but I just feel like you’d be like, wait a second, no, no, no. More than any other student.

2:18:19 Lowkey: I don’t know. I mean, maybe, I think this is another thing that I think I’ve learned from some of the best people in life, and this is something that I think is important for young people to take, is that curiosity is your greatest gift. You know. And one of the saddest things is when we see people so imbued with common-sensical notions of neoliberal, corporate, corporatist thinking, is that it can give birth to this in curiosity about everything except consumption.

2:18:54 So most of the things that we will see young people being curious about are things that they are being, that there’s million-pound campaigns to get them to feel passionate about, and it’s about consumption. You know, find ways to be curious about other things, but also foster that curiosity and eternally remain curious.

2:19:18 Brian Rose: You know, why get the PhD?

2:19:20 Lowkey: Well, I haven’t started it yet.

2:19:23 Brian Rose: So why is it a goal?

2:19:24 Lowkey: Because I think that having the luxury of spending five years or three years thinking about the same thing and deeply, deeply interrogating it is, is something that will have to bear fruit that is useful. You know, when somebody is able to persevere and give that much of themselves to understanding a subject, it means that what comes out the other side will be something that actually will be beneficial to other people in a major way.

2:19:56 Brian Rose: Am I wrong in thinking that you are arming yourself right now with all of this knowledge?

2:20:02 You’re investing in yourself, and when you come out of this, you will be this Superman version of Lowkey, and you’re gonna come out, you know, blasting, not, you know, in a good way.

2:20:13 Lowkey: There’s, there’s people that have been, you know, seriously dedicating themselves to the study from, you know, from when they were knee-high, in a way that I haven’t. So you know, this idea of a kind of super person kind of emerging from this process, it’s probably not. It doesn’t correspond to reality,

2:20:31 Brian Rose: but, but do you want to use this knowledge?

2:20:34 Lowkey: Of course, then. Of course, and that’s the point of making our own career. That’s the point of building these kind of psychological rules around ourselves, how can able to kind of enclose ourselves from the humdrum, and from the, you know, the advertising which is ubiquitous at this time. You know, we’re more exposed to images than any other group of human beings that have ever existed. We’re more exposed to images which are trying to manipulate us to buy things, you know, then than any other civilization that came before it.

2:21:08 How does that affect our concept of ourselves, and how does that affect our decision-making process?

2:21:14 Brian Rose: And you want to fight back with the, now decide what you want to look at, right?

2:21:19 Lowkey: You can, and that’s one of the great, my education, ignore, but your self first and foremost is that you have access through the internet now to so many different ways of thinking and people’s ideas, so there’s no excuse reading not to kind of commandeer it for your own interests.

2:21:36 Brian Rose: Okay. I would argue, though, that you are very unique in that student body, because other people will get their PhDs and maybe teach, and maybe you write a book and do this, but you, how to do those as well. Okay. And I don’t need you to, but you can use all this knowledge to really magnify your message with your platform, with your music, to, in a way that you know, it’s, it’s highly scalable, as they would say in Silicon Valley. I mean, it can make a huge difference, but also you can run the risk, when you’ve been exposed to, you know, certain ways of explaining, where you can complicate and intellectualize it and take out of plain language.

2:22:12 So I think that’s something to be aware of. Okay, and to God against 2016, even least armored, right? Why release music? You must have had to think long and hard before you did that. Why come back?

2:22:27 Lowkey: It had been four years. Well, at that stage I had been involved in an organization that was working in a camp in Calais. You know, it’s worth noting that around 500 years ago Calais was actually a part of Britain at that time, so these people are in a patch of formerly Britain hoping to take advantage of something in EU law, which is the Dublin amendment, the Dublin agreement, which means that for people particularly, they have the right to claim asylum in Britain if they have first-degree relatives here, even though they’re in a neighboring country.

2:23:10 And so we were going over to facilitate that process, and I was working as a translator for several different law firms in that regard, who were working this.

2:23:22 Brian Rose: Is the charity your work? You don’t talk about yeah.

2:23:26 Lowkey: Well, I mean, I don’t necessarily view it as even charity, where you’re facilitating a process that should, you know, we were fulfilling the role that really a government should be fulfilling, because these are human beings that under their, the laws that you supposedly subscribe to at that time, and still to this point, they do.

2:23:51 You know, we’re fulfilling the really the role of the state in them, and, and so we were going over there and kind of meeting people that had first-degree relatives, and worked on a few cases, and we’re successful, you know, and that translated for those cases. So it’s proud of that, but in that situation I thought to myself, I’m here in a kind of atomist innit, atomized way, as an individual, looking at the micro aspect of this. I have this new insight into what this experience is like for people, because it’s no longer abstract, organic again.

2:24:26 Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a direct experience. You know, the first, the first interview that I did was with you know, guys 16, you know, we both basically started crying in the interview because of, you know, all of the things that he’d gone through. And so in that situation I thought to myself, okay, what tools do I have at my disposal in order to combat this, you know, this massive machine- like function that keeps these human beings just literally surviving, really, in this field, freezing, you know, and keeps them away from, you know, it’s not being able to embrace them, see them, learn from them.

2:25:09 And so I thought, okay, make us unlike image. You look at a word. I made the kind of way it’s interpreted by English speakers often is a word that’s, you know, mispronounced. We know for that, on the, the letter. I just mispronounced it, and that’s fine.

2:25:27 The letter for hat doesn’t exist in the English alphabet, so people would, what, what the way you pronounce this is, it’s fine, because you didn’t add a letter that doesn’t exist, but sometimes people will hide their yeah, which also, the letter exists in the Arabic alphabet, but it doesn’t exist in the English alphabet, say a person would discount how, for sure, Ahmed, but it’s actually Zachary Destiny, and and I also think you look at Jeff Dunham and his, I’m at the dead terrorist, and I remember growing up and seeing adverts for it on the TV even in Arabic-speaking countries. You know, there would be, had verses Ahmed the dead terrorist. I don’t think this is truly damaging for human being to internalize this idea of themself, but then also the name, you know, it’s like people kind of self-Oriental eyes and Borat eyes themselves sometimes to fit in to a society, so they won’t reflect himself with Ahmed lacell my name’s Ahmed.

2:26:22 Oh, my name’s at the wood. They won’t say Ahmed, they say I made, they weren’t, but the point is, is that I wanted to try and combat that, and you know, and for me the, the best way to do it was musically. I have I have no other kind of resource to exploit in that way.

2:26:42 Brian Rose: Was it scary?

2:26:43 Lowkey: No, just natural.

2:26:44 Brian Rose: After four years you drop the track, and it’s okay.

2:26:48 Lowkey: Yeah, yeah. Well, making it was painful. I’m quite an emotional person, you know. I feel it from the depths of my soul when if the point of creation, so you know, I’m really pouring something into it, and so obviously you want something that you’ve poured such feeling into to be received.

2:27:13 Brian Rose: Well, but you know, what difference does it make to that? Actually, live to reality is clear. Right back to what you said earlier, the most important fact for you may be its most important. I think, I think is, I think is, I think is.

2:27:28 Lowkey: Yeah, but, but I think that the song was, you know, was received well, and you know,

2:27:33 Brian Rose: and you continue to do more songs, and you continue, at least certain tracks, as you always do when appropriate, when organic.

2:27:41 Yeah, and that’s why maybe they mean a lot to people, because it’s not an album.

2:27:46 Lowkey: It’s not a, yeah, well, hopefully the album will come soon, but like you say, before there would have been more of an element of sort of contrived ideas and sort of the process of creating the music, but now I try and make is, you know, if it moves you and if you feel that you have to speak about this, and you should, you know, do it.

2:28:07 Brian Rose: So you’re making peace with yourself as a musician again.

2:28:11 Interesting. Yeah, yeah. That’s an interesting way of looking at you. In 2010 you had a really famous Fire in the Booth with Charlie Sloth that just got watched by massive amounts of people, and last year you went back in, seven years later. Yeah, people that don’t know, in the States, it’s this kind of phenomenon over here.

2:28:28 Well, people go, and they don’t really freestyle, they rap in this booth, and it’s kind of one man, and it’s very powerful, and a lot of famous people have done it, and it can go really viral and move people. What was that like, to go back in seven years later, and do you remember even going back in, in 2010?

2:28:47 Lowkey: Well, for the record, when I went in, 2010, I didn’t even know it was cool. Fire in the Booth. I was probably the third person, the fourth maximum.

2:28:56 I think the first one’s my straw, second one was Cake, on the third was Black the Ripper, knows that their fourth. Once I was the fourth person to do it, but I had, I didn’t even know, his good friend, agree today. I’m put it on the map, baby. No, no, no. Okay, but they upload it, put on the internet, and I saw it’s just cool.

2:29:12 Fire in the Booth, so yeah, but I think it’s quite interesting, because in terms of bar for bar, it’s the number one platform worldwide for bars, and it’s based in London, so that’s quite significant. By formalizing ship, or an amount of time, or a man, just for people coming on and rapping, there’s no other platform worldwide that has the exposure there has.

2:29:36 Brian Rose: You know, why is that?

2:29:38 Lowkey: I think it’s due to the consistency of Charlie Sloth, sheer consistency, been able to ubiquitous himself successfully, all of these, you know, better than me, our core tenants of how to, you know, go buy, rent.

2:29:52 Yeah, how to build a brand. That’s how you do it, and he’s done it, he’s done it well, and like I say, it’s their continued presence. You know, so if people want to know who can rap, and I’m, so the good thing about it is it’s, it’s more akin to the open mic stuff that we used to do in our teens and stuff, because you can’t really, high, do you have to, you know, pretty soon, you all in that way. Yeah, it’s live. Yeah, so you got that one, not now.

2:30:20 Brian Rose: Okay, it’s not like no, okay, gotcha. And you, you spit out 200 bars, it feel good, in which one, in the, the most reason why.

2:30:28 Lowkey: Yeah, the most recent one was more, was it? Yeah, okay. The first one probably would have been around 200.

2:30:35 Brian Rose: Was yeah, okay. How’d it feel?

2:30:38 Lowkey: Good to make those points publicly, but I’m also aware that the platform that people have been trained through these platforms to expect certain things, and this kind of stage, I’m not willing to kind of cater to that in the way I might have been before.

2:31:01 Brian Rose: What are they expecting?

2:31:03 Lowkey: I mean, people are used to hearing stuff which deifies wealth, which pornographers poverty, which deifies and pornographers violence.

2:31:15 You know, the other thing about the first one I did is I came in, and at the beginning I’m talking about the kind of, what do they call them, when you say a letter acronym? Acronyms. Exactly. He went crazy with those acronyms. Exactly, but I love the acronyms.

2:31:32 I was saying with brands, so you’re instantly coming in off the top of a lifetime of being bombarded with, with a training for consumption, and so instantly at the reading of the firing, I’m coming in with that. It has the immediate intimacy and familiarity that that people receive. Well, whereas I’m coming in, in this new one, and rapping about things that, say, two years ago I didn’t know, talking about Galileo, or I’m talking about Plato. I’m talking about these kind of things.

2:32:04 Brian Rose: This is something that immediately you’re kind of exclusive-izing what it is that you’re talking about, right? Which is okay with you, because you want, you want the right people, so the right message.

2:32:15 Lowkey: No, this is the right people. I don’t want to patronize, little censorship. I don’t want to just assume that they only know about insert big brand name here.

2:32:23 Okay, and don’t know about this other stuff, because it’s not true.

2:32:26 Brian Rose: The people that are listening, do you know about the son stuff, and your standards have changed? You will not put the brand name in?

2:32:33 Lowkey: Now, yeah, why should I? Yeah, and why should I?

2:32:35 They’ve got, they’ve got huge amounts of money put behind trying to make people think they’re their best friends and that they’re a member of their family. Why am I going to contribute to that? Like, there’s no need for it. Often it’s stuff that’s unhealthy for them anyway. So yeah.

2:32:52 Brian Rose: What’s Lowkey doing ten years from now? And I know no one knows what the future holds. Question: if you had to really close your eyes and think where you want to be, only what you want to be, in terms of organized, the possibilities for organized life in London,

2:33:09 Lowkey: I’m not sure that we can actually be a hundred percent secure in the idea that, you know, 20 years from now, that it will be as we know it. So it’s hard to know, is this level of complexity sustainable for human existence?

2:33:23 I don’t actually know, and that’s the other thing. That’s something, like Grenfell gave us, is it completely widened the realms of possibility for us? It might not be allowed to be here anymore, but I don’t know about that. I wouldn’t necessarily go that far. Okay, I mean, but you know, when you look at the trajectory of discourse and the way that this manufacturing of the fictional other goes, you know, you have interesting precedent historically.

2:33:56 You know, the US Congress voted for the expulsion of all Chinese people from the United States in the Second World War. You had 110,000 Japanese people in prison camps in the United States. You had, in the 1500, obviously the Spanish Inquisition, but in the 1500 you had the expulsion of the Muisca, who were people that were merely descendants of Jewish people and Muslims kicked out of Spain, right at that point. You do have a relationship between people, and there are some in this society that are considered of a precarious citizenry, and it’s important to note that in the war, terror, war on terror era, civil liberties, habeas corpus, the Magna Carta, it doesn’t exist for Muslims within this society or in the United States.

2:34:47 It is far more cute in the United States than his fame. You know, I’m a store that Muslim Beck is absolutely emblematic of that process, and that’s not necessarily to say that I am exposed to anything like that, but it’s that you know, we have to be aware of the way that the social context will determine what is and what is impossible for us in the future as people in in society. You know, what does this level of surveillance and visibility mean to us on a societal and civilizational level?

2:35:20 You know, what would life look like? You know, probably within ten years all cars will be automated. Fairly likely. I mean, if not 10 years, 15 years max. You know, what would that then mean for the way that human beings administer their lives?

2:35:37 So in terms of where I would be, you know, I would hope that I would, I would be, you know, what my big dream, and it’s something I would absolutely love to do, would be to set up a free university where, you know, a group of academics could get together, design a general curriculum, so a general course which people could come and then study in this place and come away with a degree, which would then enable them to work within the society, on the back of that degree, a progressive degree, an alternative degree, suddenly turns a degree. Yeah, okay. Free is the main point.

2:36:18 It’s that a university education delivered for free by academics that were, that obviously had the qualification, and also had the, the ideological basis for why they were doing what they were doing.

2:36:34 Brian Rose: What about Lowkey MP?

2:36:36 Lowkey: Why not? Because it’s a quite narrow understanding of what politics is. You know, what we do is politics.

2:36:44 It’s everyday politics. It’s playing a role that’s slightly different. I think that putting yourself into a system that you’re not even convinced of the effectiveness that you can have within it as a body, it’s it’s not really, it’s not really what I want to do.

2:37:01 Brian Rose: Smart move. Are you gonna be in London fighting the good fight, or are you going to move out to some cottage somewhere and start writing your books?

2:37:11 Lowkey: I know. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s like, it’s, it’s hard to know, but I would love to be writing and creating, and yeah, and I think as much as you can achieve an unrestricted level of creativity, but at the same time thinking critically about what it is that you’re creating, I think that’s a good place to be, and a good place to get to, and be in touch with what’s happening on the ground.

2:37:37 Brian Rose: Yeah, very important for you.

2:37:39 Lowkey: Exactly.

2:37:40 Brian Rose: Okay, you mentioned religion. Are you religious?

2:37:44 Lowkey: I would define myself as somebody that sees great worth in the stories which ground us in our understandings of morality, you know, as much as I think the morality is a social construct of the time. I think that if you can have, you know, there’s a saying that a person will forget thou shalt not, but they’ll remember once upon a time.

2:38:12 And so I think that if you can bond yourself to two understandings of precedence, you know, for example, you have this obsession with the idea of the Midas touch in this society today, the idea of telling everything to go but people forget that Midas actually killed his own daughter by turning her to gold. So if you can ground what it is that you do, and the way that you behave on a day-to-day basis, within a moral foundation that is on the basis of ancient stories or contemporary stories, I would think that that is a positive thing, and religion plays a factor, and definitely all religious, without a doubt, by reinforcing morality, thought is human values, and, and moreover social justice. If you can bond yourself to the struggle for social justice, if you can take yourself back to even the Confucian golden rule, so the idea of you treat others as you wish to be treated.

2:39:15 Now, that’s something that has permeated throughout the monotheistic religions as well. If you can bond yourself to that and live with that as a daily reality, I definitely think that you are somebody that is, you know, is, is walking in a path that’s bigger than you, and I think that that understanding that the universe is far bigger than you, and so much exists without you and beyond you, I think is a good place to be,

2:39:44 Brian Rose: and that’s what religion means to you. Yeah, okay.

2:39:47 How do you feel about extremism, religious extremism, some call terrorism? What do you see when you see act?

2:39:57 Lowkey: But, but then why is it, why is it synonymous? Why is your idea of extremism, religious extremism, synonymous with terrorism? You know, you had, for example, William Tyndale translated the Bible in the 1500s.

2:40:16 Now he was executed and burnt at the stake for that. Fifty years later, the King James’s translation of the Bible into English actually used some of what William Tyndale had done, did in terms of the translation. You know, during the same period you had people being burned at the stake. I’m not the same period, people being blessed for being witches. You had the idea of ensnaring human beings into bondage, and this being justified by the curse of Ham, Ham being one of the sons of Noah who saw him drunk, and that supposedly being a forefather of African people, and therefore this being the right thing to do, and it was justified and sanctified by God at that time.

2:40:59 He had the Taiping rebellion, for example, in China, whereby you had someone who believed himself to be the brother of Jesus, who, you know, launched the rebellion, and millions of people died. You know, why is it that our idea of you know, religious extremism is so much bonded to the idea of the present, rather than looking at these examples historically, whereby things have been, you know, the important thing with Christianity is that until around 300 BC this was a rebellious, essentially, sect of Judaism against the Roman Empire, against Roman power, but when Constantine converted and was baptized on his deathbed to Christianity, in the way in a sense it imperialized the religion, and so when it imperialized the religion, it meant that all types of things became part of the parameters of rationality for this group of people under the the name of this, and in the name of this, but actually it’s served specific class interests at specific times to do specific things.

2:42:11 When you think about, you know, the present tense, there is a tendency for people to fixate on, say, for example, you have Robert Pape, who was a professor at the University of Chicago that was employed by the Defense Department in the days of Donald Rumsfeld to do a study on quote/unquote suicide terrorism. Now, what he found at that time, during the war on terror, there actually, the vast majority of suicide attacks at the time, it’s still, at that time, had been carried out historically by say, groups like the Tamil Tigers, you know, who ostensibly Hindu leftist.

2:42:54 Brian Rose: Okay, so what’s the basis of their understanding for that?

2:42:58 Lowkey: As we mentioned earlier, the first suicide bomber was a Russian who killed the Czar at the time, in the late 1800s. You know, you look at, say, the tactics of kamikaze pilots during the Second World War. There’s a suicidal element to it. You look at all of these things, which are part of a wider picture, and, and the way in which the building up of this image, you know, as an American, right? You are more likely to be killed by a toddler with a gun than in a terrorist attack, much less a suicide attack.

2:43:35 Right? As in Iraqi, I’m more likely to be killed in a suicide attack. They knew far more likely. You have a chance, one in 16 million, chance of being killed in a terrorist attack in this country. Right?

2:43:47 So the extent to which this fictional other is built up has a direct correlation to big business, and who are the recipients of military hardware in the world, and who are the people that suffer from it, because there has to be an extent to which I put a distance, and a test of the more worthlessness of the other, and that in fact you follow a moral compass which is somehow lesser than the moral compass that I have. Follow, and so on.

2:44:17 Brian Rose: So these arms companies engineering a London Bridge attack, or just bending over from it?

2:44:23 Lowkey: No, no, of course not. You know, when you look at, and when you look at the, you know, it comes back to the kind of spectatorship of suffering, but the important finding of Robert Pape is important for us to emphasize, this as this was a Donald Rumsfeld-funded study. It found that it found that basically the causes for this type of terrorism. He says his argument is that suicide terrorism is the lung cancer of terrorism, right? And in lung cancer, 85% of the people they get lung cancer, people that smoke.

2:45:02 In suicide terrorism, 95 percent of the suicide terrorism is linked to foreign occupation. This is Robert Pape, not me. People don’t have to take this up with me. They can take this up with Professor Robert Pape of Chicago University, in his book Dying to Win. Now, the important thing is also looking at the way in which to bring down the Soviet Union in 79, you had the CIA backing groups from all over, gravitating towards Afghanistan to fight, and at the same time you had set up on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan workshops set up by the ISI to work on the production of opium.

2:45:45 You know, at the time, in 1979 you had no heroin addicts in Pakistan, but by 1985 you had over a million heroin addicts in Pakistan. Some of the people that were being funneled funds at that time were big heroin traffickers, were big opium traffickers, and of course that itself has its root in the East India Company, who was it that brought that, that the, the opium to China and forced the Chinese to be a market for this opiate of the masses, literally. You know, enforcing one of the oldest existing policies and the oldest existing political system, you know, where they had an examination system which was meritocratic, thousands of years at least, ostensibly, murder to crack mert socratic thousands of years before the ideas even came up, enlightenment era in Europe.

2:46:41 Right? A society that had steel production a millennium and a half before the Europeans, had a society that had printed press half a millennium before the Europeans had it. They invented paper. They invented the compass. They invented the gunpowder.

2:46:59 You know, how could you tame, quote/unquote, with the use of quite vulgar phrasing, this society? The way you could do it was by forcing this society. You know, look at Forbes, for instance. When you look back at how the Forbes game fortune, you will see in the opium trade in China. How did Roosevelt’s grandfather, the Delano family, how did they gain their fortune?

2:47:20 It was from the opium trade in China. The Russell Group, how did they gain it, for Qing, from the opium trade in China? So the ways in which these things follow war, comes together, and when you look at the situation of Afghanistan, you saw this, this, this trade explode. But then on top of that you also saw, you know, Brzezinski played perfectly when he said, what do I think is more dangerous, you know, to society, the Soviet Union or a bunch of crazed Muslims?

2:47:51 Was the way they are. Brzezinski puts it, you know, power operates to, to, to harness and push people’s and mobilize people in certain ways. But at the point, coming back to, you know, why human beings are doing these things, you know, if somebody, they could, they could, what people do is they nitpick and they look at specific things and take them out of context and then put them out there and say, this is what this whole fictional group actually believed.

2:48:20 But it more often than not doesn’t actually ring true, and that’s because of ignorance, because they do it in a microscope with the timescale of days. Well, it’s also about the function of terroristic activity. It is about building a spectacle, about polarizing society, about scaring people.

2:48:40 Brian Rose: Yeah, so what happens is becoming less effective now with the spectacle of society. You would argue that’s what I thought the other day.

2:48:49 Lowkey: I mean, with the movie, it’s understandable people fixate, and the other reason also I think why people fixate on instances of death sometimes, when it’s made known to them, is that they feel there’s great wisdom about the way we live, in the way people die. So you secrets of our civilization are contained in the way that human beings die, and I think that people know that, and so they, they, they often fixate upon these things, and rather than, say, taking into account that you have a far more hybrid relationship than we care to admit. You have aspects like cotton, for instance, coming from the Arabic word qutn, which originally, because that during the agricultural revolution until the 900s in the Abbasid period, you had cuts and being produced by Arabic speakers, and then coming into the English language via that.

2:49:43 Sugar, the same way it came in, because it was first being, you know, obviously rice also came into the English language. So rice, sugar, cotton, they came into the English language by an Arabic, because agriculturally these were being produced by, at that time, a metropole of power. You know, you have many examples of this hybridity, but it’s that hybridity which is not emphasized, unfortunately. You know, it becomes us and them, and there’s no context.

2:50:15 And also, you know, so for instance, you have a newspaper coming out with the idea that if your name is Mohammed, you’re more likely to pay a thousand pounds extra to an insurance company for car insurance. They’ll charge you a thousand pounds extra.

2:50:30 Brian Rose: Right? Was that true?

2:50:31 Lowkey: I don’t know.

2:50:32 Well, this is according to the investigation of a certain Murdoch- owned paper.

2:50:37 Brian Rose: Okay, this is true, right?

2:50:39 Lowkey: But who has been partially responsible for creating that ambience? Yes, you have, you have it, and it’s not to obfuscate about responsibility. You know, when you look at Secret Affairs by Mark Curtis, you can actually look at how often the pronounced foreign policy is actually contradicted in the activity.

2:51:00 So pizza all, born in the Daily Mail, came out with his article where he’s actually directly saying, you’ve got MI6 and MI5 on two different pages. You’ve got MI6 working on weaponizing young people and sending them around the world, in some cases training them, and then you’ve got the MI5 trying to prevent domestic attacks. So all of this, all of this, it’s a kind of collective psychosis in a way that’s brought about by these relationships, which are all intertwined and entangled, and it’s to do with the spectating of human beings dying in ways that you are rendered completely powerless to have any role regarding.

2:51:46 But I think we also then have to look at the mechanisms within the society which otherwise and criminalize people. So you had the period in 2008, 2009, with their demonstrations outside the Israeli embassy, you had people arrested in that situation, so they’re seeing that political expression is something that they’re kind of disqualified from, for something that they can’t really play a role in. Right? And then where do they go next? This is not to say, in a sort of deterministic way, that they have to become apocalyptic, nihilistic, weaponized thugs.

2:52:26 Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I’m against that in every way, shape or form, but looking at a situation and saying you can see how it happens, and you can realize what power operates through people and where it operates from. It is not in any way, shape or form can be seen to be in any way just. If any type of justification, it exists.

2:52:55 You know, it exists, and how and why does it exist, and why do people, you know, what persuades people to be violent? You know, there was a study done in the First World War which I find quite interesting, whereby they looked at it and they said around 24% of soldiers at that time in the US Army could justify shooting someone head-on. A lot of other people found ways to avoid killing human beings. What is it that can move people to kill, and what is it that functions within them that moves them to kill?

2:53:36 You know, it’s, it’s fascinating to think about, especially when you look at the First World War. You have the example, the kind of horizontal solidarity between the German soldiers and the British soldiers on the Christmas Day of nineteen fourteen. They both came up from the trenches and played football with each other. What is it that, in all of this, this, this great mess of human existence, can persuade people to kill one another? Now, there’s one side of the argument, which is that we’ve got it.

2:54:08 It’s this, it’s this, but they don’t even understand this. Not either. They not even speak Arabic. The people that will come forward and tell you it’s this, they now understand history because they haven’t looked at the reasons that people have become violent in history and the different ways in which they’ve become weaponized. They view the violence of massive corporations as benign, non-existent, and their violence is victimless.

2:54:35 They view violence of small, unorganized militia-like violence as far more threatening than this systematized violence. So what’s the reason for the disparity? And it’s very easy, for you know, every single empire that has ever existed, right, has tried to claim that the subjects of their empire were followers of an inferior moral compass. You know, the time of the Romans, they define everyone beyond their borders as barbarians, and it was upon that basis that even the word Berber exists in Arabic, but other than it takes to refer to people, you know, largely in North Africa, because of course from the Roman occupation of North Africa there are people still defined as Bonaparte, and that came into the Arabic language.

2:55:21 You know, why not think about the fact that the Phoenicians taught the Greeks the alphabet? Why not think about the fact that you know, Europe wouldn’t have had an understanding of Aristotle and Plato. Plato’s Republic, had they not read the work of al-Farabi or the work of even Xena? You know, why not look at you know, why not look at the way in which, you know, Descartes’ idea of “I think, therefore I am” is believed by some to come from even seen as, I do, of the floating man theory?

2:55:50 Why not look at the ways in which conviviality is victorious, and focus on the ways in which small disparate acts of alienated and often brainwashed by the powerful people act. Why focus on that violence? Why is some violence so much more worthy of note than other violence?

2:56:12 Brian Rose: So it frustrates you to see that, and see people’s reactions,

2:56:17 Lowkey: because it operates over me whether I like it or not, right? And needful people.

2:56:24 People will feel the need to ask me a question like that.

2:56:27 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’m not projecting on to you.

2:56:29 Lowkey: No, I’m glad you answer in situations outside of here. You are forced to answer for something. You know, there is no way, shape or form that someone is going to, you look at the Ku Klux Klan, you look at Martin Luther King.

2:56:41 They were both, they were both motivated supposedly by their religion, and by the same religion. You look at when William Buckley interviewed Muhammad Ali, and he asked him why did you not go and fight in Vietnam? He said because my religion is not allowing me to go and fight in Vietnam. Why is it we don’t look at that, and we think, well, for our civilization Vietnam was a massive miss. Well, if you want to perceive it as a mistake, we were defeated.

2:57:05 We were defeated by resistance, and we killed many human beings, human beings that could have been brilliant, that could have been geniuses, and we never knew because we destroyed their lives. And yet this human being says there’s something that motivated him not to do it. What was it? You know, why is there this manufactured other that actually exists in other people’s heads that someone such as myself is forced to answer to? That we live on a daily basis, being forced to answer to, no one’s going to take someone and say, excuse me, you have to answer to, say, the Taiping rebellion, because there was a guy that thought he was the brother of Jesus at that time, and millions of people died.

2:57:44 But yet constantly we, who are more victims of it than anyone else, we who have more to fear of it than anyone else, who’s we? Iraqis. Okay. Iraqis and Pakistanis, far more Iraqis and Pakistanis die in suicide bombings than anyone in this country or in the United States. How dare, how dare the military which has destroyed our society, a society which goes further back than Hammurabi’s legal code, that goes further back in the three thousands when they invited Babylonians invented writing.

2:58:20 How dared that society, something so rich and so beautiful, be somehow, and I’m not particularly, listen to you, but it’s a reaction to years and years of being in these situations, and partly I, I hate its dominance. I hate its dominance over my own thought process, that I have to think how to respond to these situations, that how could a society so absolutely rich in its contribution to human history somehow be defined by the violence that’s been imposed upon it? It’s truly heartbreaking, not just for someone like myself before this, but for the people that, that feel that that manufactured other exists in their head more than it exists in actuality, and that’s worse even, that it, when that it exists in their own heads.

2:59:04 Brian Rose: Yeah, exactly. That’s more dangerous than the people pointing the finger.

2:59:08 Lowkey: Well, the, the finger pointer, I think, is more afflicted than the person is. I mean, the finger pointed at them, because the finger pointer is also, dominant part of me is dominated by their fear.

2:59:20 Brian Rose: How do you communicate this complicated, nuanced point to anyone, whether it’s Iraqis or Pakistanis or English or Americans?

2:59:27 I mean, you just explained this. It took ten minutes. It’s not gonna happen in a song, is it? No. Is that frustrating to you?

2:59:34 Lowkey: Yeah, because also sometimes you can get put into positions of being a mascot. You can get put into positions of hyperbolic, hysterical stuff on all different sides. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s not nice, but I think you know the answer to times of systematized and institutional violence, of structural violence, we have to, you know, as Mark Gonzales the poet says, wage beauty. You know, we have to find ways to love people, to love each other, and to not allow that violence which we know exists, and we have that awareness of that violence, to not allow it to dominate us too much.

3:00:10 Brian Rose: So people need to wake up and look at the whole context of the world, end of history, and of these civilizations and these peoples.

3:00:18 Lowkey: Yeah, and don’t judge them by a few thugs doing this one act on this one day, and, and take a zoom way back and look at all the other acts.

3:00:27 Brian Rose: I mean, and what created those thugs?

3:00:29 Lowkey: It depends how you perceive crime. They actually depend how you perceive crime in society.

3:00:35 Yeah, if you look at somebody, if you can look at a human being and see, and it comes back to our conversation before about Dan Penner, and the idea that as far as I am concerned, he’s symptomatic of a sickness within our civilization, but I can see him as a human being, and in a more humane way he’s baring his vulnerabilities and his fragility through what he’s saying, and you can see the way that power operates over him, rather than seeing him as this ogre or this monster or this perennial other. He’s actually, you know, he’s in me and I’m in him, and I think it depends on the way that we perceive crime, you know. We look at human beings, even someone that stabs a person in the street, and if we can deconstruct what they’ve done and see that in some way or another they’re actually reaching out for embrace.

3:01:34 As strange as it seems to people, as absolutely strange as it seems to people, through that lashing out and that communication there’s a yearning to be loved, and if we really deconstruct almost everything human beings do, we can find that the seed of some of it, a feeling that they have a need to be loved by other people. So when we look at these things and we can actually analyze the structural things, look at the history and the trajectory that creates people, it will mean that when we meet other people, that other won’t necessarily exist in our head, because we’ll have the power of imagination. It’s about the failure of imagination, because it means that I can’t quite stretch the limits of my perception to understand that this human being I’m seeing in front of me is not the human being that I read about in the newspaper this morning.

3:02:23 Very easily people do it, you know, and it’s about protection. I understand that why people do it. They are defending and protecting themselves, but if we can allow that fluidity in our own conception of ourself, also in our conception of other people, to take place, then it means that we have a far wider space for acceptance of human beings and patience in understanding things, rather than jumping to hyperbolic and easy conclusions.

3:02:50 Brian Rose: And Dan Pena is a victim of what the pornographication of wealth was.

3:02:54 Lowkey: He was a victim of? I mean, of course, any reading that I have of him is only through your videos. It’s superficial, it’s shallow. What I feel, though, is that he is a product of a society which is abrasive and obnoxious in its deification of wealth, and its idea that wealth is the be-all and end-all of you, and that if you don’t have it you’re not lovable, and that having it makes you lovable. And so I think that this veneer that he has covers up something which is wounded, which is wounded.

3:03:38 That’s my estimation. You know, that’s my estimation.

3:03:42 Brian Rose: That mentality sounds like hip-hop a little too.

3:03:46 Lowkey: Social stratification wounds us all in one way or another. Yeah, I don’t think you’re far off.

3:03:53 It’s very complex, but you’re not far off.

3:03:55 Brian Rose: And so you’re ultimately saying that every human being we look at, we need to look first of all, we have to come with compassion and open-mindedness and forgiveness, and look deep down into their heart, and don’t judge a criminal, but look at why did those acts come about? I mean, even, crime, any social construct, even a crime, sure, today is, of course, a social construct, right?

3:04:17 Lowkey: Yeah, I mean, Ice-T said slavery has been abolished except for the convicted felon, which is economic present, which is actually true according to the US Constitution, and they’re worth more imprisoned than they are on the street, and it’s one quarter of the world’s prison population, even though it’s only one four four percent of the world’s population is the United States, but they actually give a quarter of the world’s prison population.

3:04:41 You know, it’s a big business. It’s a big business, so it’s understanding the way that power operates through human beings. You know, it doesn’t mean that we have to be condemnatory about it,

3:04:52 Brian Rose: but I understand, in matters of life, would death, and especially seen death, it’s, it instantly intensifies all of these feelings, right?

3:05:00 Lowkey: Undoubtedly, and it’s not a surprise, but then, you know, if we’re going to get into these kind of conversations, we need to start thinking about the role that, you know, like I say, there’s mis-education by design, so there’s not a curriculumization of Britain’s role in the rest of the world, you know, in the fact that post-Nazism they were castrating people in Kenya.

3:05:22 You know, so when you have Boris Johnson saying about Obama he has a colonial grudge with the British, that’s because Boris Johnson knows that Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned by the British. You know, of course he’ll talk about Jeremy Corbyn saying anything about Trump and say that that somehow was damaging the special relationship, the special relationship being that the US Army has the right to spy on us from, Men with Hill, right? But so somehow that damages the special relationship, by him saying that Obama has a colonial grudge with Britain, doesn’t harm the special relationship.

3:05:50 Brian Rose: I appreciate your explanation, and my question when it came to extremism, or whatever that word means. I really do, and I hope people are listening to that. Ultimately, your message is about love, completely, and also it’s,

3:06:04 Lowkey: but it’s a process that I’m going through in terms of thinking and learning and trying to understand, because you know these are things that have affected all of our lives in different ways, all of our lives in different ways. So for me to think about it, you know, it’s, it’s an anguished process.

3:06:23 Meaning-making is an anguished process, which is what music-making is, meaning-making partially. Yeah.

3:06:32 Brian Rose: How much, let, how much do you have left? How much more anguish can you go through to create this art?

3:06:41 Lowkey: Living, living.

3:06:42 When you’re born, you’re condemned to death. When you’re born, you’re condemned to pain. When you bring a child into this world, you are condemning them to become aware of what it means to be, but you’re also giving them the chance to give, which is an amazing thing as well.

3:07:02 Brian Rose: What keeps you awake at night?

3:07:04 Lowkey: The things I make music them up.

3:07:06 Brian Rose: You don’t sleep much, do you?

3:07:09 Lowkey: I I think my sleep is probably a bit better now than it has been in the past.

3:07:15 Brian Rose: Okay. Would we be surprised to learn about Lowkey?

3:07:20 Lowkey: I don’t know.

3:07:21 I try not to put too much thought into kind of the way I’m perceived, because I don’t think that that’s necessarily a healthy kind of practice, indulging it. It’s just conjecture.

3:07:31 Brian Rose: You know, are you a father?

3:07:33 Lowkey: Yeah, I have a baby on the way. Yeah, okay.

3:07:35 Brian Rose: How’s that feel?

3:07:37 Lowkey: Exciting. Exciting. Excited to meet the baby that comes. Okay, yeah.

3:07:47 Brian Rose: What scares you?

3:07:49 Lowkey: Not doing something that is useful to other people. You know, being narcissistic, you’ve been there before, briefly? Yeah. Okay, but it’s also a default position I feel within the society.

3:08:13 If I was dead and I don’t want to hurt anyone, what does that mean? I don’t want anyone to be hurt by me, by your words or by anybody, anything.

3:08:23 Brian Rose: If I was to ask some of your friends what’s Lowkey’s superpower? I know you’re not super, but I was saying, what’s the thing that allows him to do these things, to make this stuff happen? What would they say?

3:08:37 Is it because he’s, he’s dedicated, because he’s, he’s emotional, because he’s, why?

3:08:45 Lowkey: Don’t know. I don’t know, you don’t know.

3:08:50 Brian Rose: Do you have to ask them? Will you be a poet the rest of your life?

3:08:56 Lowkey: Probably not. I mean, if I’m convinced of its utility, then you know I’ll do it.

3:09:01 Brian Rose: But yeah, okay. I had a guest in here named Kevin Kelly, he started Wired magazine back in the day, and he said, Brian, he’s in his sixties or seventies, he said, Brian, you’re only as old as the last time you changed your mind. Hmm, and I was wondering, what have you changed your mind about?

3:09:18 Lowkey: Every day. Yeah, yeah, every day I change my mind about these kind of things, and like I said, the paralysis of analysis. It makes it difficult to have conviction, because you’re constantly challenging your certainties.

3:09:30 Brian Rose: And that’s you, you are analyzing all the time?

3:09:32 Lowkey: No, I think you have to, you have to expose yourself to new information.

3:09:36 You have to expose yourself to the information which challenges the emotional investments that you may have. I think that’s one of the best things about studying, is that, you know, your emotional investments really get brought up against the air, and you get to grow them in a way that you’ve done otherwise.

3:09:58 Brian Rose: I think you probably do a lot of analysis. We’ve must be. I know we must look.

3:10:04 We always ask every burden that comes here a few questions at the end. You might know what they are, but I’ll ask you anyway. Okay, um, I have to give you a phone and you could call up the 20-year-old.

3:10:14 Lowkey: Yeah, what would I say?

3:10:15 Brian Rose: Well, if you give that man some advice back, and no sex, like,

3:10:18 Lowkey: I’d say slow down and say take your time.

3:10:20 Let’s say read more. I’d say, I’d say relax. You don’t need to be visible straightaway, think critically, as critically as you can, about yourself, about other things. Oh, it’s okay. Hmm, slow it down a little.

3:10:40 Brian Rose: Yeah, take your time, take your time. Would you change the journey?

3:10:45 Lowkey: Um, yeah, I think every, I think everyone has things that they think they shouldn’t have done, or they wouldn’t have done, or they do differently. I think anyone that doesn’t is, there is maybe a little bit, they’ll be strange. No.

3:11:01 Mmm.

3:11:01 Brian Rose: If you don’t think there’s things you could have done more effectively, on that same note, best advice you’ve ever received?

3:11:10 Lowkey: This is a hard one. Could it come from another musician or a professor, or I don’t know? Yeah.

3:11:17 I would say bell hooks said we must love just this more than we love any aspect of our own identity, and I think that that is, it’s a good piece of advice to aspire towards. Do the right thing. Yeah, no matter what. Have a code, stick to it. Yeah, okay.

3:11:39 You got a crazy smile. Last part to that 20-year-old that’s watching us right now, him, anywhere in the world, from America, food in Pakistan, from the UK. Yeah, they’re 20. You know, they grew up in this world you’re describing, pre-internet. They’re like, what are you talking about?

3:11:57 Mmm. What advice do you give to them? What can they do to make a difference, to change the status quo, if that’s what we’re talkin’? I think one of the hardest things for young people Love yourself, love one another.

3:12:39 Yeah, and don’t mess around, be serious, have a plan, do something. We realize that we have an economic system which is at war with our planetary system. That we have an economic system which alienates human beings from each other, and so that within that space you have to find a way to move, and to to change it, to contradict it, even in small ways. I was like to think that every day, if you don’t take discipline to action, you’re losing to wars, the war inside your brain.

3:13:12 Brian Rose: Mmm, and the war against everything that’s happening out there.

3:13:15 Lowkey: Yeah, discipline is another one. I think it’s something that all of us meet. We’re at this stage, suddenly clarity, conviction, and discipline. You’re important things to develop.

3:13:25 Brian Rose: Are you disciplined?

3:13:26 Lowkey: Not enough I am, but not enough.

3:13:29 Brian Rose: Okay, Lowkey, it’s been an epic conversation. Yes, yeah, I hope we covered everything. Yeah, we covered a bit, we covered quite.

3:13:37 Look, it’s true, the last four years I’ve been hearing a lot about you. A lot of people said I needed to have you here. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve had people on here that are articulate, that know history like the back of their hand, much better than I do, and yet when you talk about it, there’s something different about you, as in it feels like your ego’s out of the equation, you know, and you don’t need me, even on the lightest level, to be impressed with your knowledge of the facts.

3:14:05 It feels like you just, you want me to get to the point and understand what you’re talking about. And I know it’s not easy to make art the way you’ve made art, and we don’t see 90 percent of it, you know. We don’t see that struggle. We don’t see all the other trauma you have to deal with. We don’t see when these groups that I might think you’re allied with ask you to say something, and you might think, well, I don’t want to be that person that has to say something, and, and I can only imagine what that’s like to be there.

3:14:33 And I appreciate you putting the music out, and I appreciate the ground-felt video, and there’s a lot of nuanced things that you can see about an artist to tell you a lot about that person, and I think the reason you have such a loyal fanbase is because they see that in everything you do. And not saying [expletive] you, bro. I’m not saying you don’t have the alternate, but I’m saying people can see through it, and it gives me a little hope in humanity that people can see goodness in burka, because, as you know, I guess I had in here named John Joseph.

3:15:02 He used to hang out with the Rastafari in New York City, and he said they used to talk about this concept of Babylon. Babylon is this material world, you know, that we see all around us, and it’s, it’s so easy to be seduced by it, and yet I have optimism for humanity because people still want to hear your message and want to hear your music and want to watch your videos that don’t have you in them, and that gives me a little bit of hope. And I appreciate the explanation that you gave me when I brought up this concept of terrorism, or extremism, or reaction-ISM that we see on the front page of the Sun every day, and how we could all take a step back and look at it.

3:15:39 And actually, I put a video up after the London, London, whatever happened in the bridge, and I said something like, we are all one, and it makes me sad that people had to react this way, and it was brutal, it was brutal, and I felt I was maybe naive at that point, but actually, having said after speaking with you, it makes me feel like maybe I wasn’t. I, I actually have a close friend who was a doorman at the London Bridge incident, who I know very well, who witnessed it. He is a hero, actually, officially recognized as a hero for saving lives on the night.

3:16:14 Lowkey: It’s, it’s just grotesque. It’s truly grotesque and bizarre. I think the reason that, you know, sometimes also when we look at why people find refuge in conspiracy theory on a generational level, is to do with being told stories which they found quite difficult to swallow about quite important things. So when we look at generations that were the generation that I come from, you know, we had the death of Princess Diana. You know, it’s come out since then, six months before she died she sent a letter to her lawyer saying my husband’s gonna get me killed and make it look like a car crash, and that’s come out.

3:16:54 A little Isha’s into a lawyer, you know. We had September 11th, in which we had Building Seven, you know, fall down without being hit with anything next to it. We had architects come out and say it’s almost impossible for this not to have been a controlled demolition, that doesn’t mean that we don’t say, look, you know, and there’s someone that knows Arabic and can watch an interview with bin Laden, for instance, and understand it, and, you know, there is responsibility being taken in the videos.

3:17:27 You know, it’s almost like mass confusion. You know, we had the death of David Kelly, you know, which we were told he was killed with a cut to his own artery, which you know, I know that is something that would take days to kill a human being, not several hours. You know, Norman Baker’s, his book The Strange Death of David Kelly. So we told stories growing up, and we find them hard to swallow, and so I think that that leads people to a new surah, especially with the London Bridge situation, and has me knowing someone who was there who actually interacted with the people that were killing people, and threw chairs, and tried to defend people.

3:18:05 And so his co-worker got killed in front of him. So another guy gets shot, an innocent guy. There were four people that were shot, three of them were the people that did their, the thing, and one of them was an innocent bystander. You know, he saw them, in strong ties to this day, because of it, and he lives by me, and we went through and fought together as well through all of this confusion and all of this pain. You know, we look at why it is that people will often find it easier to kind of take refuge in, in, in our landish theories about why things happen.

3:18:42 It’s because the official story is often perceived as hard to believe, and sometimes it’s not true. You know, yeah, does it? It doesn’t mean that it’s always not true, and I think that that is a kind of anti-intellectualism when people are, they just jump to the conclusion, oh, it was this, oh, it was this, but that’s from this sort of fatigue of being things that they had, they find kind of that there’s too many holes in that story. So it’s a lack of trust.

3:19:11 Brian Rose: We definitely need to guard what we put into our brains.

3:19:15 Lowkey: Yeah, completely, and we need to think, okay, what’s fruitful, you know, what’s going to lead to me, you know, being more functional in the things I want to do, what’s going to lead to me being useful? You know, and for you, it’s no hip-up, probably not much news, not the real news, for instance, Democracy Now, you know, Novara Media, DoubleDown News. There are avenues which I trust, but it’s that I trust that they’re not trying to sell me something which is against my interest anyway.

3:19:46 Brian Rose: Right? It’s about finding those kind of avenues.

3:19:50 Lowkey: And also, I think, and it’s kind of ironic for someone like me to say, with so much of my music being that way inclined, you know, we can’t fixate on the pain, because there’s more pain than could ever fill this room, so we can’t fix a upon it. Yes, there’s wisdom in it about the way we live, but you can’t make it the B.

3:20:13 Brian Rose: Well, you can’t build a shrine to your pain, which is why you describe grandfather the way you describe it.

3:20:21 You don’t focus on the pain.

3:20:23 Lowkey: There’s a lot of people who would, and stick it in everyone’s face, and it’s also because that is what the media wants people to do. I’ve been on interviews where I’m trying to deliver an analysis of what I believe caused it, based on many days of researching, and yet all they want is platitudes, and all they want is me to say, you know, hand-wringing, it’s so terrible, and it’s terrible, and people don’t need to hear how terrible it is.

3:20:54 You know, we need to find ways to avoid something that you know, but in a system where the the political class is so subservient to corporate power, and the bodies that are meant to keep us safe are, in fact, hijacked by companies that benefit from these situations, it’s going to happen. You know, yeah. We got to stay vigilant. Yeah, and put some love out there.

3:21:23 Brian Rose: Lucky, thanks so much.

3:21:25 Lowkey: Thank you for, appreciate your time

3:21:27 Brian Rose: on London railways. Say it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours, and thank you.

3:21:31 Lowkey: Weather, wish you the same, hope to see back energy. Thank you very much.

3:21:35 Brian Rose: Thank you.