The definite article can go either way. At least the one in the middle of George the Poet’s stage name might do. Is this particular “the” a hubristic declaration of assumed pre-eminence – roll over Elizabeth Barrett Browning, tell JH Prynne the news – or simply a straightforward demonstration of occupational commitment, respectfully tying 24-year-old George Mpanga’s showbiz identity to his chosen societal function?
Probably a bit of both. But as this Brits Critics’ Choice and BBC Sound of 2015 nominee strives to move up a level from supplier of ear-catchingly wordy cameos on Emeli Sandé and Labrinth remixes to fully fledged solo star, he’ll be dragging that P-word behind him up the down escalator like a shopping trolley full of concrete.
I don’t see anyone turn and flee when confronted on arrival at the Village Underground by a table laden with copies of George the Poet’s slim debut volume, Search Party (Virgin, £9.99), so that’s a good sign. However, the unrepentant literal-mindedness of the man’s grand entrance – George and his burly, bearded backing band, wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, pick their way across a stage dotted with road signs and other construction paraphernalia to affirm (he explains) tonight’s status as a “road test” of material from his forthcoming debut album for Island Records – suggests aficionados of nuance may be in for a long evening.
As it turns out, the minds of an attentive packed house will get few opportunities to wander in the course of the slick and energetic 90-minute performance that follows. George the Poet holds their attention by combining the untrammelled positivity of the motivational speaker with the smooth-talking charm of a really good phone salesman (“Literally – the same thing we’ve all seen on YouTube 65 times already,” he grumbles self-deprecatingly at one point into an imaginary mobile handset). And if all this sounds a long way from the aesthetic grandeur of such landmark combinations of music and spoken word as Gil Scott-Heron’s H20 Gate Blues, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Street 66 or 4hero featuring Ursula Rucker’s Loveless, that’s not to say George the Poet brings nothing fresh to the table.
So clean cut he makes Chipmunk look like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, this erstwhile teenage grime MC’s opening number, Wotless, ponders the distance his educational accomplishments have taken him from his rough-and-tumble beginnings in the same ill-favoured corner of north-west London that gave the world Lady Sovereign. UK rappers have boasted about many things over the years, but George the Poet is the first to accord his degree in politics and sociology from King’s College, Cambridge, the same prominence So Solid Crew once gave to their matching Audi TTs.
The line “Now I’m the Oxbridge alumnus on the blocks with the youngers” is not the only one in George’s oeuvre that makes it possible to imagine him as a satirical creation – a paragon of social responsibility to balance the moral darkness of Chris Morris’s imaginary gangsta rapper Fur Q. But George the Poet’s resistance to reflex ridicule has stood him in good stead so far and, given the stranglehold currently exercised by ex-members of the Bullingdon Club over the nation’s financial and cultural resources, he would be entitled to ask anyone sceptical about the place of such subject matter within hip-hop whether the real gangsters aren’t as likely to be found on University Challenge as they are on Crimewatch.
The poetry slam scene that is George the Poet’s other alma mater is notorious for delivering conventional wisdoms with a measure of emphatic self-satisfaction better suited to the stunning apercu. But his best material, such as the unexpectedly multilayered teen pregnancy scenarios explored on his Chicken and the Egg EP, does the opposite, sneaking some bracing critical thinking into narrative scenarios theoretically exhausted on Channel 4’s Dubplate Drama.
I particularly like the way Yolo meticulously repurposes the Kardashian sisters’ favourite acronym (for “you only live once”) from hedonist shrug (“I told a friend I’m sorry for the vomit in your car but you know, bro… YOLO”) to urgent political battle cry: “I would like some change – like a shopkeeper.” And any performer willing (as George the Poet does) to namecheck Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, while refuting the Frankfurt School’s tin-eared critique of popular culture with a defiant insistence that “realness will prevail for the youth” is definitely worth keeping an eye on.
