Normally when I introduce a downstream I set up a question which gets answered in the broader chat.

But talking to George the poet isn't really a straightforward question and answer.

He's a poet, a rapper, an academic and an author, and speaking with him is a bit like climbing into a

spaceship and taking a tour of the constellations of someone's thinking.

In a nutshell, we're talking about what it means to be black, but in reality, we're covering everything from imperialism to Tupac-Shakur and Kendrick Lamar, political assassinations, how the West killed off a cada of black radical leadership.

This is one of the most expansive and freewheeling interviews I've ever done for this show, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My first question is actually really different from the one that I've got written down

and I think this is the question I've always wanted to ask you, which is how did you develop your poetic voice, the rhythm, the cadence, the timber, what was the story?

I hint I mean I think I outline it a little bit in the book.

It really starts with me developing as a Grim MC. There's a certain foundational discipline that went into that in terms of how we put our ideas together

What our artistic priorities are so rhyming as well has always been a high priority.

And then I reached a point when I got to uni

where I had already built up some

some reservations about certain elements of the art form that we grew up in, Graham. And one of them was the provado that always comes with it. I wanted to strip that back. I was also

aware that not everyone can listen as fast as we talk, so I wanted to slow it down and make it more

conversational and it just became the poetry that I do today.

Who are the Grim M. C's that were most influential for you.

Without a doubt, it was definitely Wiley Skeptor

and Gets.

A little later on in my life, it then became,

he's not strictly a Grim MC but he was in

Grim retch-free two and in my generation people like Chip and criminal they were

...