George the Poet: ‘Jay Z has betrayed black radical tradition and Beyoncé is a classic capitalist'
“Clear that man’s name. He doesn’t lie!” I have just asked George the Poet, aka George Mpanga, a question that has been bugging me for almost two years. A friend of mine once got into an Uber with a driver, who, after a little small talk, professed to be Mpanga’s dad. Was it true?
“Yeah, he Ubers every now and then,” Mpanga laughs when I recount the story. “God bless him, man, telling people about me. Sweet.”
His humility is disarming, but it’s easy to see why Mpanga senior would want to boast about his son. A rapper-turned-author, podcaster-turned-PhD candidate, the 33-year-old Cambridge-educated Ugandan-Brit is the ultimate multi-hyphenate. These days, it is hard to say what Mpanga is best known for – perhaps the genre-bending spoken word poetry that saw him reading at , or his Peabody Award-winning podcast. But none of this is really the focus of Mpanga’s new book, Track Record. While it is part memoir, it is primarily a socio-economic history – of the music industry, Britain’s colonial past, capitalism and what he terms the “war
