How to scale cultural greatness, with Elijah

Here in Sovereign Albion, we are interested in exploring and scaling British greatness. So I wanted to speak with Elijah, a friend and artist who’s a very special person to have that conversation with.

Elijah is a writer, DJ, and founder of the record label Butterz. He came up through grime and pirate radio, a scene that had to build its own infrastructure, and in doing so produced something totally distinctive in Britain, culturally, sonically, and economically. More recently, he’s the author of Close the App, Make the Ting, a set of prompts and provocations that I think of as akin to a16z’s It’s Time to Build, but aimed at encouraging agency in new and emerging artists.

This was a really special conversation. We explored cultural sovereignty and the role of media institutions in platforming British arts, power laws and talent spotting in record labels, cultural company building in the internet era, overcoming tall poppy syndrome, rent as the creative director, and how it’s up to all of us to reconnect the nation. All fundamentally in service of an increasingly important question: how do we platform, and scale, cultural greatness in Britain?

Thanks to the Centre for British Progress for supporting the podcast, to Podcast House for production support, and Simon Panayi for original music.

How to scale cultural greatness, with Elijah

[00:00] Because I travel a lot, I see the things that make the nation special.

How would you describe the way that your work is usually framed?

[01:23] Today, I think people think I’m just a guy that gives creative advice on the internet — shares ideas for artists, how people can get into the music industry. And for the most part, that’s not what I’m interested in. I’ve never really had a love for the music industry or anything like that.

I started out on pirate radio. I did a DIY independent label. What I was doing was the antithesis of that. I’ve never worked for a music company or a major label. And a lot of the artists and scenes and music were spiritually against those things. I think people think about it more in terms of the music scene that I’m part of rather than a wider vision of what I think makes Britain interesting.

Because I travel a lot, I see the things that make the nation special. I’m like, that’s not normal. It is not like that in most places in the world. The things that maybe I would say I’ve benefited from were intangible to me until I was able to step out of London — step out of the 40-minute zone of East London that I’ve grown up in — and visit the rest of the country, or when I started travelling to places that don’t have arts funding and all these institutions.

So usually my work isn’t framed in that way, but it’s impacted the way I communicate and my experience. Today, a lot of the things I was doing organically or exploring by myself are now institutionally acceptable. Being a DJ or an MC — you can do a course for that, or someone could teach you how to make beats at university. It’s socially acceptable to say “I’m an artist” or “I’m going to university to study music technology,” in a way that, at least when I went to university, would be “Why would you do that? You can’t get a job in that.” It’s still the case today, but it’s more socially acceptable because there are courses that make it acceptable. And there are grime MCs who are MBEs and stuff, in a way that I wasn’t.

It’s funny how the institutional credibility comes into it and there’s a bit of a shift there. I spoke to Zakia Sewell recently and we were talking about a whole bunch of things, including new folk cultures. We were talking a bit about Notting Hill Carnival as an interesting new folk custom. And then I was like, is UK garage folk? And she took it down the route of grime — obviously this is the scene that you grew up in, and it had this relationship: it was DIY, it had a — I don’t know whether you describe it as anti-institutional or not — but it was certainly outside many of the existing commercial institutions.

But then there’s this crossover point of, when does it become part of the music industry? When does it start to have that institutional credibility, but also maybe commodification — or it just becomes, as you say, a path you can go down because you pick a course. It’s gone mainstream and normalised, which in some ways is great because more people get into it, and in other ways it changes it. I don’t know how you feel like things have changed both within grime but also the music industry more broadly?

[04:58] Yeah. There’s a bit more of a revisionist history because people are saying now, “Oh, we’ve always loved this kind of thing.” It wasn’t just anti-institutional in a sense that we are against the thing — the thing was against us.

When I was coming up, there was Form 696 by the Metropolitan Police, monitoring how ethnic minorities were organising in clubs and things like that. That’s an institutional structure that’s like, “We’re not sure about this thing.” Even at majors or radio, people would actively say this is rocket-shot, no one will want to buy this, we’re not going to take this to the rest of the country, we don’t think the UK will be interested in this music. Or even, “Rap is better than grime.” That’s a normal position for someone in a major record label to have.

And 20 years later, we have this organisation MOBO — Music of Black Origin — and now they have a grime award. But when that music was developing, they didn’t have one. So even the institutional things designed for, say, black music have had to do a kind of revisionist history of, “Oh, we always loved grime.”

Interesting. Did you get this feedback when you were — at different points you’ve been a bit critical, I think very reasonably, of some of the major radios and institutions not really platforming black British music. Did you have those conversations? Is this some of the thing that’s come out in the response?

[06:22] There was always this idea of the business case of why you shouldn’t. “Oh, 50 Cent is bigger, Beyoncé is bigger. We should prioritise them because more people like them.” And that was never my qualm. It was more like, I know that, but shouldn’t we make space and time just because we are here and we’ve got something special, and we are pouring all these resources into making people explore these paths anyway? It feels really silly to not make more and more space as we have more and more resources pouring into it. It makes no sense.

All the way from youth services up to college, university, and then post-university — now we have all this music and culture and creative architecture. But then when it comes to existing alongside commercial work, it’s really hard to do, and people always make the business case against it.

There’s so many analogies with so many other conversations going on in policy or economics at the moment. There’s really dry stuff — does the government buy stuff from the domestic company or does it go to the US company that can do the same thing and maybe it’s quicker, maybe it’s even a bit cheaper? But if you do that repeatedly, you never allow your domestic company to ever be competitive. It’s interesting thinking about this through the lens of culture as well. Actually having something like the BBC or these other institutions which exist in order to be — and they’re funded differently in order to be able to do different things and make different decisions. If they don’t almost follow up on that privilege, then what are they for? I’m a big believer in it, but it’s interesting.

[08:11] A lot of things have started to converge to be the same thing. The BBC and Netflix and Spotify and the other DSPs — Apple, Amazon — I always think they end up producing really similar kinds of work. Even when it is platforming domestic work, it will still filter through the same lenses and ideas.

For example, even if it is grime, they’ll be like, “Oh, we should make a grime documentary.” And then you have seven grime documentaries instead of just a story about a particular MC’s experience, or a story about the technical side behind pirate radio. Today, most people couldn’t explain to you how this works. It feels like it’s been a through-line over the last four years in British culture in general. But most people still couldn’t break down how it even worked. They can understand the music and the cultures that came out of it, but there’s something interesting technically behind all of that stuff that happened.

The frustration is, if one story gets told, it gets told seven times rather than the thousand possible stories. Even stories like “grime was made on a PlayStation” — that’s a half-truth. There is no famous grime tune made on the PlayStation as far as I know. But it’s one of those things that sticks around. It sounds like a better story than probably what it is.

My battle, my work, is trying to widen the stories that we tell about our music. The hard thing about being part of a niche scene, or a niche within a niche — if I see myself as part of the pirate radio lineage and family in London, that’d be grime, dubstep, UK funky, drum & bass, jungle, UK garage, house, reggae sound system music — that lineage gets flattened into one box, maybe “Black British music.” Then seven small threads come out of that, and you end up with two stories told, when there’s a thousand.

There’s two things I want to think about. One is the type of work that gets made when you’re trying to sell into a world which has some dominant platforms who make decisions, and it shapes the type of work that people can make. But the flip side of this is almost — one of the things that I think is still vastly under-theorised is talent spotting.

Yes.

We think about it in VC and startups — you’re looking for outliers. But there’s actually quite a lot of overlap with A&Rs, or Mob Kitchen — Mob food. It’s really interesting how many young creative chefs they basically found who have gone on to serious careers as food influencers. Someone there knew what they were doing and they found really interesting talent. From the perspective of both being an artist and also having run a label — how have you thought about that? Yes, there’s a question of what stories are worth telling and they don’t get the airtime. But also on the flip side, when you’re looking for talent, you’re looking for interesting people, you’ve got some in the background — are they gonna make it in this scene under these conditions?

[11:41] The whole infrastructure of what I’ve been part of has been built on anomalies, over the last 15 years. “This was worth doing, all of these resources were worth piling into, to get an Ed Sheeran result, basically.” Our whole cultural landscape is based on one or two of those things happening maybe every three years. And it justifies all of the spend, all of the buildings and infrastructure.

But I guess we have this other side of what we do that has, maybe, a problem with identifying elite talent and pushing them upwards and then supporting them all the way through. We are very good at supporting underdogs and getting people to a level — and then that support breaks if people don’t go to some sort of arena or stadium level. There’s a massive middle ground of people that have ideas, contribute something interesting, but then they’re not able to push through because, “Okay, we’ve supported you now, but we’ve got to start again with the next phase.”

There’s something funny there. There’s the power law effect — one outlier success pays for the rest. That’s the model in VC and startups, and it’s true for a label, or it can be true for a label. But an investor wrote this interesting piece recently about — there’s no power law for the founder. Some of you make it, but not everyone does. He was making this argument, which I really resonate with: so work on something that matters. Because you may or may not succeed, but if you don’t succeed, at least work on the thing that is most important to you or most important to the world.

There’s also a funny side of this — in that world, okay, maybe you are a software engineer, you work in sales or whatever it might be. The startups that win can accommodate other people. You get this cycle of talent and the winners get bigger, they recruit people, they hire people, and people can find their place. Maybe they build a company, it doesn’t work, but they can find their place in the ecosystem.

[13:46] I think that’s what I tried to do at Butterz — the label, and my learnings from it I was trying to share as I went. Whether the project ended up being successful or not, or projects being successful or not as successful, people could see or get close to what we were doing. I was trying to be as transparent as practical as we could be.

Because this is not a static industry. It’s not widget one, widget two. The time that we started was in the transition of vinyl to CD to MP3 to streaming. It was like five years. Even as a DJ, I went from playing records — vinyl — then to CDs, then to laptop and Serato, this thing that used to plug into the decks, and then to USB, in the space of maybe five or six years. The technology, the speed of everything, just completely changed. I saw companies, artists, everything in between, ideas wiped out every single year.

It’s not “stay the course.” Effectively the first five years of Butterz is five different companies, or five different vast iterations of ideas just to survive. And then the anomaly result happened because of this combination of massive buoyancy of the artists that orbited us, and the artists that we were releasing. But then the platform dial changes — streaming in 2014 and 2015 registering our music as something that, “Oh, people actually like this. We can see the data behind this.”

The social access changed too, being able to get to people easier through Instagram and Facebook groups. So we’re able to sell tickets across the country in a way. 696 being dropped. And brands feeling comfortable spending money in a way that they didn’t before on what we did. It was probably those three or four things. The music didn’t change that drastically. Those infrastructural changes were like, “Oh, okay.” And then majors come in — alright, buy everything. And it just inflates the same content, same music, and people are like, “Oh, okay, maybe this is actually valuable.” Nothing really changed about the product.

That’s really interesting. How did you, just to go back a step, how did you get into founding Butterz in the first place?

[16:12] It’s weird, because I was just a music — like, pirate radio fan. I was listening to Rinse FM. I was at university and not enjoying my time there. So I would come back to London, take photos sometimes of club nights and talk to MCs, but not a lot. And then I was on the internet on this forum called Rewind, which was a magazine at the time. That forum shut down and a bunch of the users started another forum called Grime Forum.

I was like, “Okay, we’ve got a little internet community.” It was the Twitter of grime of the time. This is 2007 — maybe 300-400 people talking about grime, and dubstep and all this kind of stuff, for probably two years. Then it hit a point where I was thinking, “What do I want to do in general?”

I had this vision in my head of being a Rinse FM DJ and a Guardian writer. A journalist and a DJ or something. At the time those things were just too different lanes. You are either going to be a critic or a contributor. You’re an artist, or you are part audience. And I was like, “Why can’t you be both?”

Then I spent some time interviewing people and writing about the scenes, and trying to write about it in a different way to what people just do — artist interview, “How’d you make the beat? What’s the song about?” I was trying to broaden that. Then it hit a point where I wanted to put something in that I thought was good. Some of the things I just thought were terrible, or the paths people go down were stupid. So I was like, “Okay, let me have a vision for what this could be.”

I just happened to be graduating from university at the time. Needed something to get hold of. It was the credit crunch. No money. No tough direct work opportunity. I was struggling to find employment. Me and my friend Will were like, “Okay, we’re going to put £250 each from our part-time jobs and get a record produced.” We were buying records from record shops, from these dubstep labels, but grime had fallen off in terms of vinyl production. So we were like, “Let’s make a grime version of Hyperdub or Tempa — these dubstep labels that were hot at the time — and build something like that.”

In my head, I thought it would be effectively a hobby project, something I’d do in the evenings. Play on Rinse, do some club nights here and there, and then eventually get a job. Then there was this monetary thing where I was getting offered roles at £17k starting. I was like, “Oh, I think I can make £17k in grime.” And that was it.

As I got older, the opportunity cost of going into more mainstream work versus just continuing this project — and all the arms that developed organically — was like, I could either do this, be in control of my own destiny, or work at an institution or brand or something, and get paid less, have less autonomy, less control, and not be contributing to something that felt very temporary. I was so aware of being part of something that felt special. There were certain moments where I was like, “Okay, maybe in 10 years’ time people will look back at this as important.”

There’s a thing I’ve been thinking about — this sort of overlap between artists and startup founders. Maybe this is a stretch, but I think there’s something in it. There’s actually quite a lot of overlap. These worlds — the creative worlds and the tech worlds — often feel very adversarial. The copyright stuff is a good example of that, or people critiquing techno-optimism or whatever.

But actually something underlying both, that just feels really rare in the rest of our country and society, is (a) an ability to take risk and be comfortable with that, and (b) an understanding of there being some almost uncapped upside for the people that make it — you can do really well. But then, to your point before, you have this differentiated vision of the world that is not being provided by what’s already out there. And the kind of entrepreneurialism that’s required is, “If that’s how I think the world should look, I’m actually best placed to build that.”

It’s funny — I don’t think people often see it like that. What’s interesting hearing you talk about the conditions under which you were first starting out — it’s not like it was some economic boon period and everything was going great. Maybe that’s in some ways why you ended up having to do DIY. But then you look forward to today, and the relationship between people’s economic circumstances and how much risk they feel that they can take — things aren’t great economically, and we haven’t grown for 20 years. Equally, I don’t know whether you think it’s an easier or harder time to start for someone today.

[21:47] I think I had a clear view on what the opportunity was of its day. That was the right thing to do at that time. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do today. For the equivalent 21-year-old that’s trying to figure things out — if you are looking at the things that we started in the tens, or even just anything pre-COVID, I’m like, do not use that as your frame of reference to create something today. It is good in terms of seeing journeys, but if you ask me how I started, that’s not the same answer as how I would start today if I was starting at 21 with the information I have today.

The successes of today could look completely different, and sometimes to our generation or people older than me, that success is not legible to them. I’m like, “I don’t expect you to understand why this works, or why the metrics of this level of success, or even the artistic ambition, is completely different.”

At the time, my goals were very small. They were “Okay, we want to put records in a shop, we want to play on pirate radio, we want to sell tickets to a club.” It wasn’t “Create global brand, tour internationally,” that kind of thing. Or even have a strong political vision. Maybe there was some underlying “fuck the system,” but not to the point of, say, tweeting at Zack Polanski or something. That wouldn’t have been something I was doing. Or questioning the tax system, or asking, “Oh, why am I paying VAT on this?” That wasn’t really what I was focused on, even though it was something that was impacting me.

But now I think a 21- or 22-year-old does have the power in some way to bend discourse in a way that we didn’t. When I see people — in one post they’ll post their new drum & bass tune, and the next post they’ll post about a social issue or food bank or something going on in their local area — I’m like, whoa, that’s different. It’s super interesting. And there are opportunities based on that activism and communication that are financially rewarding, so I understand why people explore it more creatively too.

Whereas at the time, my activism was less theoretical. I was actually dealing with the Metropolitan Police. So I couldn’t just be tweeting about it — it would have derailed what I was trying to do. Today I think it’s more artistically and socially acceptable to tweet through the process of dealing with an institution.

Maybe that’s an interesting segue onto how we met, and how we originally got connected. Without getting too political, there’s definitely a sense of need for change. But then the visions of what that can look like are really different. One of the first things we ever spoke about was techno-optimism. It’s quite important. But there’s quite a lot of resistance to it, particularly in creative culture.

Yeah, definitely.

Last year, when the AI and copyright debate came up, you had the debate reduced down to Elon versus Elton. You’re like, this is not a serious way to have this conversation. But if that’s the level of conversation we’re going to have, we also need to build up some new idols on both sides. I don’t know how that resonates with you. You’ve been thinking about this quite a lot and trying to — as you say, almost like a niche within a niche — carve out a slightly different worldview and outlook within these communities.

[25:32] Yeah, it’s really hard because people are picking sides, and then ideology forms around that. So hard that they can’t even take on a good idea from another side at all.

Sometimes I see this idea of, rather than left or right, it’s up or down. What vision do you have of the future? Do you want it to be how it was before? Or do you want it to be something else, to develop and move forward? Do you want Elizabeth Lines in every city, or do you want it to be like the old Bakerloo line? Or nothing change? It’s not just a case of faster trains, it’s there being a train at all.

The way I’ve spoken about this that most people seem to react to, or are surprised by — I’ll frame every policy failure as a tax. I’ll say, “The train to Manchester — whatever the price of that is, is a policy failure and is a tax on our work, on our way of communicating, our way of bonding with the rest of the country.” If it’s £146 for me to go to Manchester, that is a tax. Even Walthamstow Central to Farringdon being £9 at nine in the morning is a tax. Student finance is a 9% tax on your income. All of these things are not working.

So you don’t know what your politics are if you just address the numbers of those things. Usually people will say, “Oh okay, so you’re saying there should be less tax.” I’m like, “Or — why don’t these things work properly?” That’s more the question.

If the outcome you want is a country that does feel connected to itself — that if it’s so hard to get around the country, actually you end up living in very different silos, and you don’t feel connected, or you feel like London, it has its challenges, but it can run away relative to the rest of the country. I’m from near Stoke and I love it. It’s a special place, but it’s seen better days. People know that. It’s not found a place in this new global economy very well.

There’s a whole lot of cities that, if you just built some trains or fixed their local transport, they could have a revival. I was talking to someone recently about Leeds being a really interesting entrepreneurial, creative city, and almost like the indignity of not being able to pay its own way. He’s an entrepreneur — founded a company that employs those people. I thought he put it really well: what is this country if we can’t be connected to each other, and we can’t allow everywhere to kick on?

[28:27] Here’s a good example. Yesterday, Sasha Lord, who’s a representative of Manchester, tweeted something like, “Manchester has brought all these massive events to the UK,” or “These massive events in the UK happen in Manchester. We’re the cultural powerhouse right now.” And I’ll go into London to talk about it with the people.

I think, if the UK is functioning as best as possible, we’d have at least five cities that are like Manchester, not one. And the person representing Manchester would be able to talk about that in Leeds and be like, “Oh, this is how we can make Leeds banger, this is how we can make Newcastle…” Not preaching to London about how great Manchester is and why we should come and visit. And it still doesn’t change the economics of — okay, if I want to go to Manchester, it’s £150. And that just breaks everything.

Looking towards 2028 and 2029, the arts, cultural institutions, music industry, whatever — has got to ask itself what outcome it wants, not what your ideological position is. What is going to be an effective way of you communicating the outcomes that you want? And if you don’t get what you want, what does that look like?

If reform comes in, for example, or a Reform-y coalition or something that would make you feel uneasy today — what do you think they will do to your institutions, or to your funding, or to prioritising your points of view? If you believe that to be the case, what are the next two, three years’ courses of action — things that we should be doing as artists, as an industry, as a cultural ecosystem — to either pivot away from that, or make a better case for us existing to that inevitable outcome?

What is the case for publicly funded arts? And how does that function best for the entire country? What should we make? What should we say? Being able to answer that question very far away will ensure survival.

There’s a funny version of this — without it being about any one side in particular. I can totally understand a viewpoint which is: you elect a particular government, that government should think about what it spends money on as a capital allocation problem. These are the things we care about, so these are the things we’re going to spend money on. These things we don’t care about. Rather than inheriting a hand and being like, “There’s nothing we can do.”

In some ways I think one of the reasons there is so much clamour for change in so many different directions is because it feels like nothing very much actually changes from government to government. In theory I’m very open to the idea that actually every five years things might look quite different. That’s probably a good thing. You think about democracy as error correction — if something goes wrong, the whole point is you can vote the last people out and get new people in. But then there are these things along the way that we think have intrinsic value, they have this cultural value. And maybe also in a world where the economics — the market for art and creativity is not an easy market. This is not groceries or some random thing where a lot of people can get employed and have stable income. It’s a very weird one.

[31:59] Again, if we can fix all these other things — there’s that phrase, “rent is the creative director.” If we can fix all these other things, that actually might be better than trying to fix the cultural policy. Would we live in a more interesting country if the greengrocer, the farmer, also has time to make art?

There’s this podcast I subscribe to, and there’s a part of me that’s like, “I don’t know how they make enough money.” And then I was like, “Oh, they live in Berlin. That’s why.” Their living costs are low so they can take risks, and it makes a city more interesting. We should make rent cheap so that cities can be interesting. That just feels obvious. And yet we’re not — we haven’t been able to coordinate our societies in a way to actually make that happen.

Yeah.

Maybe this is one of the other ways we initially got connected — talking about culture as a coordination technology. And then finding what are the cultures that scale, and do they still work when they scale? It’s quite an interesting question.

[33:03] Everything comes down to scale. It’s the same as the university question. If we have 10,000 people doing a music management MA, it doesn’t work. That thing breaks. Same with — one thing that comes up quite a lot is taxing the rich or something. If you ask people what that looks like, you can model some amount of money that raises. You’re like, “Okay, model what money that raises. Cool. Now what should we do with it?” “Oh, spend it on the NHS.” “Ah, cool. And then — now what? Now what?”

Taking these things to the creative limit is interesting. It should be more explored. I’m not going to shout someone down that thinks that. No — actually ask the question. Let’s unravel this and make the people that speak about this, that I feel are trying to advocate for us as artists, or people that are trying to make interesting things happen — let’s make them show their work. Let’s make them show their numbers. And okay, now we get a view of it.

What do you think has been the biggest influence on creative direction — time or rent?

[34:15] I think every part of my success and reason for being here is time and place and, again, rent. I am a child of Jamaican immigrants living in East London in the 80s, and a beneficiary of all of the infrastructure that got built around — and some of the things that got left alone as well.

I’m not what people would describe as privileged. But I’m this very “no-money beginning” privileged person. My mum owns her house. I was able to stay at home until my mid-twenties. So I was able to benefit from all this culture on the doorstep that someone who has to pay to be here doesn’t. That gave me and the rest of the crew — the people that I work with — an advantage over everyone else.

What I’ve tried to do with that privilege is, “Okay, I’m going to share my work, or use what I’ve been learning through, and be honest about that too.” I wasn’t trying to hide it. It’s something that people didn’t necessarily identify as a privilege. And this is not financial privilege. It’s location. Timing. Even just awareness of that, and the awareness of thinking it’s important to make other people aware of it.

Have you seen that when you do a lot of work around the country, and you travel around the UK and globally — help us contextualise that.

[35:50] It makes some people feel uncomfortable. Because in some spaces I’m supposed to be the diverse character. I’m supposed to be the person that has, you know, brilliantly come from a working-class black background. But that doesn’t mean the same thing if I’m in Coventry.

And now I’m older as well. I do something that is youth-coded, but I’m not young. I’m 38. I benefited from some structural things that aren’t there anymore. I benefited from going into university when it was £1,200. I literally paid the first bit of tuition in cash. That was doable at that time.

Wow.

Me and my mum were at these —

I can’t even imagine.

Yeah. Handed over cash.

Wow.

I still had a student loan, all these things, but it’s nowhere near the scale where it was. I was the last thing before it turned into £3,000, and then now it’s £9k or something. When I see these debates — your degree is not the same if you’ve paid three times more, and it’s not the same if you paid nine times more. And then it’s not the same if, say, my generation — people that came to London were paying three or £400 in rent to live in Hackney, and now you are paying £1,500.

There’s a funny thing here. I want to see what you think about this. There’s a version of the story, or the ambition, that more people should go to university. That came out of the late 90s. I remember reading this — there’s this strategist that worked for Tony Blair at the time, Philip Gould. He was writing about why actually, yeah, working down the mines, maybe it was dignified work and great for communities, but the actual work itself was pretty grim. That should not be the sum total of our ambition for people.

So he was talking about this new services economy that was coming after the turn of the millennium, and sending people to university — encouraging people to go to university — was a way to enfranchise them, to give them a ticket into that new world so that they had a stake and they could capture some of that value. There’s something actually quite aspirational there.

The flip side is, obviously, to a degree, maybe too many people went to university. There aren’t enough jobs. Who’s hiring all the grads? You’ve got to ask yourself — the bundle that university represents maybe is no longer working. Is it good value for students? Quite a lot of people, probably not. Is it good value actually for the researchers and the teachers and the scientists, who spend all their day doing paperwork rather than actually furthering science? Is it good value for the taxpayer? Probably not either.

So there’s quite a big question of what comes next. I don’t quite know how I think about this, but for me — rather than relying on… maybe this is easy to say, we both went to university, we got to rely on it. But maybe in future we don’t rely on the institutional authority of some credential that we got from an institution. You have to think about new types of work where the feedback loop between what you do and the value is much clearer.

If you set up a company and you make money, you know when someone values what you’re doing. Similarly to a degree with art and the creative sector — partly because maybe you make money, but also almost — you know how artisanal makers have a sense of their own self-worth and the intrinsic value of what they’re doing. And neither of these people are reliant on some third-party institution to be like, “You came here for three years, you did this course, therefore you can do the thing.” You just go straight to it. But that’s going to be quite a mindset shift from where we are today.

[39:39] Those are things people are able to achieve maybe if they have a home and they have a real stake in the places where they live. If you don’t, then you’re always going to be darting around trying to figure out what’s next.

The “what next-ification” of work — this happens to me a lot when I’m moving project to project. Whereas if you know that, for example, your project is going to be in Coventry for 10 years, you’re going to work differently to someone that is going to go Coventry to Leeds to London, back to Cardiff, and not really settle and make roots. You might make money, but the impact of your work is going to be stunted every time.

It feels — but also, Close the App, Make the Ting was a call to people to just try, just go make some things. I don’t know whether you’ll like the comparison to Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build, but it has an energy of: just crack on. Don’t wait for permission, don’t wait for an institution or whatever. Since you wrote the book, how has that played out? Do you still feel — how’s the feedback been? Is this a worldview that you still subscribe to? Has it evolved?

[40:49] Yeah, it definitely has evolved. Close the App, Make the Ting is a filtering process. If you only have four hours a week, then make a project that is four hours a week. Don’t try and make Thriller or your magnum opus. Or your magnum opus might be the four-hour-a-week project that you have. That makes you create something very different to what Andreessen is doing, or Rick Rubin or something like that. “This is the time that I have, so I’m bending my creativity to that.” Okay, then you get something different. “These are the feedback loops that I can create.” Cool, you get something different.

That’s where we get interesting work. One of the hard things about working in music-adjacent is everyone’s thing just ended up on Spotify, just dumping. We became link-in-bio, basically, as an industry.

Who do you think is doing interesting stuff today?

[41:38] I’m going to go with a super-obvious example, and people listening to us will be very disappointed and annoyed. And I want you to be annoyed by this answer. Okay, here we go. Fred again.

This guy — the velocity of the output is part of the creative. I’ve not spoken to him directly about any of these things, these are just my observational thoughts. That is some sort of athlete-level presentation of work. That’s super interesting.

Then you have the shows that are very diverse in terms of presentation. Sometimes he presents as a band, or like an acoustic musician, just playing the piano. Sometimes as a DJ. And then there’s this physical endurance. I went to see the show a few weeks ago at Alexandra Palace — he’s doing open to close. You don’t see any major musician go on stage for five and a half hours, and act as a vessel where other scenes and music and generations can plug into. The show I went to had Ezra Collective. It had a couple of MCs and other DJs from different generations. It just felt like a modern encapsulation of great British music.

It’s not just doing that, it’s doing it at the pace. The volume of music. The volume of quality. The amount of talented people that it magnetises. And the backend as well — the team and the people working on it behind that was like an all-star cast of super-interesting creatives that were working hard to make anything happen.

As you describe it, it reminded me a bit of that interview with Timothée Chalamet last year, where he was like, “I just want to be the best.” He had somehow crystallised something, and there’s a bit of a vibe shift where that level of ambition is accepted and championed, in a way that I think particularly maybe in Britain there’s a bit of tall poppy syndrome — “Nah, let’s cut them down.” But yeah, okay, you’re convincing me.

[43:47] And even on social media, he uses it like an instrument. One of these sayings in the book is: social media is a canvas, not an advertising board. If you scroll it, it feels like you are playing the beats. It feels like you are part of the music in some way. I don’t know if that’s deliberate, the way they cut things — you could scroll and it’s boom, boom, boom, boom. But you feel like you’re in the music.

People might not be aware of those mechanics, but it’s happening, it’s effective, it’s working. And it’s so difficult to make people care about something. When you see the movement of 10,000 people to one thing these days — people always say, “Oh, no one cares about music,” or “People are ambivalent,” or “Kids don’t…” I’m like, okay, go to a show. I went to Dave’s show last week. That feeling is there.

Whoever’s your person — Fred again, Pink Pantheress, Nia Archives, Sherelle, Shabaka, Dave — those people that can move an amount of people. What do we do with that energy post-show? Everyone leaves — what do they do next? Those are the people. Make the thing. Once you’ve seen that thing, you’re like, “Oh, I need to go and make something.” It’s not just a feeling of, “Oh, I had a good time.” It’s, “Okay, where is that energy been harnessed post-show?”

There’s a special thing that I think you are capturing there, and that you write about in the book. Pretty interesting. Also hearing you talk about the show the other week as a real platform and encapsulation of British music — people at the top of the game. There’s maybe an interesting question around the Britishness of the music. For some people that’s really important. I don’t know whether it’s for Fred again necessarily — he’s British, but he’s winning everywhere, and that level of ambition is cool as well. How much is the British question made into your work? It seems like something you’ve been thinking about particularly recently, but has that always been true?

[45:59] I’m not sure. I think a lot of Brits — or all of us here — we just take these things as normal.

What sort of things are you thinking about?

Just that — you can make music and put it up and share it, and someone could come from out of nowhere. Or there’s an infrastructure for someone to be invested in at the level that Fred again has, or the way that people have committed to Dave. Whereas you go to most places and that’s not the case. We may have an anomaly result, but the fact that we have an industry, we have an ecosystem that allows that to happen, is still a beautiful thing.

In terms of the nationalism part of it, or even using that word makes people feel uncomfortable. I’m like, “Okay, how do you celebrate British greatness, or greatness that is created here, without that?” Why don’t we find ways to use it?

Here’s an easy contradiction I have. I think the way UK rappers use the Union Jack is annoying, because they just have it there with no other explanation of why they use it. They’re like, “Oh, we’re from the UK, so we use the flag. We want you to identify us as different from Americans.” Basically, I think that’s what they use it for. “We are from here.” But it doesn’t matter how the music sounds — it doesn’t sound British. It’s “I’m from Britain.”

Do you think it sounds the same as American, but they just —

It’s just closer. It’s getting interesting — it’s converging closer. Then sometimes, the things that Zakia talks about — people that are making a deliberate effort to filter their influences and say, “Okay, obviously I can make a song that sounds American, or people wouldn’t identify where it could come from. But I’m going to deliberately not do it that way and make it sound British. I’m going to make a jungle tune with the same concept as what I could have made a rap tune with. But it has to be jungle because I’m from here.”

That is something we should take notice of and uplift. And to a degree, it’s like — sometimes with music critics and this kind of stuff, they review and say, “Oh, what is better? Is this song better than another song?” I’m not sure that’s that interesting. I think the direction that the thing is heading is more interesting than necessarily the execution being better.

One of the artists I talk about a lot, Jim Legxacy — people sometimes listen to the music and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I don’t know this song.” I’m like, “I don’t care if you like the song — where is it heading? Is it going in an interesting path?” People heard, say, Dizzee Rascal in ‘01 and they can go, “Oh, this is a pivot.” They might not have liked the song, the mixdown could be different, the thing’s a bit harsh — but it was pivoting away from something that became just hollow. And you’re like, “Oh, okay, cool.” That to me feels more interesting.

And do you think of yourself as — do you feel patriotic?

[49:18] Now I’m having to be, partly because people are taking these things for granted. I will go out, and the ambient music of places that I hear — 50 Cent Just a Lil Bit, or Joe Budden Pump It Up — on these things, in just the fabric of my day. That feels annoying. Something I’ve experienced for the last 20 years. It’s just thoughtless. Thoughtlessness and carelessness from people that should know better.

Some people say, “Oh, it just doesn’t matter. No one’s really listening anyway.” I’m like, “Okay, if no one’s listening, just make a bit of effort to put something there that is either going to put someone onto an information, or it’s going to support someone that’s making good stuff that we can all identify as being like, ‘Oh, these people are making an effort to put new work out in the world.’”

So now I’m like, “Okay, listen to this. Check this new rapper Ceebo, otherwise you’ll just go and listen to Drake again.” I know you’re going to listen to Drake again afterwards, but just listen to this one song. And if people don’t do that, then we just don’t get the new songs, or no one will hear them.

My little bit of difference is to be like — sometimes even just saying “London is great” and people give you all these reasons why it’s not. I’m like, “I know, but it’s still great.”

And just being willing to — you choose the myths that you believe in. Maybe it’s not even a myth, but you choose the truth that you believe in, and which ones you amplify, and which ones you really make some noise around. It kind of goes back to the tall poppy thing. Maybe this is the quintessential British thing — just to be a bit miserly. But it’s like actually, there’s really great stuff here.

[51:08] Exactly. And just not accept everything as normal. Because if you lived in another city in the UK, then you just wouldn’t be getting the same experience.

Sometimes people say, “Oh, where would you move to if you could leave the UK?” And I say, I’m born here. So maybe there is a bias which I’m benefiting from, but I don’t actually want to live anywhere else. People are just like, “Oh, the weather’s better somewhere.” I know. One of the benefits of being in this city is I can go to those places when I want. And I can come back. There’s not a lot of downside for me. Yeah, I’m sure Lisbon’s great. I can just go there and I can come back. That’s one of the benefits of living in this city.

Especially well-moneyed people that live here — I’m like, “Enjoy your money and enjoy the city to the fullest extent.” It’s very different when people are having whatever economic problems, and living conditions are really difficult, and they can’t enjoy the benefits of the city. That is a very different challenge. A lot of my friends and the people in the wider ecosystem I’m part of are shut out from benefiting from the best of the city. Yes, I can go to the O2 and to Alexandra Palace and go to Roller City, Roller Nation. There are fragments of that everyone can enjoy.

When you’re born in a place, you can have this revealed preference of — you care about that place. And maybe you don’t explicitly care about it more than other countries or whatever, but you spend more time there, you have more attention on it. It’s a background thing.

There’s that meme of the guy who’s, I don’t know, it’s a cartoon drawing, he’s sitting back, and then he’s sitting up.

Yep. My favourite.

And there’s a moment I think we’re in, and it’s that — but for patriotism. We sit, as you said, you take things for granted, and then there’s two ways in which it feels like it’s being threatened. One is people just being really thoughtless and not creating space and platform for culture. And then the other side of it is the worst people trying to claim patriotism for something awful and divisive.

It is incumbent on, if you are in the middle of that, to be like, “That’s not what we mean.” And this stuff we need to push back on as well. Asserting a sense of national identity and national purpose.

[53:41] In grime, we used to just call it repping. Repping your ends. Repping where you come from. And that being your sense of pride. That is connected to the land, the nation in some way. For a lot of us, where our parents have come from, and the traditions that follow. But then part of what makes all those things interesting is, okay, we also have a platform to display them.

That is part of our experience here. If we were somewhere else, that would have been pushed out. If you lived in America, you just become American. If you lived in France, you just become French. Here, we get to explore both — being British Jamaican, for example. But understand that’s a privilege in itself. Not being like, “No, I’m just Jamaican.” I’m like, okay, let’s benefit from both sides if we are here.

Hopefully over the next few years, as I explore this as an artist or as a writer in my work, there are going to be times where it feels uncomfortable. And that’s what makes interesting art. If your work, or even the people you are interacting with — you may disagree with them on half the things. But then you agree on these things. Shouldn’t we be trying to overlap, work in some degree?

In the arts and cultural space, the last decade the policy has been to stay away from hard topics. Or people that disagree with some of the bigger things. I don’t want to participate in something that eliminates talking to half of the population. That just feels really silly.

Part of — my work is going to be straddling that creatively. How do you speak to the place that I’m from, the people I’ve come up with, the institutions that have amplified me or supported my work, at the same time as helping that reach new people, or challenging some of the things that I feel are going wrong in the space that I’m in? Or how we can communicate our ideas better to the rest of the country. How more people can benefit from ideas that we share. And vice versa — the things that are going right, or people that are able to communicate ideas well that people are resonating with. What is it about those things that are connecting with people?

One of the hard things I remember during the Brexit debate and the vote and all that kind of stuff is — you never want to be in a position as an institution or as an artist where you call people dumb. If you’re calling the people that surround you stupid, you’ve lost them forever.

Hopefully in the next two, three years, we just make better arguments, a better case for existing — that are not just more accessible work, but work that people can interact with. “If you love music, you should learn how to DJ” is my version of that. Instead of just seeing yourself as an audience member, participate, by collecting, by having your point of view.

Deep Feedback — the podcast that you’ve launched, the way that you talk about it is this post-internet discussion space. What does that mean to you?

[57:12] Deep Feedback is the idea that the only response I’m measuring is an artistic one. If someone says, “Oh yeah, I really like your work” — okay, so what? I don’t care. I want to know what it made you do, or made you think. Not “I listened to it.” If someone says, “Oh, someone released a good album,” I’m like, “Okay, how many people did you text it to? What ticket did you buy to take a friend that had never heard of the artist?”

That is the only feedback that matters. Not “Oh, did you buy it and listen to it by yourself in your headphones?” That is not going to be enough even to move the needle for the artist. They might have made eight pounds on Bandcamp, but actually you telling someone else is the difference between them making sixteen. That is the only thing really worth tracking.

The longer I’ve gone on producing work, and especially out of a very small set of ideas — I’ve got loads of ideas, but a very small set of prompts — it’s, how many different shapes can those take? At the core, the yellow squares, for example — the note series — there’s 20 ideas maybe at best, just bent in different ways. I could make projects out of them. Small, big, significant, insignificant. And then other people can make loads of projects out. That feels like something that is doable, sustainable for me. It’s not costing loads of money. It’s fun.

It’s also not me going down the rabbit hole of having to sell supplements or Athletic Greens or whatever it’s going to be. This is what keeps my autonomy and connects me with the most interesting people possible.

Yeah, man. I’m excited to see where Deep Feedback goes. Thanks man. Thanks for a good conversation.

[59:04] Thank you. The only thing I can hope for the next three years is that the things that I’m part of recognise that it has the power to change something. And I’m a small part of a massive cog of things.

Culture is high leverage.

Yeah.

And there’s a rich seam there.

Thank you. Thanks, man.