Unfortunately, this would be the last new music from Johnson until 1991's Tings an' Times, which proved yet again that regardless of how much time he takes off from music, when LKJ returns, it's as if he's never missed a beat. Yeah, those guys were a big influence. Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds (Principal Investigator: Professor Elleke Boehmer, Postdoctoral Research Fellow: Dr Erica Lombard) is an initiative of the University of Oxford Faculty of English Language and Literature, supported by the John Fell Oxford University Press (OUP) Research Fund. The programs, entitled From Mento to Lovers Rock, were more than just musical history; Johnson contextualized Jamaican music socially and politically and offered a more nuanced and thorough examination of the popular music of his native and adopted countries.Johnson returned to the pop music scene in 1984 with perhaps his best record, Making History.

And a lot of black youth who weren’t so much into reggae, because they wanted to distance themselves as a second generation from the roots of their parents.

After his parents’ divorce, Johnson was raised by his grandmother. Living in Brixton, South London, LKJ was Well, I really don’t know how to characterize that period because it was a period of intense class struggle, class struggle and the racial dimension of that was important. White South Africans have never really had to look in the proverbial mirror and reflect on where they come from, and how their histories have shaped their current realities, which inform their sense of belonging, shame, and entitlement. All that I know is that I came to politics, I came to poetry through politics. Things are about to get even worse.

Johnson projected the feeling that, despite the prevailing circumstances of dread, no situation was static and that genuine social change was not only desirable but necessary and also possible. And our leader was a remarkable woman called Althea Jones-Lecointe who is a consultant gynecologist or something now in some big hospital.

Stream it live on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, or subscribe to our Patreon for the podcast archive. See our updated Privacy Policy to find out more about cookies and how we use your data. Upon receiving the Golden PEN Award in 2012, Linton Kwesi Johnson emphasized in his acceptance speech that he saw himself as a child of the Caribbean Artist Movement (CAM), ‘a movement that sought to create an alternative Caribbean aesthetic to the dominant colonizing canon of English literature, an independent aesthetic rooted in the history, culture, languages, and oral tradition of the Caribbean peoples’.

I don’t know, I haven’t got a clue. Slowly the emergence of a black middle class that was nurtured by the Tory government under something called the intercity partnership lead by a man called Michael Heseltine who was the minister at the Department of the Environment. And when Bob Marley sang about “Concrete Jungle,” we could identify with that concrete jungle. Dread and destitute times can anticipate betters days ahead. He’s writing a song maybe about a personal grievance but it’s couched in the language of politics. We have our own concrete jungles here in Britain and London, in Manchester and Birmingham and so on and so forth. In this interview, the originator of dub poetry talks the role of culture in politics; antiracist and class struggle in the UK as well as the importance of a wide range of figures from Althea Jones-Lacointe and C.L.R. This outlines how and why we collect, store and use your personal data when you use our website. Bob Marley was a deeply, deeply spiritual person, there’s no doubt about that. In fact, is was his second release, Forces of Victory, where his mix of politics and music united to stunning effect. So there was generated greater interest in reggae music.

It is cynically unpolitical, and it’s all bullshit. I don’t know how the Black Panthers actually started because I joined relatively late but it was an African brother called Obi Egbuna who started it. Drawing from the Bible, reggae and Rastafari, and surrealism, socialism and feminism, and in dialogue with Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. People like Martin Luther King came to this country and visited. I remember seeing footage one time of James Baldwin coming here in 1968 speaking at the West Indian Center. So he was someone who at least amongst the political classes, they felt that he had a … He commanded a tremendous amount of respect amongst the masses and he had clout amongst the masses and whoever had him in their corner had a big advantage. Eliot goes as far as to suggest that not only may the reader’s interpretation of a given poem differ considerably form the poet’s, but that this interpretation may be both ‘equally valid’ or ‘may even be better’ than the author’s, and in some instances might provide poets with insight into their own work. What were the conditions like in the 1960s and 70s for black Britons?

I can’t remember all of them but our membership but our presence was greater than our membership. Johnson was also instrumental (with his friend Darcus Howe) in the publication of a socialist-oriented London-based newspaper, Race Today, that offered him and other like-minded Britons, both black and white, an outlet to discuss the racial issues that, under Margaret Thatcher's reign, seemed to be tearing the country apart. How Rwandan history is told—and who does the telling—is important as it determines who is able to participate in conversations about the past. We have recently updated our Privacy Policy. But I became great friends of Amiri Baraka who is coming out of that blues, jazz tradition.