Interview: Potent Whisper (@PotentOfficial) On Empowering The Community Through Hip Hop

Lon­don based Hip Hop hero, Potent Whis­per bridges the gap between the struggle and the plat­form of hip hop cul­ture. He reaches par­tic­u­lar the UK youth cul­ture and he has inves­ted him­self and his con­tin­ued encour­age­ment in a wider hip hop and soci­opol­it­ic­al move­ment that has res­on­ated with him and helped him rep­res­ent him­self and his com­munity in a com­munity cohes­ive way.

I Am Hip Hop catches up with Potent Whis­per; in this inter­view we find out what his latest man­ou­vres have been in the scene and the beau­ti­ful col­lab­or­a­tions he has been involved with. Potent tells us, ‘For many of us Hip Hop has served as an intro­duc­tion to a new ver­sion of ourselves.’ We also get the low down on how gentri­fic­a­tion is tak­ing over our com­munit­ies. I Am Hip Hop is proud to present this inter­view and we all look for­ward to more from Potent Whis­per in the future!

Tell us a bit about what you’ve been doing recently? What are you involved in?

The past year has prob­ably been my busiest to date. Artist­ic­ally, I’ve been work­ing on a lot of new material:

- A short film ‘What You Say­ing?’, writ­ten in rhyme and delivered in sign lan­guage. (Star­ring BSL act­ress Vilma Jackson)

- A short film ‘The House of Palestine’ which explores Israel’s immoral/ illeg­al occu­pa­tion of Palestine (Filmed by Glob­al Faction)

- A Spoken Word series ‘The Rhym­ing Guide to Hous­ing’ which explores the hous­ing crisis

- A Grime EP ‘Deep Cutz’. (An aggress­ive attack on the Con­ser­vat­ive gov­ern­ment, spe­cific­ally with­in the con­text of austerity)

- A Hip Hop EP ‘Songs from Below’ (ft. MOBO award win­ner Fola Philip)

- A Spoken Word series ‘A Call to Arts’ which explores the power/ import­ance of art in soci­ety. (Filmed at The BRIT School with Ken McGill)

- An EP with Elec­tric-Harp­ist ‘Maria-Christina & The 7 Ped­als’. Tom Robin­son just played our début single ‘NOW’ on BBC Radio 6.

I’ve been work­ing hard! In fact, I could really use a manager…

Things have also been busy in the com­munity. I’ve been work­ing closely with traders at the Brix­ton Arches, in their fight against Net­work Rail. (Tweet @SaveBrixton for more) I also co-lead an anti-gentri­fic­a­tion cam­paign called ‘Our Brix­ton’. We aim to sup­port loc­al hous­ing cam­paigns by fus­ing art with dir­ect action. Most recently, some of our young mem­bers wrote a song about hous­ing entitled ‘Make a Change’. We went on to work with them to organ­ize a ‘Youth March for Hous­ing’ — in col­lab­or­a­tion with South Lon­don RCG — where Glob­al Fac­tion shot the Music Video for their song. I’d love you to check it out!

[youtube]https://youtu.be/HTJuVJDWOQA[/youtube]

What is the mes­sage behind your track ‘NOW’?

It’s basic­ally a call to arms. It aims to agit­ate people and high­light the need for urgency.

Music­ally the single is a fusion of Harp and Rap; polit­ic­ally respons­ive lyr­i­cism set to the exper­i­ment­al — non romantic — sounds of the Elec­tric Harp. After hear­ing the single, a review­er asked me how many musi­cians fea­ture on the track and I had to explain that it’s just the two of us. Every sound that you hear on the track was played by Maria-Christina. She has a hun­dred and one dif­fer­ent ways to manip­u­late her Harp, she’s a real innov­at­or in that respect. http://www.mcandthe7pedals.com/

You can down­load ‘NOW’ via Amazon or iTunes. 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W‑tK1EuvAt8[/youtube]

What do you think Hip Hop does at it’s best?

In 2012 I was hon­oured to have made a release with Congo Natty, in which he stated “Hip Hop saved my soul”. I think many of us feel the same way. Hip Hop is not simply an amal­gam­a­tion of art forms/ skills, for many of us Hip Hop has served as an intro­duc­tion to a new ver­sion of ourselves; a win­dow of oppor­tun­ity to self real­iz­a­tion, new inform­a­tion, self empower­ment and pur­pose. That was cer­tainly the case for me.

But bey­ond empower­ing indi­vidu­als, Hip Hop can also empowers com­munit­ies. I think one of the main ways it does this, is by cre­at­ing space. A space for people to come togeth­er… to meet each oth­er… to share our human­ity… to cel­eb­rate our joys, to entrust our vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies… to listen to each oth­er… to teach each oth­er… and to love each oth­er. Amongst the heavy cloud of pro­pa­ganda that is the main­stream media, deep with­in the indi­vidu­al­ist­ic ideo­logy of a con­sumer­ist soci­ety, in a land where big cor­por­a­tions can pur­chase, deface and devalue entire schools of thought, Hip Hop provides an inde­pend­ent plat­form for a true voice, a space for us to find ourselves, to know each oth­er and rise together.

How does gentri­fic­a­tion affect the work­ing class?

Well, let’s look at Brix­ton. Not so many years ago, a prop­erty in Brix­ton would have been worth next to noth­ing. Lit­er­ally. It was­n’t con­sidered a desir­able place to live. Over dec­ades, a work­ing class com­munity built the area up into one that was truly vibrant; cul­tur­ally rich and eco­nom­ic­ally thriv­ing. The social and eco­nom­ic value that work­ing class people gave to Brix­ton began to attract a lot of middle/ upper-middle class people and sud­denly, swarms of wealthy people all began to gal­lop towards Brix­ton with a cheque book in one hand and a Star­bucks in the other.

When large num­bers of wealthy people decide that they want to move into an area, a few dif­fer­ent things hap­pen. Firstly, land and prop­erty prices increase dra­mat­ic­ally. Land­lords real­ize that they can now get a lot more money for their prop­er­ties and they increase rent prices by up to 300%. Of course, work­ing class people who are already liv­ing in these prop­er­ties are not able to pay the new rent prices and they are made homeless/ forced to move out of Lon­don to clear the way for their land­lords’ new wealthy ten­ants. This of course means that people don’t only lose their homes, but their jobs, their chil­dren’s school places, their friends and their life.

Rent increases also dev­ast­ate loc­al traders and shop own­ers, who are forced out of busi­ness because they can­’t afford the new rents.The only small chance that inde­pend­ent traders have to stay is business/ sur­vive is to re-brand and start selling com­pletely dif­fer­ent products, which cater to their new wealth­i­er cli­entèle. This in turn means that the ori­gin­al com­munit­ies who lived in Brix­ton, before this new ‘Rich Rush’ era, are now no longer able to access/ pur­chase the products that they want and need. But not all of the effects of gentri­fic­a­tion are so vis­ible or talked about. Con­sider the fam­il­ies who man­age to stay in the area, who are now barely able to afford to sur­vive because of the cost of liv­ing. Con­sider the young man who see’s his mum cry­ing every day because they have no money, how­ever hard they work. The young man who sells a bit of weed to help his mum pay the bills. Well… these new people mov­ing into the area don’t smoke weed, they prefer to sniff coke. So the cli­entèle changes in this mar­ket too, and people are forced to take big­ger risks; just to sur­vive. There’s so many angles to it… but in a nut­shell, gentrification/ greedy landlords/ cor­rupt coun­cils are tear­ing whole com­munit­ies apart, mak­ing thou­sands of people home­less and ruin­ing lives. @OurBrixton

What are your plans for the near future? And what can we expect from Potent Whisper?

I’ll be con­tinu­ing to build in the com­munity and pro­du­cing more art that serves our struggles. There will be a lot of it — very soon! @PotentOfficial | www.potentwhisper.com