Loyle Carner has released ‘Georgetown’, an excellent track which sees the English hip hop musician continue to explore new dimensions to his work. It’s a visceral examination of burning frustration, fear, and anger which mirrors the landscape it maps – a place of isolation, loss, confusion, danger, creativity, defiance, and hope.
Produced by the widely celebrated hip hop producer Madlib, the inventive bricolage of sound harks back to a more old school hip hop tapestry infused with Carner’s knowing meditation as he spits “the streets hot like the Sopranos’ wittily and then ‘“Black like the key on the piano, white like the key on the piano”’ as he explores how his mixed-race identity has shaped his life experiences and journey as a musician.
As with his previous track ‘Hate’, Carner moves beyond the upbeat infectiousness of the Top 3 album Not Waving, But Drowning to tackle with inventive and lazer-like focus both personal and social tensions and the injustices he sees developing around him on both a global and personal scale. ‘Georgetown’ also opens and closes with a sample of the poem “Half-caste” performed and written by the mixed-race Guyanese poet John Agard.
It comes accompanied with a video shot in the titular location in Guyana, South America and is directed by Machine Operated. Watch it below.
In Carner’s words: “John Agard’s poem “Half-caste” had a heavy impact on me. To see someone who was older, that looked like me, sharing a reflection of a similar lived experience made me feel comfortable/proud to not fit in. It kinda gave me the permission to finally write explicitly about being mixed. There’s so much beauty in the gaps in-between, and in some ways this song touches on that. For me, it’s about finding this inner confidence through understanding of self, and spending time back home. It is a representation of finally feeling like one whole person instead of two halves. Also another piece of the MADloyle puzzle. More on the hard drive.”
