This week’s Who We Be TALKS_ episode features English rapper, songwriter, DJ and television personality Big Zuu. New podcast hosts Harry Pinero and Henrie are joined by Big Zuu to talk about the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, filming music videos in Sierra Leone and watching food shows before you eat to make yourself more hungry.
Key exerts from the interview :
- Big Zuu on remembering the Grenfell fire three years later:
- “And then, I got the call like, “Hey bro, there’s a block on fire in the ends.” I’m like, “What?” Looking at the video like, “Rah this is mad.” I’ve never seen something like this in my life. Mandem are calling me, saying, “Ey ye we’re going to go to the block, going to see what we can do.” I’m like, “What you man doing?” Mandem are going to the block, recording it, filming it, taking videos of people getting thrown out and stuff.”
- “It was at that point, I realised that we are so desensitised to trauma, and tragedy, that man are actually watching people die and not realising that you’re recording it. You’re actually snapping someone losing their life.”
- “It was in the aftermath of that, that I saw the community come together. Everyone came together. In Ladbroke Grove, there’s so many different cultures, and different faiths – you’ve got churches, synagogues, mosques, everything.”
- Big Zuu on filming his music video in Sierra Leone:
- “Filming out there was the best thing I’ve done in my life. People look at Africa and Sierra Leone, think it is bare poverty and you can’t do this, can’t do that, can’t film a music video. They had drones and everything. The only thing that was a bit rebore was transferring the footage. Wifi is not the one – transporting 70GBs of data; buying a harddrive and transferring it all to the drive by the boat you take before you go to the airport – we were doing this on the last day because I had to leave early due to Corona. It was 5% left and the boat driver said I had to go, so they had to finish transferring it and send me the hard drive on the next boat so I was waiting there saying, “Please God.”
- Big Zuu on keeping busy during lockdown:
- “I had to do the promo for the TV show. We actually did no promo before lockdown so there’s not even pictures of us. Nothing. And we’re premiering a whole new television programme so we came up with the idea to cook from home. So we did Big Zuu’s Isolation Eats, and one of the videos on Instagram got 1 million views of me cooking a buttermilk chicken burger. And I’m getting rinsed in the comments… People always got something to say. “He didn’t wash the chicken.” Well I did, but I didn’t put it in my video… Learning how to record myself.”
- Big Zuu on his music journey:
- “I just wanted to spit bars on Grime… I’ve just adapted with the times. You have to be fluid in what you can do. I think Jamie Foxx is one of my biggest inspirations… We live in a time where if you’re having fun doing something, you should be allowed to do it.”
Who We Be TALKS_ delivers in-depth insight into the lives of artists, music, culture and everything listeners need to know about the beating heart of Black culture from the people who shape it. The show is recorded on a Monday and drops each Tuesday, making it as timely and reactive as possible. Who We Be TALKS_ is a Spotify Original Podcast within Spotify’s library of thousands of podcasts that are currently available on the world’s leading music streaming platform.
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