After Stormzy backed Labour in the UK general election, frog-faced Conservative politician Michael Gove described the grime star as “a far, far better rapper than he is a political analyst” during an interview with Talk Radio. When Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner jokingly said that “Michael Gove is crap at both”, Gove responded by tweeting Stormzy’s lyrics: “I set trends dem man copy.”
Stormzy has now responded to Gove, and didn’t mince his words. Speaking to the Observer Magazine, which Stormzy was acting as a guest editor for, he said: “You lot picked the wrong fucking rapper.”
“It’s the classic, ‘You’re just a rapper.’ Using ‘I set trends dem man copy’... No one was talking about that. I wasn’t talking about music, I wasn’t talking about ‘Shut Up’ – I was talking about politics. So him saying that is like he said: ‘Oh, no, forget politics. This is what he does. He’s a rapper.’ It’s a weaponised tactic,” Stormzy said.
“They do it to young people, they do it to black people, they do it to rappers, they do it to entertainers: ‘Just shut up and rap.’ Stay in your lane. It’s very telling of who these people are. As much as I’m a rapper, I’ve also done X, Y, Z. But they’re dismissing everything else. They just look at me and say: ‘No.’ They reduce us to whatever they need us to be and dismiss it.”
“So when they dismiss me it’s like, ‘You lot picked the wrong fucking rapper.’”
Listen to Stormzy’s new album Heavy is the Head below.
