Stormzy breaks silence on Michael Gove tweet: “It’s a weaponised tactic”

"You lot picked the wrong fucking rapper."

Stormzy has spoken out about Michael Gove’s comments on the rapper and subsequent appropriation of his lyrics, calling it a “weaponised tactic”.

After Stormzy publicly backed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party on November 26, Gove said: “I think we again know that Stormzy, when he took to the stage at Glastonbury wearing a stab vest, he made clear what his political views were then. He is a far, far better rapper than he is a political analyst.”

Gove then went on to channel Stormzy in a tweet that backfired on Twitter. “I set trends dem man copy,” Gove tweeted in reply to Labour MP Angela Rayner. The tweet was subsequently ridiculed.

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In a new interview published in today’s issue of The Observer Magazine (December 15), which Stormzy has guest edited, the ‘Vossi Bop’ rapper responded to Gove’s comments and attitude.

“It’s the classic, ‘You’re just a rapper,’” he said in the piece. “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
Stormzy headlining Glastonbury 2019. Credit: Getty

“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.”

Stormzy added he had no concerns about his own intelligence. “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.

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“So when they dismiss me it’s like, ‘You lot picked the wrong fucking rapper.'”

Speaking to BBC Radio 1Xtra, Stormzy said the Conservatives party’s general election victory felt like a “dark cloud”.

“As soon as it hit midnight I was signing albums. But it was like a dark cloud, you could feel it,” he said, describing Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a “sinister man”.

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