Denzel Curry on police brutality, overcoming trauma and the power of martial arts
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy
Channel 4 News
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2022
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Denzel Curry is an American rapper and artist. He is brutally honest in his music about very personal topics such as his own mental health and his approach to policing and racism in America.
Krishnan talks to Denzel about how he’s overcome trauma, his attitudes towards police brutality and why he thinks the music industry needs to become more collaborative.
Warning: This episode contains very strong language and very adult themes
Produced by: Rachel Evans
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Guru Matthew and this is |
| 0:07.0 | the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives |
| 0:11.3 | and the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week is a very successful rapper |
| 0:16.4 | and artist called Denzel Curry. Now Denzel is a really unusual rapper in that he confronts |
| 0:24.4 | brutally honest and personal topics about his own personal history, mental health, his |
| 0:32.1 | approach to policing and racism in America which is partly formed from the death of his brother |
| 0:39.2 | in 2014 after an encounter with the police. I think one thing that has been said enough is that |
| 0:47.5 | people that aren't people of color see everything that's happening don't say a word they don't |
| 0:53.3 | say anything. They may put in a bio they may do something but they never go out and be like oh |
| 0:58.9 | I'ma go help this person. He's over in this country performing and we're lucky enough to speak |
| 1:04.8 | to him. I think from a pretty noisy hotel lobby but Denzel welcome to Ways to Change the World. |
| 1:11.9 | You've described this new album as a sort of a coming of age becoming a man a maturity to your work. |
| 1:20.0 | Can you just explain what you mean by that? I mean if you listen to my past work because I've |
| 1:24.9 | been in this game for about like 10 years already and I started when I was like you know 16 17 |
| 1:31.3 | years old so when I blew up I was pretty much young I didn't even experience the world yet. |
| 1:37.4 | I experienced the world after I made my first album you know I'm saying so I would say it's |
| 1:42.0 | a coming of age story because I finally made it past 25 and that's when I started working on |
| 1:46.0 | the project for real. I started really just exploring like who I was as a person because that's |
| 1:51.1 | all that stuff I had going for me during lockdown during on quarantine so I had too many distractions |
| 1:57.4 | around me where I couldn't really focus on myself and the moment where everything stopped that's |
| 2:02.2 | when I got the time to like really focus and that's why I call it a coming of age like the |
| 2:06.4 | level of maturity had to present itself and I had to take that like deep dive within myself to |
... |
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