It is May 2020. I am watching Kae Tempest perform Hold Your Own online. Tempest’s vocal performances are always rich in meaningful detail; from the rising semi-sung sound that embodies all the dreams and potentials of a fallible humanity to the throaty fall that
edges and softens our collapse into foolishness and self-defeat. Slipping between semi-dramatised personae and myriad versions of a shifting self, Tempest rants, preaches, chuckles, snarls, jibes, sobs. Their South East London voicing carries a weight of cultural history, and personal identity. Rapper as well as poet, Tempest’s insolent, abrasive, insistently surging sound is ‘battle-born’, yet they’re equally capable of self- deflation, playful misdirection, and cheeky sleight- of-tongue. Now, though, newly attuned by Covid- 19, primed by weeks of news stories about ventilators and oxygen masks, I find myself fascinated in an unexpected way. This time, I start to watch the artist breathe.