hip-hop

Kae Tempest

1 festival played

London poet, playwright and novelist who raps as an extension of the page — dense narrative verse delivered with the cadence of spoken word rather than bars.

Kae Tempest is a writer and performer from south London who works across poetry, theatre, fiction and recorded music. Tempest came up through spoken word and slam performance before moving into records, and the writing carries across all of those forms, with long-form narrative and recurring characters rather than conventional verse-chorus structures.

On record, Tempest's delivery sits closer to recitation than to rap phrasing, set against spare electronic production. The work tends toward contemporary British social observation, and Tempest has also published poetry collections, plays and a novel alongside the albums.

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