Weather that never was: Kae Tempest (Patreon)

Hey, Joseph Fink here. After all these years, I thought it might be fun to share with our patrons some of the weather songs that never were. These are songs that I wanted to feature on the show, but the artist never responded, or said no, or I just never asked because the artist seemed too big to try to contact.

Our first weather that never was is an unusual one. This is Brand New Ancients, by the spoken word poet and rapper Kae Tempest. This is actually the opening to an entire work of spoken word theater of the same name, which I saw live in Brooklyn in maybe 2014 or 2015. 

When a recording of it was released, I reached out to the publisher (it was released as an audiobook, technically) about featuring just this part of it on our show. Their response was that it didn't make sense to them to give away "fully 25% of the finished work for free". This was a confusing answer given that the passage is 4 minutes out of a 90 minute show. Now I'm not a math genius, but I think that isn't quite 25%.

Ah well. I love this piece of poetry/music/theater. Kae Tempest is an extraordinary poet, and here they draw the parallel between the people of ancient myth and the people of our ordinary lives with incredible passion and empathy. If you want more of Kae, here is another poem I love by them, called Pennies.