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(Photography: Jordan Huie)

With Channel 4's highly publicised Street Summer season about to begin, SceneTV caught up with Lawrence Lartey, Associate Producer on 'How Hip Hop Changed the World', which airs this Friday (12th August) at 10.25pm.

To begin, can you tell us a little bit about your career background?

I started off as a print journalist. Back at school I liked media studies; that’s what I studied at university covering all the disciplines including journalism, video production and marketing. With journalism, while I’m not the best writer, I just had a passion for it. I then got into music journalism just because I love music really – I can’t sing, I can’t play an instrument so I guess what I could do well was write about it!

Which publications have you written for?

I’ve written for the Guardian, the Daily Record in Scotland, London Paper, Now Magazine, Music Week, Mixmag – quite a few, but I started out at Touch Magazine and for me that’s probably what I’m most proud of. Touch Magazine was started by a guy called Jaimie D’Cruz; he now has a production company which produced Exit Through The Gift Shop which is also part of the Street Summer season. I’ve known him for about 15 plus years now and basically, I bugged him to let me write for Touch and it took about a year before anyone in the magazine got back to me! So for me, this is what I’m proud of because I went from work experience at Touch, to a contributor, to a contributing editor. From there, it led on to other more mainstream and national publications.

The documentary ‘How Hip Hop Changed the World’ is airing on Friday 12^th August on Channel 4 and is presented by Idris Elba; how would you sum up the documentary in a couple of sentences?

Basically it’s looking at Hip Hop and how it has infiltrated mainstream culture; from fashion to music, politics, economics. It’s looking at Hip Hop and its impact on the world.

Time to name drop! Who will we see being featured in the documentary giving their comments and perspectives on the topic?

Well, from the UK front you have So Solid Crew, Roll Deep, Goldie, Jessie J, Professor Green, Tinchy Stryder. Then you’ll see the American heavy hitters like Nas, Rakim, will.i.am, Damien Marley and Snoop Dogg. Then there are people like MK Asante, who is an amazing author, scholar and film producer. He’s written a book called ‘It’s Bigger than Hip Hop’ and made a documentary with Maya Angelou. People like Kevin Liles who used to be the President of Def Jam and helped run Barack Obama’s campaign – he got all of the music people involved, which was a really important moment. Then people like Cookie Pryce from the Cookie Crew; so it’s a good mix and that’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to reflect the mix of people not just the usual suspects.

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I recently attended a two day media conference - The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit which looked at both the opportunities and challenges that we face in an ever-changing media industry.

There were a number of high profile movers and shakers in the room and speakers and panels included the likes of Adam Crozier -CEO of ITV, Gino Fisanotti – Director of Marketing for Nike, Tim Armstrong -CEO of AOL and Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post.

I personally wanted to hear from the perspective of how technology and digital is going to continue to change the way we consume television content. Yes there are catch-up TV services but what is to come for user generated content? Technology and the online space enables people to produce content reflective of their own point of view as well as seek content that they want to watch but fail to receive from mainstream TV channels. So what are the opportunities and challenges here?

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