The Streets

It seems to me that about once a year, an album comes along that tests everyone’s coolness. To be in, you have to know it, and you have to know it before too many others do. If you don’t, well that’s fine, but really, why am I talking to you?

And people aren’t eager to give it away. We hide music, oddly. It’s a currency rapidly devalued when put into wide circulation. It hardly helps to know about Shuggie Otis now. No, it would have mattered a year ago, two years ago, whenever that specific musical knowledge was known only to those who usually hoard specific musical knowledge. For an album to be valuable to us, you need to hear about it from us. If you already know about it, and have been waiting to check it out, the album is immediately soured in some small way.

We don’t do this with books. People are all too eager to press their favorite books on you. Read this, they say. It will make a great impression on you. Read it and let’s talk about it. We’ll share this book. The greater your appreciation of it, the greater your knowledge, the happier I am.

Not so with music. Perhaps this is because books take obvious work to read. There isn’t much danger that, say, if I go around talking too much about the cachet of the five-volume autobiography of Sir Osbert Sitwell, you’ll pick it up, consume it and be name-checking it at Luxx. But an album? How fast its pleasures come, and how fast they evaporate. There are so many genres to mine, but so little time to bask in self-satisfaction before everyone’s heard it. So the question remains, in regard to this year’s album: How cool are you?

I’m pretty cool. I first heard the Streets’ Original Pirate Material (Vice) back in May, as an import from England, where it was enjoying fawning praise in various music magazines, and gradually engendering a predictable backlash. But I only heard the Streets because a guy I know, who knows these things, made the mistake of inducting me into the, at that time, small cult.

After that, in my excitement, I blew it. I was going on a trip with 10 friends for Memorial Day weekend, and I brought the CD. Further, I played it, to the delight of my friends. When I got back, a rift arose between me and the guy who had introduced me. I heard through a mutual friend that he was angry with me: I had had no right to expose what was, essentially, his. And, for a little while, I did indeed feel guilty, because I knew what it was to know something, and to want to keep that knowledge until it could be used by only me.

So after all this, there’s a little irony in the fact that the main elitist musical choice this season will be a bittersweet, ruminative, slightly immature hiphop album by a young white Englishman named Mike Skinner, who created it in his mother’s Birmingham basement.

It’s hiphop, but not of a form that we’re accustomed to acknowledging as hiphop. It’s hiphop because Skinner doesn’t really sing, and it’s hiphop because Skinner doesn’t play instruments. But to those infatuated with hard hiphop in the style of Def Jux or even Jay-Z, it might sound like dance music with a narrative structure.

For the most part, the production is more repetitive than American-style hiphop. Skinner likes to establish a beat and stick with it. One can picture him setting up the drum machine and then repeatedly trying out verses over it. But the beats are always catchy, and oddly intrusive. The samples are out in front on most of the songs–it must be said that Skinner’s mom has a pretty crisp-sounding basement–and they stick in your head. It’s light and dancey, but hearing this album a lot in the past few months has given me respect for its musical backbone: lines and motifs that should get stale have not. I think the European lack of prejudice about dance music has probably given great life to Skinner’s music.

Over this foundation, Skinner raps in every song, generally, about "a day in the life of a geezer"–the current English slang term for what was, I guess, formerly a bloke–in his earnest, rhythmic Midlands accent. His formula works so wildly well, and comes across so uniquely, that the initial reaction of most people who hear the CD is, "Why hasn’t this been done before?" And it does seem deceptively easy. Establish a beat, throw in a sample and then start rapping about "sex, drugs and on the dole." But it’s the ordinariness of Skinner’s life that, in part, gives the rhymes their effect. Ordinariness crossed, of course, with a lyrical inventiveness that gives birth to great lines that make people imagine they should have thought of them first.

The Streets is not novelty hiphop. That it is not hard does not imply that it is Paul Barman. Skinner keeps it real by keeping it actual. He defines the territory he tackles. "Make yourself at home/We got diesel or some of that home-grown/Sit back in your throne, turn off your phone/’Cause this is our zone/Videos, televisions, 64s, PlayStations/...Few herbs and a bit of Benson/And this is a day in the life of a Geezer/...think I’m ghetto?/Stop dreaming." It’s both considered and off-the-cuff.

There are songs about getting cheated on ("Geezers Need Excitement"), pot (all of them), getting fucked up with your friends in Amsterdam ("Too Much Brandy") and an honestly riveting number about losing your girlfriend on account of being habitually late, called "It’s Too Late." This might be the most affecting song on the album, and the least traditionally hiphop. Swelling strings overshadow the beats, and Skinner rattles off the events of an evening in a demotic, associative tone, with very few stressed syllables. Amid descriptions of putting in his hair gel and calling friends to borrow some money, he slips in a line worthy of a mid-period Bob Dylan, full of humor and self-loathing: "We first met through a shared view/she loved me and I did too."

There’s a naive song about a morning-after, where the protagonist’s friends try to convince him not to call the girl he hooked up with the previous evening, and Skinner demonstrates that he can name-check his cellphone as often as Camp Lo mentions bubbly. In general, the second half of the album is weaker lyrically, though there’s some interesting production, especially in "Who Got the Funk," where there’s an inspiring funk guitar line and Skinner tells us, "this is just a groove." True, but I find it as irresistible as he must have.

That’s followed by a truly dumb song. In "The Irony of it All" we have a completely pat dialogue, in verse of course, between Terry, a jackass who favors getting drunk and hitting people, and quiet Tim, who likes to smoke weed, think and be lame as hell. It’s supposed to be funny and provocative, but it’s not. Well, it’s a little funny when Tim brags of completing Gran Turismo on the highest level.

There is immaturity here, and some faltering steps. The grandly awkward chorus to "Geezers Need Excitement" is "Geezers need excitement. If their lives don’t provide them this, they incite violence. Common sense. Simple common sense." This is said with great authority. But all this can be excused because, frankly, Skinner is stretching an art form. Take this song, "Same Old Thing," in which Skinner describes another Saturday night for a young Englishman without too many prospects: "Whose round is it?/Down that beer quick smash my glass back down fall over the table/All rowdy and pissed/Seems the only difference between mid week shit and weekend shit is/How loud I speak/And whether Itry to pull a girlfriend/That’s it who’s got dough?/Hey you know I’d pay but I’m broke, only got coinage to show/Putting off walking home on my own to my thrown/Two empty takeaways ashtrays and remains of the day stoned/Pick a bottle off the table, peel the label, tell a fable."

This all in a song in which Skinner is interspersing confident interjections: "That’s it! Yeah, oi Street level!" The juxtaposition of honest introspection–the property, in popular music, of rock–with emancipated swagger–the equal and opposite force of hiphop–is, to me, staggering. Ultimately, there’s something forlorn and thrilling about a 23-year-old who performs alone continually name-checking his stage name, as if projecting an audience, and a call and response. Remarkably, he may actualize his audience.

I’d like to avoid grand predictions, but here’s what Skinner could be: a corrosive, mordant Englishman, one of those whose wry insights condemn himself and his audience. So, despite the music collectors and the cool collectors who are embracing this album, and will eventually discard it, it’s a steady keeper that will inevitably suffer from an attack by an instant and rapid culture.

But for now, savor this record, and don’t let the fact that it will shortly be everywhere–courtesy of Vice Records’ branding and credibility–deter you. Coolness moves on eventually, and like a well-scoured beach after a heavy storm, you’ll soon feel unsullied again.