The Tris McCall Report
British Inversion, April 11, 2003
Original Pirate Material
My annoying running gag about Mike Skinner -- better known as the voice behind The Streets -- is that he's "Naked Chef" Jamie Oliver in disguise. Okay, their deliveries aren't all that similar, but they've got comparable geeky, pacifist charms, and I get a kick out of putting on a fake British accent and saying things like "geezers need mahi-mahi". Really, it's just an deflection: it irritates me that Skinner has been marketed to Americans as the UK's Eminem. That's to misinterpret Skinner's seriousness as stridency, and his frequent flashes of sympathetic humor as mockery and one-upsmanship. To an American raised on hip-hop values, it's probably easy to make those mistakes, but we don't need the hype machine to exacerbate our tendency to expect aggressive posturing from every new emcee.
Postures and aggressivity have gotten hip-hop far -- our popular culture rewards tough guy tactics as a matter of course. Eminem came up on hip-hop, emerged from an underground hip-hop scene in Detroit, and has worked with one of the most groundbreaking producers in the history of the genre; the form has been good to him, and he has always been willing to return the favor by playing the role of the bad-boy lyrical warrior to the hilt. Skinner, on the other hand, makes his music in his bedroom -- pulling together snatches of musical traditions according to his own inner logic, as if assembling fragments of a dream. He's got no allegiance to hip-hop (and hip-hop certainly demands no allegiance from him), and he has very little interest in conforming to American expectations of how a rapper should present himself. To his credit, he never overreaches, and if Original Pirate Material, his debut, is received here in the birthplace of hip-hop with mystification, at least nobody is going to call this guy a phony.
Americans have always had short patience with British rappers. Hip-hop has always been a fundamental expression of our obsession with individualism -- emcees battle each other for supremacy, put each other down, lock horns and vie to be "King of New York", etc. Brits don't do individualism very well, and when they try, they rapidly discover they don't have the swagger to compete with their stateside peers. Tricky, for instance, still wears the scars from his encounter with the futility of his efforts to sound hard and throw down. Likewise, the most unconvincing moments on Original Pirate Material come when Skinner decides to put up his dukes: "Sharp Darts", otherwise a very good track, feels laughable in the context of twenty-five years of American battle rhymes. His big stop-the-backing-track diss is telling -- "the jury voted unanimously against you", he deadpans. Skinner's condemnation here is typically communitarian. The Streets have not bested their opponent in mano-a-mano combat; rather, a community and subculture, after consideration, have decided to reject the applicant. Skinner isn't the enforcer, he's just delivering the news.
I'm sure I don't have to point out the contrast here to Eminem, who on recent singles has taken rugged American individualism and self-affirmation to extremes not seen since Survivor disbanded. Eminem delivers all of his condemnations and statements personally, never acting as the mouthpiece of a social movement, but rather continually reaffirming his unique position: hit radio is empty without him, anybody who might have been influenced by his style and flow is not part of a coherent stylistic trend but "just imitating", he is "just what he says he is", even when the airwaves won't even cooperate with him. This is not at all to say that Marshall Mathers has turned his back on the hip-hop community or considers himself above it -- his ungenerousness and pugnatiousness is in fact the best expression of his commitment to the culture. An American emcee who failed to manifest the requisite individualism and go-it-alone spirit would be considered a traitor to the exact community he is hypothetically spurning.
It's a paradox you can't really expect the Brits, saddled as they are with endemic ironic detachment, to riddle through. Skinner barely tries -- he's thoroughly European, and several of the best tracks on Original Pirate Material communicate the collective hopelessness and fatalism so characteristic of the continent that witnessed the failure of the social-democratic project. The Streets save the bulk of their contempt not for their battle emcee contemporaries but for peers who refuse to extend sympathy for the less fortunate. On "Stay Positive", in a voice frosty with desolate sarcasm, Skinner addresses a hypothetical listener too self-contented to identify with the desperate characters he's drawn: "If you aren't or never have been at rock bottom, then good luck to you in the big wide world." Just as America's get-rich-or-die-trying emcees refuse to countenance the possibility of falling on hard times -- Eminem's "success is my only fucking option/failure is not" -- Skinner lashes out at the arrogant, brash and confident in the language of class rebellion and thinly-veiled resentment. "Just remember one day shit might start crumbling", he warns, "so if you ain't feeling it, just be thankful everything is cool in your world". These are the sentiments which he chooses to close his debut, and heard in the context of the ongoing debate between American unilateralists and European pacifists, it feels like a portent.
Many will deny that this is hip-hop at all. Even beyond his massive ideological dissimilarity with American emcees, Skinner has no skills -- he rhymes out of time, he's got awful breath control, and he can't maintain a flow for more than a handful of phrases. As an emcee, he's slightly better than the rapping logo in the Pringles commercials, but certainly inferior to Brian Austin Green. But the tyranny of technical proficiency has been an albatross around the neck of hip-hop for the past decade, stifling the careers of artists with gifted poetic (or even prosaic) visions in favor of athletic performers who flow beautifully but have zilch to say. Skinner, a word-portraitist and vivid storyteller, compensates for his lack of hip-hop skills with an intense and immediate address. By the end of the second track on Original Pirate Material, I find myself so engrossed in his comprehensive worldview and minutely-detailed scenarios that I've forgiven him his every technical transgression.
Contrast again with Eminem, a rapper who shoehorns phrase after internally-rhymed phrase into strict rhythmic meters that often become wearying in their precision. Skinner's relaxed approach couldn't win him a lyrical battle against Mike Bloomberg, but it does neatly remove the athletic and competitive component from his version of hip-hop, and clear space for the narrative writing that is his forte. In his willingness to sacrifice his relationship to the backbeat and any claim he might stake to performative competence to the demands of his own verbosity, Skinner most frequently recalls the early Boss of Greetings From Asbury Park. The more closely I engage with Original Pirate Material, the more convinced I am that the Streets are not Britain's answer to Marshall Mathers, but rather its own homegrown version of Springsteen circa 1975.
It's a cross-genre comparison, sure, and one liable to raise rankles among the Freehold faithful: Springsteen, after all, was a singer and guitar rocker, Skinner raps, and melds together canned synthesizer loops and samples. But the many who only know the Boss from the relatively economical Born In The U.S.A. and Nebraska albums don't immediately recognize how impossibly wordy he was at the beginning of his career, and how complex and involved his early narratives were. Had hip-hop existed in 1975, it's virtually impossible for me to imagine that the young Springsteen wouldn't have tried his hand at it. The enterprise on the great Greetings From Asbury Park and the world-historic Wild, The Innocent, And The E Street Shuffle was to cram as much verbiage into a pop song as it could possibly carry, and to allow the musical choices to be dictated by the dramatic demands of the lyrics. That's a job for hip-hop, and the absorptive and protean teenage Springsteen would have gravitated toward it as an unparalleled medium for his dense storytelling.
Mike Skinner is obviously attracted to hip-hop for similar reasons; not as an arena to show and prove, but as a rapidly-moving platform for the conveyance of his ideas and stories. Both the Springsteen of E Street Shuffle and Skinner detail the minutia of their urban surroundings with a commitment to verite that borders on the obsessive. Both represent cities in decay that stand in close relation to a major metropolis, but draw narrators who feel imprisoned within their lives and unable to grasp those cosmopolitan virtues: "apparently there's a whole world out there", Skinner mutters on "Same Old Thing", "I just don't see it". Original Pirate Material uses the rave precisely as Springsteen employed the carnival and boardwalk scenes of Asbury Park in songs like "4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" -- both phenomena are shown as romantic, pathetic, oddly doomed, a desperate vestige and a release from the round of intoxication, sudden danger and boredom of humdrum lives, but capable of transforming the "weak into heroes" through collective participation in a subculture. Skinner retraces Springsteen's examinations of the blurry line between celebratory and criminal activity, and he does so with a familiar landslide of associations and impressions, one piled atop another, of nights out, days in, dangerous recreation and recreational danger. Thirty years have passed, and Playstations have replaced amusement parks, but the same spectres stalk the back alleys and bedrooms of the young and the aimless.
Most of all, Skinner, like Springsteen circa '75, is obsessed with his young male peers -- he calls them "geezers", and at times on Original Pirate Material, it feels as though geezers are his only concern. He strives not to stand out but to fit in, and he's constantly worried that his hyperarticulateness and overall geekiness will deny him membership: "street geezers, accept me as your own" he entreats in "Who Dares Wins", "I just ain't a clone/still got the monsta boy ring tone". Geezers, like Springsteen's boardwalk crawlers, are congenitally competitive and threatening, locking horns for want of anything better to do, looking for a channel for their explosive energy. Skinner is content to play the role of the peacemaker, talking combatants off the ledge in "Geezers Need Excitement", but his are words of caution from a position of deep understanding and sympathy. The narrator passionately loves these guys, right down to their pugnatious attitude, and he ratifies their code of honor: "stare at the geezers so they know you ain't lightweight", he matter-of-factly advises his audience. Violence may be the natural consequence of an excess of misdirected energy, but while The Streets make no excuses for bad behavior, it's clear that Skinner would never betray his set.
Women are another matter entirely. To the young Boss, the girls imprisoned in the man's world were either strumpets or lost souls; they offered a romantic escape for the narrator, but always seemed on the verge of being swallowed by the shadows of the carnival tents. Skinner's female characters are frequently situated as Springsteen's were, but to his credit, he takes a more realistic view. Indeed, one of the most refreshing things about Original Pirate Material is its surprisingly thoughtful treatment of women (or "birds", the analog to "geezers"). Skinner bucks longstanding hip-hop tradition by refusing to duck the nasty consequences of living in a subculture dominated by male energy and boys' priorities. On "It's Too Late", the devastating, rain-washed masterpiece that centers the record, the narrator loses his "fair female" by neglect, his good intentions drowned by the demands of his social circle. "Mate bells me to borrow money, I've got two Henrys and a dealer to pay", he sincerely apologizes, but he also realizes that "sorry babe, had to meet a mate" isn't going to cut it. Other characters unsuccessfully tempt fate, too -- in "Geezers Need Excitement", a cheating boyfriend gets his comeuppance when he stumbles upon his bird making out with another geezer in a smoky club. Skinner acknowledges the impulse toward vengeance "football fan-style", but urges self-examination rather than aggressive action. "Don't listen to them voices", he cautions, "even as they smile, you still got choices/at the end of the day, you may just have caused this." (Imagine 50 Cent saying something like that.)
See, Skinner doesn't want to transform the geezers or even lead them -- he loves and admires them too much for that -- he just wants to encourage them to think harder. Like Springsteen, his first instinct is communitarian: he's not a figure projected out of the underground, he's a voice willingly subsumed within it; one light among the many shining from the bedroom windows of the dismal-looking tower block on the cover of Original Pirate Material. His occasionally brutal candor should not be taken as a call-to-arms or even an urge towards transformation; if he's hot about anything, it's the arrogance behind thoughtless action and careless individualism. No surprise, then, that The Streets have found an audience among ambivalent Europeans, deeply disturbed by recent world events and arguments about their own encroaching irrelevance.
Everything you need to know about the transatlantic rift can be determine by contrasting Original Pirate Material to a standard-issue American hip-hop album. I originally felt that 2003 would be the year of the geezer -- that The Streets would take America by storm, and send a welcome shockwave through a beat music scene that, quite frankly, has seen better days. Now, I'm not so sure. The ease with which our armed forces dispatched the Republican Guard was certainly a relief to those of us who feared a protracted and costly war, but it sure wasn't the sort of victory that encourages reflection. And it's also pretty certain that Europeans aren't feeling much better about American triumphalism today than they were a few months ago, when they were doing everything they possibly could to deter our march to Baghdad. I thought Original Pirate Material would be the album to shatter the cultural embargo on all things European, but instead it may turn out to be the one that illustrates just how wide and unbreachable the divide currently is.
And with his earnest anti-war stance and social-democratic tendencies on courageous display, Bruce Springsteen ain't currently selling records stateside, either.
There's no excuses, my friend. Push things forward.