The Streets
w/the Fitness, DJ VSOP
Sat March 15, Chop Suey, 9 pm, $14 adv.
My deep, abiding, life-altering passion for hiphop only lasted about 36 months, between ages 16 and 19. Like most passions, it’s marked in memory by powerful boundaries, beginning with the first time I heard N.W.A.’s epochal Straight Outta Compton (1989, a year after it came out) and ending a week or so after I bought Boogie Down Productions’ miserable Sex and Violence (1992).
Needless to say, in the decade since KRS-One let me down, rap has become the unquestionable dominator of popular music, outpacing rock for general relevance (and everything else for sheer power). It’s not like I’ve ignored it since then–it’s not like I could, even if I wanted to. It’s just that mainstream hiphop’s increasing cultural currency has, with a few exceptions, made for increasingly predictable, uninspiring music, and the job of keeping up with the slang and attitudes has become less rewarding as hiphop subculture has moved closer and closer to the center of culture.
All of which is why, when I hear a hiphop record I really like, I feel like a teenager again. And white-bread though it may be to admit, the Streets’ Original Pirate Material has me digging through my tape crates, looking for all the old favorites.
As with any hiphop made by white folks, Original Pirate Material carries all the question marks of authenticity and culture-plundering. What makes the album so exciting, aside from its catchiness, energy, and youth, is the fact that it looks right in the face of those question marks and offers a resounding “Oi!”
The Streets is one Mike Skinner, a 24-year-old white boy from Birmingham, a town that sits squarely in the center of England. His flow is unlikely and incessant, his rhymes obsessive and internal, and the whole show turns on the unrivaled sonic opiate of Skinner’s thick British accent delivering lines like “Stop tryin’ to shag the birds and fight the geezers.” Not exactly the blueprint of hiphop. Or is it?
“I think it doesn’t matter where any music comes from,” Skinner posits, on the phone from New York. “People get into it. I dunno. I think people who are really into rap music, they’re into it because they really like the rap attitude and artists from that background, really. And I don’t really represent that–even though it’s hiphop, it doesn’t really fit with maybe the beliefs of what people want to hear from hiphop.”
But clearly, people do want to hear it. Original Pirate Material is selling tons of records and winning awards and acclaim from the very people (i.e., rockers) who seem the most likely to dismiss it. Maybe the Streets’ appeal–unlike the appeal of some of the better-known exponents of white hiphop (Eminem and the Beasties, say)–lies in bringing something new to the table rather than just imitating a predominantly black lifestyle. Skinner raps about nights at the pub, riffs on the disjunction between alcohol and marijuana laws, and drops phrases like “Mine’s a Kronenbourg, mate.” Thug life, innit?
“I’ve come to realize that a lot of that is glamorized anyway,” Skinner offers. “Not as much of it is reality as I’d once thought. All I was doing was really just trying to make the UK equivalent, and trying to be as real as I could, so there wasn’t going to be any comeback. So I could always be confident.”
Talking to Skinner on the phone is a bit like listening to him on record. His accent is thick–like “fick”–and pleasing in the same way that, say, watching a Ray Winstone film is pleasing. Even if he weren’t saying much, you’d still want to hear him talk. I’d read on his website that he started off as a bit of an indie rocker–the live lineup includes drums, bass, keyboards, and a singer, in addition to the man himself–so I ask how and when he got started making beats.
“I’ve always been making tunes,” he says, seemingly wary of the idea that rock and hiphop are mutually exclusive. “Always. What I ended up doing was a result of what I was listening to.” That meant Wu-Tang, Redman, early Dre, and the onset of UK garage beats, all of which Skinner deems “obvious, really,” before adding that in England (“maybe less so here”), it’s not unusual for kids to be into a multitude of music.
“Even though hiphop is a certain kind of people, everyone’s familiar with it,” Skinner adds. “It’s the most highly selling form of music on the earth, innit, really? It’s not like people outside of that don’t know hiphop really well. I was into hiphop [when] I was really young. I mean, I’ve been into loads of things.”
Thankfully, all those things have come together to make the kind of hiphop even a jaded old fucker can love. I may not know what his phrases like “least actual” or “paraletic” mean, but I do know that if the Streets is driving this stylistic synthesis, I’m a very willing passenger.
