The Streets “A Grand Don’t Come For Free” (2004)
To my mind The Streets are punk. What I mean by that is that punk rock took music, stripped the “you need to be a trained musician” requirement, replaced it with an “anyone can do it” ethos and brought it down to the street level. Likewise, plenty of Brits were hip-hop fans, being wowed by the vocal prowess of rappers but not necessarily feeling a connection with stories of street murders, gangstas etc.
Mike Skinner’s musical project the Streets gave his listeners stories of trying to return a DVD in “It Was Supposed to be so Easy”, gambling (badly) “Not Addicted”, looking for a romantic connection at the bar “Could Well be in”, or of finding someone attractive but being put off by the fact that they are well aware of their looks “Fit But You Know it”.
As well as the ‘real’ subject matter, Skinner's delivery is not really
mile-a-minute spitting, nor does he have the smoothest flow. He almost
sounds like a quietly amused bloke who's wandered onto the stage at a
karaoke bar. I mean what other rapper could get away with a cracker of
a line like "This night's not even begun, yes, yes, oh yay". There's a
narrative running through the songs which I vaguely picked up on.
Still not always my cup of tea, I tend to prefer slightly more obscure
or 'wordplay' sorts of lyrics rather than this wave of "I like it
because they're talking about things we all know about" artists. I do
like some of his stuff though, and I can hear why others would too.
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