The Streets: please explain.

hilariously ridiculous at first. like el-p but
worse. and 'can he hear the beat?' ehhhh. when
people described it to me i didn't think it would
be so terrible. but it is.

god. i've never really heard anything like this.
reminds me of: el-p but worse, like i said before,
mc hawking, uhhh....

it's pretty bad.

I also agree with Gareth, I like it but don't love it. I'll try to think up some of my own, original thoughts on the next thread...

Angloquestion: what does 'geezer' mean in Britain? Well I can sort of infer from the lyrics, but here it just means old man...Oh, and what does 'bird' mean -- haha just kidding...

The new Streets track on the single is an odd one - a confessional ballad starting off saying that yeah he's fake and not a real geezer and then apologising for claiming to live an exciting life of chip shop fighting. He's so sweet!

As for the Reynold's piece, it's unfortunate how he has to simplify things for his NYT pieces, but it was pretty fair all around. The picture of Skinner made a lady-friend go "Rowr" until I showed her the CD case. He gave So Solid Crew short shrift, but his description of their exact/prissy delivery to American ears was spot on - I played "They Don't Know" to some of my friends and they laughed when the MC says, "I am now about to resort to violence" sounding like an effete bowing butler (to an unawares US audience). Actually that's part of why I, as an American, enjoy listening to them: as a satire of "hard"-ness - much like that old Black Sheep track that spoofs NWA.

Also, who in this bitch was to see him in L.A. tonight!? Ned already dissed him/me to see the Chameleons for like the 4th time this week!

"julius caesar, the roman geezer, squashed his wife with a lemon squeezer"

Saw The Streets twice last week, at their own gig in Sydney and at the Livid festival - on both occasions, he went down extremely well with both the largely nonplussed but undeniably intrigued Aussies, and the wahey-we're-backpackers-and-here's-an-English-lad "get fucked up with the boys" squad.

Skinner's a revelation onstage, bounding about like Eminem crossed with an excitable puppy spliced with Harry Enfield's Kevin The Teenager - he's so young! - conducting the crowd like he can't believe his luck..."oh my god! if I tell these 2000 people to shout 'Easy Mick ya fucker!', they actually DO IT! Amazing!"

The live thing gives the album some much-needed cross-cultural context, cos it's more of a curious English hip-hop revue - there's something kinda vaudevillian about his over-pronunciation and gauche showmanship, and in my head at least, the concept of "Vaudeville Garage/Hip-hop" is a fucking fantastic one.

All up, a bit of a revelation, bathos and wit all wrapped up in lovely skittery beats and a hugely evocative slice of Laahnden life which makes me feel a bit homesick to be honest. I can pick holes in the odd clunky lyric, but I can't fault his flow, his magnetic personality (really) or his musical idiot-savancy - classic classic classic.

Only the 3rd. ;-)

Shit, don't let momus see that!

I remember thinking that the background music would have been better if it had been by Ennio Morricone, meaning not just that Morricone made better music - so did Mozart - but that Skinner was trying to do something that Morricone would have done better. I no longer remember what, though; something about mood and space, I assume.

just as in the late '80s the Dolls and Slade became roots of metal

When did that happen by the way?

He's not fast enough basically - except for "Don't Mug Yourself" obviously - and even there he does his usual trick of rapping against the groove rather than on it; as far as I can tell rapping on the groove is one of the basic tenants of garage MCing, allowing the MC to function as a central rhythmic component of the music. Listen to something like God's Gift's "Mic Tribute" or Maxwell D's "Serious" or So Solid Crew's "2 Dark" or Pay As U Go's "Champagne Dance" - as trippy and complex as the MCs' scatting wordplay gets, it almost always stays on beat.

The conflict you're setting up applies far better to the more representative garage/UK hip hop fusion groups like Fallacy & Fusion and Roll Deep (who ironically count Skinner as a sort-of member) - both of which actually sound like a compromise between MC-flow and "real" rap-flow. Although in truth something like "Champagne Dance" is so close to hip hop-proper already that "hip hop-influenced MC-garage" or vice-versa becomes an increasingly meaningless distinction.

In some strange way, Skinner has more in common with Henry Rollins than with MC Rankin/MC Conrad or Rakim/Guru/Biggie/whatever.

Shit, don't let momus see that!

Dude, I'm there already. In fact, I had to change my new album title. It was going to be called 'The Pirate', but that just took it way too close to 'Original Pirate Material'.

I've now moved on from vaudeville / hip hop (did that 91-98, and liked what someone said upthread about Streets-as-PM Dawn) to vaudeville / musique concrete.

Favourite Streets track: Turn The Page, for the stuff about apprentices and legionaries, and the way the slow strings move behind it all.