At Street Level
One look at the ugly, faceless, concrete, low-income apartment building on the cover of Original Pirate Material should give you an indication of where Mike Skinner comes from, and what he's trying to get across on the record. Architectural eyesores like these (and hey, they're everywhere, not just Britain) seem to warrant nothing more than a passing glance, but when you start to stare at the dozens of illuminated windows, you soon become aware of all the different lives intertwining in the building, all the stories, be they dismal or happy, desperate or mundane. Mike Skinner's story is just one of them, and his remarkable homemade debut, under the moniker The Streets, makes it one you won't soon forget.
A self-described "day in the life of a geezer", Original Pirate Material, to put it plainly, is the most vivid evocation of life as a young person in the UK since Blur's Parklife, and yes, even The Clash's first album. Skinner also manages to paint the most lucid, dryly humorous portrait of lower-class life since Pulp's Different Class; his tale of one "geezer"'s struggle for identity, for redemption also brings to mind the films of Mike Leigh (most notably High Hopes and Naked), and even Irvine Welsh's novels Trainspotting and Glue. It sounds like a hip-hop album but it's not, it sounds like two-step but not, spoken word, but not. Combining elements of UK Garage, rap braggadocio, touches of punk, R&B, ska, and even a hint of Beat poetry (whether he knows it or not), this 22-year-old Birmingham native has come from out of nowhere and given us a record with undeniable power and imagination.
"Brace yourself, cos this goes deep," warns Skinner in the opening track, "Turn the Page". Utilizing a simple, yet memorably nifty strings sample, his tone is more conversational than someone merely spouting rhymes. The song works as an overture for the rest of the album, as Skinner describes a scenario that's part fantasy and part prophetic, hinting that the lower ranks have more fortitude than the upperclasses think, despite the increasingly trying times ("It's a fine line between strife or crime"). The breezy tones of "Has It Come To This?", with its light, two-step rhythm and soulful vocal samples contradict with the subject matter, namely a snapshot of early-20's malaise during a brutally hot summer: we visualize Playstations, weed, and restless young people, or as Skinner aptly puts it, "Sex, drugs, 'n' on the dole" and "Deep-seated urban decay". He continues with some knockout lines, like, "I step out my yard through the streets / In the dead heat all I got's my spirit and my beats."
The dub-infused "Let's Push Things Forward" is the album's boldest track, as Skinner performs a similar meshing of genres as The Clash accomplished on their Sandinista! album, while he dares to challenge listeners to exercise more good taste in their musical choices: "You say that everything sounds the same / Then you go buy them / There's no excuses my friend / Let's push things forward." It's a ballsy thing to say, but Skinner backs up his statement; he does push things forward, just as The Clash did on songs like "The Magnificent Seven" and "Mensforth Hill", combining the raw, bass-heavy, Jamaican characteristics of dub with his own form of UK Garage: "This ain't your typical Garage joint / I make points which hold significance / That ain't a bag it's shipment / This ain't a track it's a movement." Aware of the influence the band has on his own song, he even throws in a quick nod to The Clash, saying, "As London Bridge burns down, Brixton's burning up / Turns out your in luck."
"Same Old Thing" and "Geezers Need Excitement" vividly describe the mind-numbing routine of nightly pub life ("Real people, same repeated sequel"), and one's desire for something, anything to happen. "Same Old Thing" uses more of a techno accompaniment and stuttering beats to back up Skinner's perceptive lyrics, such as, "Seems the only difference between mid week shit and weekend is how loud I speak." The excellent, foreboding "Geezers Need Excitement" ("If their lives don't provide them this they incite violence") depicts the rage that's always bubbling below the surface in young males, as the eerily minimal music hints at something rather nasty lurking, waiting to be let loose. Skinner's word sketch of a café brawl erupting is nothing short of potent: "Geezers looking ordinary and a few looking leery / Chips fly round the sound of the latest chart entry / An incendiary waiting to blast . . . Behind the counter they look nervous, but / Carry on cutting the finest cuts of chicken from the big spinning stick / Then over flies a chip, flips, and hits you on the back / You spin round on the attack / 'Fuck you playing at?'"
The surprisingly lush and catchy "It's Too Late" offers up another facet of an everyday bloke's life: girl trouble. Combining the sweetly honest sentiment of a regular guy with touches of gentle humor ("We first met through a shared view, she loved me and I did too"), the song is a startling change in mood from the two menacing tracks that precede it. Skinner's character displays an introspective, positively wide-eyed view that differs tremendously from all the posturing among his male characters: "Standing at the top of this huge mountain, smiling and shouting / Spring flowers sprouting, not one inch of doubt in my mind as I reached the gates." When he lets his girl slip away, the lyrics are heartbreaking, as Skinner says, "She'd walked away, too little too late / I step up the pace, walk past the gates, rain runs over my face / Spirit falls from grace." Of course, our hero ultimately drowns his sorrows, and the booze-and-shroom-fueled "Too Much Brandy" comically depicts a drunken night among friends at a club, and the interminable, foggy-headed ride home ("We eat junk food, sat drunk on the tube / Every time the train clunks I feel like puking / Wonder whether that beautiful bird'll ring / Then it all goes hazy . . . ").
"Last night was some beer-laryness done our way but again we're back in the light of day," says Skinner on "Don't Mug Yourself", as his protagonist contemplates ringing up the "bird" he met the previous raucous night. He and his mates, sitting over eggs and coffee at a café, engage in lighthearted banter; his friends implore him to not look so eager, to which he defensively replies, "And I'm like, 'Honestly it's not like that, your acting like I'm prancing like a sap / Jumping when she claps and that.'" Original Pirate Material hits its comedic peak in "The Irony of It All" where Skinner portrays two vastly different characters: Terry, a thuggish, drunken football fan, and Tim, a flaky pothead. A riff on the absurdity of marijuana's illegality, Terry bluntly philosophizes, "And when the weekends here I to exercise my right to get paralytic and fight . . . See if that bothers you cause I never broke a law in my life." To which Tim retorts, "Just a few eighths and some Playstations my vocation / I pose a threat to the nation . . . I take pride in my hobby / Homemade bongs using my engineering degree." Back and forth they go, in a hilarious exchange that rivals Irvine Welsh's funniest moments, with neither character appearing particularly bright in the end.
"Weak Become Heroes", a tribute to the rave days of the Nineties, is fashioned creatively, as Skinner tells a story of hearing a song from his youth that takes him back to his first rave experience. "All the commotion becomes floatin emotions," he says, "Same piano loops over / Arms wave eyes roll back and jaws fall open / I see in soft focus." He gets lost in a reverie reminiscing about "geezers on e's and first timers kids on whizz, darlins on Charlie", before his attention is brought back to the present day, and the song concludes on a regretful note: "The world stands still as my mind sloshes round / The washing up bowl in my crown / My life's been up and down since I walked from that crowd."
All the tracks I've mentioned are great on their own, but Original Pirate Material wouldn't completely work without a fitting conclusion, and Skinner pulls out the aces on the closing track, "Stay Positive". Over a deliberate, midtempo beat and a looping, four-note piano sample, Skinner touches on the subject of one's descent into hard drugs ("Weed becomes a chore / You want the buzz back so you follow the others onto smack") as a means to forget about bad luck. But according to our humble narrator, there's more to life than moping: "Get the love of a good girl and your world will be much richer than my world / And your happiness will uncurl . . . Positive steps will see your goals," as the chorus of "Just trying to stay positive" repeats, mantralike, as if our hero needs to repeat the line over and over, just to keep him from slipping over the edge. You get a bit of a hint of a sarcastic overtone, as if Skinner's trying to tell us that it may be easy to say, but it's friggin' hard to maintain a positive attitude in this day and age.
With the exception of three short, but creative, interludes, the sound on Original Pirate Material is decidedly minimalist, with bare-bones musical accompaniment that is unobtrusive enough not to distract from the subject matter, yet still manage to provide quality pop hooks throughout. It's Skinner's laid-back voice that dominates, pushed right up in the mix, and his delivery, while many will categorize it as rapping, actually draws more influence from contemporary slam poetry, which itself is heavily influenced by the gutter-level poetry of the Beat writers fifty years ago. Skinner doesn't yell, he doesn't proselytize; like I mentioned early on, his style is more conversational. He's innocuous and unpretentious, and his delivery only bears the slightest hint of rhythm.
To hear Original Pirate Material is to be led through Mike Skinner's neighborhood: past the tenements, the drug addicts, the thugs, the men and women on the dole, the clubs, restaurants, and living rooms where people like Mike bide their time, hoping for their one chance to transcend this scene. "I ain't helping you climb the ladder," Skinner says on the record, "I'm busy climbing mine." Hey, with this album, he's put himself so high up the ladder that it's no use trying. This is the type of album whose influence could be felt in the coming years; after all, it's pretty inspiring to see an unknown Brummie lad come from out of nowhere and establish himself both as a hip-hop auteur and a fine street poet, and you can expect many kids to create their own DIY music project as a result. Whether or not Mike Skinner will be able to follow it up is up to him. In the meantime, though, he has left us an album for the ages.
— 8 November 2002
