Streets Wise

I really despise musicals and operas and poetry,” Mike Skinner (aka the Streets) recently told NME. “I wanted to make a great rap album, and inadvertently I’ve made an opera, a musical and poetry.”

And Skinner is partly right. The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free (released May 18) isn’t exactly a great rap album, but it is a great something. What is it? A hip-hop play? An English Seinfeld set to music? A Shakespearean romantic tragicomedy set to a UK garage beat?

Well, for one thing, it’s one of the few truly honest rap albums you’ll hear these days. Skinner wanted to make a record about real life, not an album set in some cartoonish Hip-Hop Land where murder has no consequences, every woman is a freak and drinking a half-gallon of Hennessy leaves no hangover.

A Grand Don’t Come for Free is also a first-rate love-and-loss story, by turns exhilarating, entertaining, embarrassing and devastating as Skinner explores the travails of “Mike,” his narrator, and “Simone,” his lady love.

We hear the giddy elation of Mike and Simone’s first date on “Could Well Be In,” the couple’s bleak, Ecstasy-fueled night on the town in “Blinded by the Lights” and their first blazing argument on “Get Out of My House.” The last of those comes complete with all the manipulations, cheap shots, lame retorts and devious psych-ops that any self-respecting participant in a long-term relationship will find painfully familiar. Ultimately, Mike is thrown out with the parting words I’ll be proper angry if you’re not back later on your knees.

And he does come back. First, though, “Fit But You Know It” — which sounds like Blur, despite Skinner’s vehement protests — finds our hero on holiday in Ibiza with his mates, trying to get off with a tan-lined tramp. Despite the allure of chat-up lines such as I reckon you’re about an eight or a nine/Maybe even a nine-and-a-half in four beers’ time, Mike has no luck, at least until the next song. By then, we know that he succeeded and that turmoil will result.

The relationship is central to the album, but there is also a parallel story line concerning a missing thousand British pounds. The grand vanishes from Mike’s living room on a particularly disastrous day, and hilarity and paranoia ensue.

But the album really is a window into the world of English youth living in craphole towns far from London’s glamour. I’m married to an Englishwoman, and I lived for a couple of years in Lancashire — in the decayed, red-brick mill town of Preston and the seedy beach resort Blackpool — and this CD takes me right back.

There’s the surface-value stuff: the slang — “50 squid” for 50 pounds, “fit” for sexy and “smackin’ glasses down at George Best’s best session rate,” which translates as well, partying really fucking hard. When he’s hurt, Mike sits in and drinks Super Tennent’s all day, a reference to an evil brew about twice as strong as American malt liquor. Then he whiles away another day trying and failing to place a bet on a football match — in England, there’s a betting shop on the corner of nearly every major intersection where you can spend many a meaningless day wagering your dole money on anything from soccer matches to elections in Bangladesh.

The characters’ lives all seem to be facing drab dead ends. Neither Mike nor Simone nor any of their mates have anything in mind besides getting fucked up on weed, E or booze. The characters are not thugs or gangstas, but they have no plans. Nobody seems to have a meaningful job. And nobody seems to care that there’s a world beyond the next buzz, the next romantic conquest and what’s on the telly tonight.

That was exactly the mindset of my coworkers at the landscaping service I toiled with in England for a few weeks and at British Telecom, where I worked a mail-clerk McJob for a summer. Every Friday, we would kick off the weekend by getting positively hammered at lunch. (If you’re a Brit and you mysteriously never received a phone bill sometime back in 1994, my bad. I probably shoved it in the franking machine upside down some lush Friday afternoon.)

Under the circumstances, one wonders how Mike ever got the grand that went missing or where the characters got the ubiquitous cell phones featured in nearly every song. But dreary lives or not, Skinner does such a great job sketching life in the British twentysomething wasteland that England can’t help but seem intriguing to the young and impressionable. After all, the Specials’ “Ghost Town” hardly painted a pretty picture of Maggie’s England, but I still wanted to go there. And nothing on this album is nearly as frightening as that song.

Non-Anglophile Americans would be well-served by a lyric sheet with footnotes. But since that is not forthcoming, it seems unlikely that the Streets will ever have more than a cult following here. Perhaps that’s also because Skinner takes a lot of shit for his supposedly weak flow. It’s not weak, though — just different.

Rather than trying to weld his Midlands accent to an African-American chassis, Skinner is savvy enough to arrange his beats around the way British people talk (or, rather, the way they think). Judge him by Jay-Z or Rakim and his flow is feeble, but look at him as somebody creating a uniquely English style of hip-hop and his flow is formidable. And his use of language is as inventive as anybody on either side of the pond.

As for the characters on the album, their lives may suck, but at least they have each other, right? Well, no, and that’s the point. If Grand can be summed up in one hyphenated word, it’s “self-reliance.” Look out for No. 1, and let the rest take care of itself. Only you are responsible for your happiness. Not your mates. Not your girlfriend. So on top of everything else, this album is a fable, complete with moral. And I’ll be damned if it’s not the work of a genius.