Hands about my testicles, middle finger risen
Nobody cares about grime anymore. The British pirate-radio rap offshoot was endlessly flogged as that next shit three or 4 days ago. Music writers and the masses who study them (or, um, us) were discovering this seething hive of action in London's housing projects like it was a settlement of ants thriving under a rotted-out log or something.
Teenagers, apparently, were recording beats on their PlayStations and climb up on council-estate towers to post their pirate-radio broadcast-antennae. But almost of that scene's leading lights barely made it out of their neighborhoods. Even if grime did return a few big hits in England, those hits couldn't translate to anything resembling stateside fame; grime's penetration of the American rap scene never got beyond Pitbull spitting over Lethal B's "Pow (Forward)" on some mixtape. And finally we all but stopped hearing about this grime thing. On one hand, this is merely share of the constant sped-up turnover in music-press interest; this x has already seen the press embrace and abandon garage-rock, electroclash, dance-punk, freak-folk, Houston rap, hyphy, and any number of other micro-explosions I can't even remember right now; the like matter is most certainly going to pass to the current blog-house boom. But this isn't (just) a type of music-press fickleness. If Simon Reynolds is to be believed, London's pirate stations haven't really been fucking with grime for a piece now; they've moved on to funky house, whatever that is. The lingering effects of grime seem to be modified to the margins. Kano, a truly talented MC and potential star whose great debut album Home Sweet Home inexplicably never found American release, is a playable character in the new Def Jam Icon fighting-rapper game, for some reason, but that's about it. This kind of thing happens all the time. Maybe back in 2003, grime hit a kind of collective nerve, and perhaps its minor-key chaos and knife-edge violence just don't think the like thing four days later. But if grime has total and gone, that makes it a lot harder to explain Maths and English, the devastatingly great Dizzee Rascal album that leaked late last week. Maybe Dizzee is only one of those artists who's built to exceed whatever scene birthed him.
Back when grime was silence that next shit, Dizzee was its enthusiastic poster-boy. He released his first album, Boy in Da Corner at the age of 18, and it establish itself near-unanimous critical love. Dizzee famously won England's prestigious-I-guess Mercury Music Prize, and he was alleged to be the guy who would reverse this matter up huge. I liked Boy in Da Corner, but I never really fell for Dizzee until second album Showtime, where he slowed down both his jittery beats and his hyena rasp. A lot of people thought Showtime was Dizzee's capitulation to an American rap audience, but as an American rap guy, I thought he projected a whole lot more confidence and ferocity than he had before. I don't know where Dizzee's been over the preceding 3 years, but it's an enormous and unexpected joy to see that he's continued to develop. On Maths and English, he's just possessed, riding huge and off-kilter beats with sharp virtuosity and bend his voice around corners like it's the easiest thing in the world. He hasn't lost his angry-young-man confusion, but he sounds more charged and purposeful than ever. And the album manages both to be stylistically all over the order and sonically cohesive, a hard thing to rip off. It's more of a straight rap album than a grime album, but it's impossible to suppose an American rapper making this record. Dizzee's producers swipe musical signifiers from all sorts of apocalyptically paranoid British electronic musics: harsh and distorted bass-rumbles from dubstep, evil synth-chimes from jungle, echoed-out drum-pings from Tricky. But they reorganize those puzzle-pieces into straight-up rap contexts. "Where Da Gs" is an ice-cold track, laying harpsichord flutters and sandworm synth-bass over sparse heartbeat drums. UGK show up for guest-spots, and the course is about the precise sonic opposite of the lush, organic country-rap they usually make, but they still sound totally at home; they can see the track's pocket because the track has a pocket. (Matt Sonzala has reported that this is the start of three existing collaborations between Dizzee and Bun B; I can't expect to see the others. "Flex" is a blaze of a club-track, at once hectic and metronomic, and yet though Dizzee's just spouting strip-club boilerplate, it's capital to see him ably navigate the drums and synths and horns and whistles that all fly in from nowhere. "Da Feelin'" is a entirely unexpected burst of lush, summery drum-and-bass, layering bubbly bass and smooth-jazz pianos over drums that skitter all over the place. "Temptation" samples the Arctic Monkeys, bringing their percussive guitars to their legitimate conclusion by turning them into parts of the cycle track. Musically, Maths and English is both totally British and totally rap, and I'm not certain I could say the like matter of even Showtime.
The album also finds Dizzee tangling with all sorts of internal chaos but still end up hopeful. The album's opener, "World Outside," is a lull before the force and a hope of things that never quite arrive. Over whispery, pretty windchime synths, Dizzee mumbles about how he's discovered the man that exists outside his projects and how he wants to render it to the kids who haven't seen it yet. But a track later, he's laying into a late friend (probably onetime mentor Wiley) on "Pussyold (Oldskool)." Musically and lyrically, the 1st half of the album is violent and turbulent as fuck, Dizzee repurposing different forms of 80s rap (the Lyn Collins "Think" break and "It Takes Two" whoops on "Pussyole," crunchy King of Rock guitar-squeals on "Sirens") and maniacally spitting all over them. He simply finds something vaguely resembling the serenity and happiness he promised around track seven, when he starts talking about dance-clubs and about watching girls in the summertime, things that he presumably enjoyed a long time earlier he found lower-tier fame. On "Hardback (Industry)," he offers career-advice to aspiring rappers and makes the music industry sound like a lawless snakepit not too dissimilar from the mob as portrayed on The Sopranos. On "Wanna Be," the only mar on the album, Lily Allen shows up to sneer at fake gangsters over tinny music-hall polka. (Seriously, Lily Allen makes fun of fake gangsters. You can't do this stuff up. But even amidst all the tumultuous noise, Dizzee takes rare moments to face up and think a happy place, never offering any indication that he's there yet. Maths and English is a thoughtful and varied piece of work, and it bangs like a motherfucker. With this and the "International Players Anthem" video emerging within a few years of each other, it's been a moment since I've been as excited about music as I am right now.
Voice review: Jonah Weiner on Dizzee Rascal's ShowtimeVoice review: Jeff Chang on Dizzee Rascal's Boy in Da Corner
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