Captive State

It Was A Bad Time For Me, OK?

2005-04-21T14:38:04Z

“You have – one – new message.”

“Get up, get a fucking life, get a fucking career, you’re not even motivated to get off your fucking arse and DO SOMETHING.” – “Pick U R Self Up”

Whatever nightmares your answerphone has been unleashing lately, it’s all too easy to think that the battlelines have stopped being laid out, that it’s time to give in, to accede. It’s time to bite your lip and resign yourself, surrender to the inevitable. There’s nothing new to see here. I’m not a celebrity, get me out of here.

Best known as Dizzee Rascal’s mentor in Roll Deep Crew, former member of the Pay As U Go Cartel, and the name behind the celebrated Eskimo dance, “Treddin’…” may be Wiley’s debut album, but this is only indicated by its hunger and drive, its will to power. Everything sounds so slick, sassy and assured. Apart from Wiley himself. His voice may lack the stuttering cadence of his protégée, but he’s just as confused and contradictory, as obsessed with how brutal minimalist music can be.

So what is it that makes this so impossible to deny? It’s in enforced limitations forcing you to be more creative. It’s in the pure pleasure of turning music into a weapon. It’s in making a call to arms. “Listen to this sound/It sure ain’t garage…Make it in a studio/Not in a garage”, he laughs on “Wot Do U Call It?”. It’s Wiley digging trenches around his scene, his brand, his vision, with a welcoming arm to anyone who wants to join the draft, and a sniper ready for anyone who dares to fight. “At its most endearing, a manifesto has a madness about it”, wrote Mimi Parent. And, when Wiley exclaims “Everybody who likes this go this way/Everyone who likes that go that way” as the cavalcade of his “Igloo” rhythm begins to twist and turn from incredibility at the idea to plain incredible at its execution, metallic insano-riffs clattering into pixieish Mario blips, that quote makes perfect sense.

Although commonly called grime, what Wiley calls Eskibeat reacts to UK garage in the same way that sound reacted to the increasing irrelevance of late-90s jungle. Part of the same pirate continuum, it lacks any semblance of the drug/noise interface: radio slots are suffused with almost comically violent lyrics. It – quite literally – lacks ecstasy. Wiley’s glacial trope makes this almost inevitable: it’s when the ice breaks, like on the baby-doll paean of “Special Girl”, when he exclaims things like “I need a girl who doesn’t flex like a yattie” over an impossibly cute SWV sample, that this album becomes as endearing as it is endlessly listenable.

Disconcertingly, the lyrics are aimed at rival crews, other MCs, rather than the listener (“I know you hate me cos you think I write lyrics and I aim them at your crew/Come on blud, that’s not true.”). And so, if you sense that the problems Wiley has – money, girls, parking tickets – are trivial, that would be missing the point. The triumph of “Treddin’...” is that it revels in small talk, in bitter disputes, in the inner turmoil, paranoia and self-consciousness that defines, internalises and humanises humanity. “Pick UR Self Up”, part anthem for doomed youth, part inspirational exploration of how inertia creeps within us all, is surgically-precise blocks of cartoon noise that sound as wonderfully weird and perfectly pop as anything The Neptunes or Lil Jon are doing now. “Reasons” stuns with a noise so compression chamber paranoid that it glitters. Its fatalism (“If it happens then it happens for a reason”) is so at variance with what is prevalent in every tainted step of millennial living, with what Cristina Odone calls “the terrible power of violent death”, that it’s strangely apposite.

It’s not perfect. Pirate classics “Ice Rink” and “Eskimo” are tantalisingly reduced to instrumental interludes just as they’re ready to soar, “Goin’ Mad” isn’t sure whether it’s a parody or a mistake, and there’s the most gruesome description of a back-of-the-seat fumble ever committed to plastic. But what’s more important is that grime shows new directions for pop to go, fresh areas for it to pinpoint, new playgrounds and fairgrounds for you to find your fun. “Treddin’ On Thin Ice” does all this, while still acting as a point of departure, a beginning for something that should be dovetailing the zeros and ones of your digital technofuture, tracing the uncanny mindspaces that you can never call home.

Surrender.

This Is Going To Be Fucking Insane

2005-03-26T10:09:52Z

You know what to do. Also:

Apparat
Silizium (Shitkatapult)
Collecting Apparat's May 2004 Peel Session and a handful of remixes, Silizium is precious, perfectly poised pop always on the brink of rapture. Can-cool, but less techno-taut than last year's Shapemodes, the Peel session itself is stunning: lush violin-spun mini-dramas that wouldn't sound out of place on Constellation, toughened up with 'Ice Rink'-minimal breakbeats that stu-t-t-t-er so immaculately you hide your bitten fingernails in disgust. There's an emotional chiaroscuro here, the unenviable fearlessness of music so built for headphones - because it's yours and no one else's to share. But there's also a glorious love of pop music: 'Komponent' is so playful it's feline; Rechenzentrum's click-house mix of 'Not A Good Place' emphasises the original's elemental joy; the rest *glides* with a savagely graceful intent. Wall yourself off from the world and let this set off fireworks in your daydreams.

Sonic contraceptives and kaleidoscopes of carnival colour

2005-03-26T09:59:53Z

‘Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions.’ – Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

She’s strikingly beautiful and dresses like a magician at a children’s party given style tips by Neneh Cherry. That’s important. A fellow art-school grad dismissively swipes that she’s “well faux, and completely loves herself.” That’s important, too. She’s Sri Lankan, her father has high-end Tamil Tiger connections and her insane first single ‘Galang’ was co-written by Justine Frischmann. Yep, you’ve got it.

The appropriation of military signifiers is nothing new in art school pop, but is rarely this explicit. The cover of M.I.A.’s Arular (XL) splices spray-painted tanks, AK-47s and aeroplanes flying off to nowhere with a kaleidoscope of carnival colour. Lyrics casually reference her “freedom fighting Dad” (after whom the album is named in tribute), the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and Kill Bill slash-em-up, but it’s delivered as an afterthought, worn as an accoutrement. What is engaging about Arular is that is sounds like it had to be released in 2005 – the cut&paste fragments of ‘Fire Fire’ say more in three minutes than modern rock has in a decade. The production borrows from Jamaican dancehall, East London grime, 90s hip-hop, 00s pop, and the Rio baile funk that boyfriend Diplo has been mining to such great effect. Assemblage. Subcultures and fashion students. Hegemony. You can see Dick Hebdige salivating in the distance, but does it work as an album?

Very nearly. The sound is compression-chamber tense and tinny, like it’s been mastered for MP3 distribution: everything filtered through in the top end apart from burbles of bass. At its best – the Richard X propelled fireworks of ’10 Dollar’, the wow and flutter of ‘Bucky Done Gun’, Arular sounds incredible, but you can’t help but think over the course of an album it lacks the freewheeling lunacy to really inspire. It’s a play of surfaces, a too-perfect collection of rough-edged polygons that don’t tessellate like they should.

A more wholesome fusion of party beats and street smarts is The Perceptionists’ astonishing Black Dialogue (Def Jux): sumptuous loops that slam with a satisfying boom-bap crunch; MCs utterly reverential to the sanctity of the beat and to the righteousness of their lyricism. ‘Blo’ is the best beat El-P’s had to his name since ‘Deep Space 9mm’, ‘Let’s Move’ and ‘Party Hard’ have metallic bass to make you dribble, ‘Memorial Day’ gouges chunks from Bush, Rumsfeld and Condi without the try-hard wetness such records so often fall prey to. Just please ignore ‘Love Letters’, the most cloying attempt at rappers showing their love for smart girls since Dead Prez’ sonic contraceptive ‘Mind Sex’. We can’t ever be seen to encourage such horror.

Meanwhile, the best of grime is still clawing away at the living corpse of mainstream rap. Check Ruff Sqwad’s self-released Guns ‘n’ Roses mix-CD for its supreme evocation of how to do so much with so little (one Fruity Loops preset, infinite possibilities). They approach every song with the idea that it should launch a boxing match: stadium rock-woah drum sounds; synth riffs so huge and jagged they’d slice open Neptune; MCs nibbling at the beat, afraid it might bite back. At 76-minutes, it’s inevitably overlong, but even the highlights have highlights.

Ignore Bashy’s Ras Kwame-hosted UR Mum Volume 1 (2NV) (so much pettiness, so little point) and head straight for L-Man’s beguiling Facts Of Life (Electrical Management). The NdoubleA MC reads too many history books, curls syllables around beats like Eminem, has the urgency and love for ideas of Skinnyman, and the deeply destructive past of Dave Pelzer. It’s a frightening delineation of someone who’s thoroughly fucked-up, and quite happy to use that torment to amuse, bemuse and abuse you, scored to orchestral doom-hop and boxfresh grime. Be prepared to spit your coffee when he spits “you’re lyrically shit: you remind me of afterbirth” with clinical nonchalance, be impressed that he hates 50 Cent with more venom than you have energy or time. And someone sign this crazy genius now.

Published in Plan B, April/May 2005 issue

Don your long-coat and shades

2005-03-26T09:56:41Z

Director Of Football
So it’s not all big money and supermodels, then

So. Are we talking hot-air balloons or peanuts? I mean: how big is your ego? When you’re approaching gaming-management, just how much control do you need in order to satiate yourself? For the brains behind Director of Football, it seems, nothing but the whole gamut of simulated existence. Yessiree: not content with letting you run riot over the traditional methods of player selection, transfers and a smidge of training and finance bolted on, DoF puts you in control of everything. From hiring and firing, marketing, share buying, delegating and communal/personal motivation – to even advising your overpaid strikers when to shoot. Don’t be afraid to don your long-coat and shades. This is control-freak onanism.

Inherent in decent management sim are three key features: ease of use, ease of creating response, and sheer joy of play. And it could have been that, with swish use of tact and tactics, this overload of involvement could have lifted DoF from the Sunday League to challenge CM3’s omnipotence. But no; its main claim to even a talking point is that it fails mightily on all three counts – despite having much to control, you never feel in control.

First impressions are poor, despite the game moving at a fair canter and containing the now-requisite number of league and options. There’s a Derridean* complexity in performing simple tasks, and – pertinently – a nagging lack of response to your commands. There’s also a horrible, insistent tribal chant of background noise. But while you can flick a switch and hide the sound, the stuttering experience of play is unavoidable. Few, if any, management games have ever managed to pull off viewable matches, but DoF’s utter nadir is the isometrically-viewed matchday screen. Examples? Keepers frequently save with their feet. Substituted players spontaneously combust. The camera doesn’t keep up with cross-field passes. It takes four minutes match-time for the players to run from box-to-box.

Combined, not enough of note happens, and it when it does, the end result is something akin to watching a kickabout from the sidelines, trying earnestly to shout advice, but giving up when you realise no one’s listening.

So. Percentage-wise, we’re talking peanuts.

* The subs changed this to “pea-souper fog of” during production, on the grounds that their readers wouldn’t know who Jacques Derrida is. Fine, but I would like to point out that this is a terribly phrased tautology, and I had nothing to do with it.

Published in PC Gamer, December 2001

Can it be that it was all so simple then?

2005-03-23T23:47:24Z

Football World Manager 2000
The new signing in the Football Manager ranks sees Ubi Soft having to settle for mid-table mediocrity

More than perhaps any sub-genre, football management games are annoyingly good at making time mysteriously disappear. They’re responsible for the fleeting scream you feel throbbing down your veins after casually looking down at your watch in the middle of a crucial end-of-season race for the play-offs, when the realisation that you have precisely two hours in which to force your coffee-stained carcass into work hits. You think: “Ssssssshhhiiiiitttt.” And then, without a glimmer of regret, you proceed to try and lift Brentford out of Division Three, for the next three hours.

Indeed, when you are immersed in the finest football management games, you don’t just feel aggrieved when your favourite striker – the one you’ve been nurturing since his teens – asks for a transfer. You feel like your long-term girlfriend has unceremoniously dumped you and run off with your best mate.

And it is for precisely the opposite reason that FWM2000 utterly fails. I never once felt part of it.

The updates sound impressive – there are now 30,000 players, over 1400 clubs, and 70 countries to get your head around; the transfer system has been refined; a wonderfully crass tabloid informs you of the latest transfer developments and all the players and staff give regular feedback.

Moreover, the new compact game engine is probably FMW2000’s best feature: after worming your way through the myriad of option on the top bar, you can find most screens within two clicks. But CM3 devotees can still smile smugly. Why?

Because, irritatingly, you have to use a scout to ascertain any player info. This is fine if you’re Man Utd and stars are crawling towards you…but Grimsby Town are in for problems. The supposed player interactivity consists of a few tedious, repeated line. Most problematically, the hours put into including Every! Team! Ever! have left your players sadly underdeveloped.

However, when you start to actually play matches, the trouble really begins. Other than the obvious graphical revisions, it’s essentially little better than the version I played on my ST over a decade ago. The limited scope of the players’ stunted, scripted movements on the TV screen hits home after about – ooooh – half an hour into the second match. So, while for the first three indentikit instances your striker failing an overhead-kick might make you curse, every subsequent occurrence makes you scream.

Missing CM3’s clarity, depth and heavyweight gloss, FMW2000 is not bad, but its lack of variety won’t make up for any sleepness nights.

Transcribed for nostalgia's sake: my first ever piece of paid journalism, written aged 18. Published in PC Gamer, issue dated February 2000.

The Drugs Do Work

2005-03-23T00:09:19Z

Festival Internacional de Benicássim, August 2004
DAY 1
FIB doesn’t kick off til midnight. Suits me. Earlier, SNOW PATROL’s jangly subpop is so inhumanely pointless that instead of dwelling on different forms of suicide, I propose heading for the litre glasses of beer. And try and find that secret swimming pool. Before I do, Neil Tennant emerges on the main stage with the first of his impressive array of cloaks. PET SHOP BOYS understand that headlining slots aren’t for difficult new material: they are for Big Pop Anthems, light shows that have UFO watchers across mainland Europe scrabbling for their digicams. They put a big gay smile on my face. They are a national treasure.

Smiles and treasure are not for KRAFTWERK, whose performance is like finding your uncles doing Frankenstein tricks in the shed and it being relayed on late night Channel 4 as performance art. The soundtrack is Very Important Classic Electro that sounds awesome for about half an hour - before you realise these noises have mutated so immensely in the past three decades that the originators look like they’re performing funeral rites. BPITCH CONTROL are plugged into that canon but the power is still surging. The Berlin techno animals are led by ELLEN ALLIEN and ply impossibly cute futurepop that ranges from hammers on your skull to soft fluffy clouds of ambient loveliness that still purr as you puke yourself gently to sleep.

DAY 2
Ew! Morning! Three hours later and congealed suntan lotion coalesces with sweat and becomes your lifeblood. It’s so hot that skin must be peeled from the side of the tent before you can exit. B-but! Next to the rows of mixed communal showers there is a stall handing out free bananas. And it’s not a mirage. Ace. Today is marked by a huge skipping rope line of MORRISSEY fans waiting expectantly for Their Hero to come save them, and him getting in a tangle with his private jet and buggering off home. Bless. LOU REED headlines and is just as rubbish as all the horrid leather-jacketed London numbskulls that have taken the worst aspects of his oeuvre and magnified them a million times until they raze the ground to dust.

For all the small talk of KOMPAKT’s sophistication (which is as much to do with the imagery and artwork as their trademark shuffling, gorgeous microhouse), what emerges is far more engaging, even if in the circumstances I can’t make out SUPERPITCHER from TOBIAS THOMAS from Gordon the Gopher. Crucially for tonight, that sophistication is used to make something so fast, hard, dirty and danceable it’s mindwarping. At 7.30am, after about 15 encores, and plenty of men raising themselves into Jesus shapes onstage, I giddily surrender, and make mental notes to visit Cologne every weekend for the rest of my life. If the pavements aren’t made out of diamonds softly humming post-human body-tech, it’ll be a disappointment.

DAY 3
It appears to be sacrilege round these indecently humid and genuinely heartwarming parts, but BRIAN WILSON is without redemption. He looks like he’s about to splutter a last breath (ready for some cruel soul to loop it and release as a bootleg), he’s out of tune, unable to remember any lyrics without consulting an autocue - and leaves any of the difficult bits to his extensive backing band. It’s too much like extended karaoke to a crowd salivating with nostalgia because some of these songs almost sound like they could have been Pet Sounds outtakes that haunted their lonely teenage nights.

YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH. YEAH! There’s a Spanish kid in his early twenties who appears to have swallowed the entire chemical allowance of his first born’s graduation party in preparation for this. He has a piece of paper in his hand, hastily scribbled with “YEAH!” in blue biro. James Murphy is a fatter Daniel Beddingfield but LCD SOUNDSYSTEM’s ‘Yeah’ is the stupidly triumphant highlight of the festival and by the time it finishes I can’t find my voice or mind anywhere in this sweltering tent. It is the last thing I remember, apart from landing in Coventry 24 hours later than expected. It’s what I want my last ever memory to be. Yeah.

Waste

2005-03-22T23:56:05Z

Wasteland – October (Transparent)
Combining the freewheeling genius of London’s premiere soundmurderer and the Germanic precision of New York’s I-Sound, this is an all-encompassing flight of fantasy.

It sounds spacious: like drum ‘n’ bass in rhythmic stasis (the searing ‘Hourglass’); dub terror overloaded with a digital gloss so all the rough textures shine (‘Wintermission’). It sounds dense: like glitch given a thorough reworking so every prickle of fractured sound has a purpose, a presence, portent. ‘Saturation’ teases with dancefloor phase-shifts before freefalling into somnambulist beat poetry. It sounds glacial: ‘Industrial Industry’ shimmers like snowdrops captured in freeze-frame slo-mo, or Neptune collapsing in on itself, depending on which way you’re looking.

And if that makes this sound unengaging or uninviting, don’t let it: April may be the cruellest month, but October sounds wholly heavenly, gorgeously grimy, positively august. Submerge yourself.

Last Exit

2005-03-22T23:45:48Z

Curiously alien, gloriously synthetic and quite, quite beautiful Canadian pop-hymns toughened up with urban ruggedness; vocals so lachrymose they literally drip with sadness; there’s a gaping silence BETWEEN the beats that sounds like a black-hole reversing on itself; what Scout Niblett would be doing if she had downed a pill containing the last 20 years of electronic music with a whiskey chaser; the need for speed? Junior Boys play parlour games with tempo: their rhythms sound like they are drifting backwards through snow, slow, slow, slowly.

Junior Boys’ incredible “Birthday/Last Exit EP” (KIN) makes me want dance and prance and scream and shout and scribble and press repeat again and again. Why? Because they (Jeremy Greenspan and a rotating cast of collaborators: local friends Johnny Dark and Matt Didemus feature on the debut EP, as does a Fennesz remix that renders “Last Exit” into a soothing scree) conjoin the dangling nerve-endings of 80s synthpop and what the Force-Inc and Kompakt labels have been doing in the past three years – then untangle them via the stuttering swing of Timbaland, Zed Bias and Horsepower Productions. Greenspan answers questions via email with the desired combination of insight and glibness.

What is pop music and why do or don't you make it?
”My friend Steve says that I make ‘earworms’. All good pop music is made up of them. Sometimes you don't want them there, most of the time you don't want them there - but you can't get them out. Todd Edwards and Dem 2 are the kings of the earworm. Have you ever been listening to one of their tracks and find yourself singing along to some completely incoherent string of microsamples? Anyone who can get you singing gibberish knows what they’re doing.”

Especially during the last two years, the music that’s interested me is that which has made me think harder, smarter, faster. Music that’s about difference: culture-clash elements, brutal ambiguity, music that compels you to impose on it your own daydreams of worlds at war. It’s the city where these elements take shape.

How important is the idea of the city to you? I mean, as something pulsing, electric, metallic, artificial, traditional, modern, futuristic and contradictory. It’s always inspired me: there’s nothing more beautiful than a photograph of London after midnight. Your music seems to have either a yearning for or idealisation of the sound of the city, or the comedown from the city. Am I constructing an elaborate fiction from something that is actually quite simple?

”Hamilton is the ultimate city. It’s a second-tier city of the highest order. It’s the embodiment of all of those world cities that are overlooked, ignored and marginalized. For the British readers, imagine Coventry, now imagine it in Canada. I dedicate all of my music to Hamilton.”

Are you in Hamilton now? When I sent your original answers to our designer, he wrote: "the Coventry in Canada thing kinda has me hooked, that's like the most boring city in England plonked in the middle of the most boring country on the planet. That I gotta see!" Does that tally with your own perception?

”I’ve recently moved to Toronto. Toronto is Canada’s largest city, and has the feel of a major metropolitan centre, although it retains some degree of Canadian humdruminess. Hamilton, however, is quite a funny little city. It’s totally forgotten by the rest of the country, very run-down except that it has Canada’s largest industrialized complex. But it’s also filled with local charm and a huge amount of talented musicians. People who are even doing well in Europe like Manitoba, Koushik, Huren and Orphx. They’re all from the Hammer.”

What is there too much of in music at the moment? And what is there not enough of?
“I think that pop music isn't abstract enough and abstract music isn't pop enough.”
What strikes the right balance?
”Christian Fennesz is doing a terrific job. I mean, on the one hand the music is really ‘challenging’, ‘abstract’, or whatever you want to call it – but it’s also totally listenable. He’s amazing. Pop music on the other hand is far less experimental then it was five years ago, but I’m always optimistic about these things.”

What producers inspire you to do better, and which make you feel mortal? Dan Snaith of Manitoba reckoned it would take him ten years locked up in his bedroom to recreate a Timba/Neptunes style hot beat.
“I’m sure that’s not true. I love Timbaland and would probably consider him as one of my five biggest influences, but part of his appeal is the combination of really clever yet strangely half-assed production techniques. I remember those Godzilla noises on [Ginuwine’s] “What’s So Different”. The list of producers who inspire me is too huge to even consider writing, but I’m largely influenced by people I know. I recently did a track with Kode 9 [of the ever-impressive www.hyperdub.com audio-virus] and I learnt a few things by watching how he works and trying to incorporate that.”

Finally, perhaps this question says more about me than you, but do you think a quasi-paedophilic band name helps or hinders you?
“Perhaps indeed. Needless to say appealing to a child-molesting demographic was not closely considered.”

Dedicated to Nick Kilroy. RIP.

A Perspectival Trick

2005-03-22T23:32:58Z

The Streets / Shystie
Brixton Academy, London

Don’t mention girls. It’s the theme of the evening. How relationships fuck you up, and how once burnt, you’re still so willing to jump back into the fire. Finding out that the girl you’re in love with is still besotted with her ex. And he’s standing next to you, and she never looks at you that way, laughs at his jokes like that. It’s enough to make you cut your hair, lose some weight, and wish you’re ten years younger.

Ignore that rule for Shystie, though. An impish, kinetic Hackney MC, she’s about to release a delightful debut that redraws the map for the new wave of East London MCs by the sheer virtue of its assured femininity in a subculture of machismo. Tonight she’s unfortunate: flanked by two rappers without a trace of her charisma, her machine-gun cadence, clean and lucid on record, is submerged in the mix. There are nods to the past (a wicked, cheeky snippet of ‘Push It’, the retro-riff of ‘7 Nation Army’ condensed into a supreme splurge of garishly dirty low-end), but ‘Step Bac’ and ‘One Wish’ are modern UK pop in all its glory. Super-produced, bass-heavy, radiant: Shystie’s making a savage statement of intent.

And so to The Streets. A huge green laser show scans across the venue like a radar. ‘Turn The Page’ opens, the beat as exciting as secret sex, and three thousand bodies melt. The question of how to recreate the narrative of A Grand Don’t Come For Free is ignored. (With the rash of hyperbole that’s surrounded A Grand…, it’s been forgotten that Original Pirate Material is clearly a superior record, reflected by the balance of this greatest hits set.) The communal crush of being here, of moments remembered and returned to is enough. Although sometimes too much: ‘It’s Too Late’ brings tears to eyes, realisations that moving on can leave you empty. (They spy each other across the venue, and you’ve lost.)

“Don’t mention girls,” barks Skinner, turning to his band. He could be so lucky, having built his career around shaping semi-fictions that gracefully trace post-teen relationships (with people, but also with pop, drugs, money) in all their messy glory. There’s always been a delicious cartoon element to Skinner, but the construct – laddish braggadocio fused with an unnatural ability to resurrect micro-observations from the realms of cliché – is rendered more tangible when your heart’s being sucked into your mouth. The only letdowns are the Chas ‘n’ Dave do ‘Parklife’ of ‘Fit But You Know It’, and the way the off-key live drums on ‘Weak Become Heroes’ blunt the irrepressible house beat of the original. That’s more than made up for by ‘Blinded By The Lights’ and ‘Could Well Be In’: stunning, post-rave mini-dramas, the music too sumptuous to do anything but surrender.

Too close for comfort, tonight was too impressive to deny. Just don’t mention girls ever again.

A-har

2005-03-22T23:31:59Z

More on pirate radio here: my summer 2003 Sussex dissertation, and I believe the first academic reference Dizzee Rascal ever received.

Pirate Radio

2005-03-22T23:27:30Z

“I don’t give head but / I give headbutts / Punch in the guts for calling me a slut” – Lady Fury

When then Postmaster General Tony Benn said “the future will not exist for them” of the offshore pirates in 1965, I don’t think he’d believe that nearly forty years later in London their modern counterparts would often outnumber their legitimate counterparts. Or give such opportunities for teenage girls to speak their minds about sexual issues. Although in a sense he was correct: new legal powers and the emergence of Radio 1 soon brought on a hasty shutdown of first post-war radio stations to represent youth culture. [Insert favoured drunken cultural studies rant about the assimilation of invention by the mainstream: here. No, not the one about the Sex Pistols.] But all that caused was the eventual burgeoning of inner city stations from the 80s, defined increasingly by the reduced locus of low-powered FM signals.

And now, localisation is more prevalent that ever, especially in the semantic minefield of the London pirate scene. Although to the uninitiated, they sound broadly similar, West London’s Jon E Cash calls his music “sublow”, East London’s Wiley “eskibeat”: it’s an attempt to secure your destiny in a scene defined by its exclusivity and newness. The fewer copies of a hot new track, the better. If a record played on the London pirates ever gets a commercial release, it’s inevitably at least 18 months after it was first played out on dubplate, by which time everyone’s forgotten it existed in the first place. No matter: it just means you have to move quicker.

Led by Maxwell D, formerly of Wiley’s legendary Pay As You Go Cartel, South London’s Musketeers ply the “muskesound”, a frantic fusion of bashment, grimy beats, and a host of witty, quickfire, often ridiculously young, MCs. Their lyrics range from cartoon violence and genius teen-girl backchat (choice lyric from Lady Fury about tough boys who come up short: “Your tool’s so small / How the fuck can you penetrate pum-pum at all?”) to explanations to why Maxwell sold his story of having blazing sex with Jamelia in the back of his Merc. In a car park. And then watched Gladiator on the newly installed DVD player. Meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Ashman, whose name is covered all over my local bus stop in black felt tip pen, sighs: “Remember when I first stepped in the scene / I was only six and was still very keen”. It works because of their desire, the repartee with their listeners and each other, because of the music – but also because it’s pop as schoolyard soap opera, with more hilariously brutal honesty then you’ll get on The O.C. and 80 Raves In 80 Days combined. And who doesn’t want to be party to that?

Musketeers, 9nine3fm / 9nine3.com, Tuesdays 10pm-12am

FURTHER LISTENING
Slimzee – Rinse 100.3fm / Rinsefm.com. Sundays 3-5pm. The most important pirate DJ of the past decade now plays exclusive breakbeats, grime and FWD>> dubplates. Check in for occasional super-special guest MCs.
N.A.S.T.Y – Déjà Vu 92.3fm Mondays 6-8pm. Not as hard as they’d like to think (it stands for Natural Artistic Sounds Touching You), N.A.S.T.Y still feature the cream of the current MC crop, including future-stars Kano and Sharky Major.
Plasticman – Rinse 100.3fm Rinsefm.com. Fridays 7-9pm.
Croydon’s finest, pushing the now Rephlex-affiliated FWD>> breakbeat sound

Grime Time

2005-03-22T23:14:36Z

Reacting to the cocaine and champagne comedown that occurred as UK Garage lost its chart focus in late 2001, early grime productions were brutally primitive. Musical Mob’s ‘Pulse X’, was otherworldly music that sounded alien in isolation, but acquired a mutant ferocity when combined with ultra-aggi MCs fighting for the mic. No melody, little narrative, the minimalism acting as maximiser for passion boiling over to the point that it becomes sheer burning hatred, increasingly vicious, horrible lyrics bending back on themselves until they become comical. It’s pop music as urban graffiti: annoyance to everyone but the admiring observers and those in the know. From then until now, the scene’s seemingly grown exponentially, new producers, MCs and crews (sometimes literally) fighting for attention, Dizzee’s Mercury triumph signifying interest beyond the reach of radio.

Although seemingly always in a state of flux, currently grime’s more disordered than ever. Pirates have been hit hard by another DTI clampdown; violence has scared off venues and promoters so rave bookings are down; some of the creative talent has moved on to more moneyed-up pastures, awaiting the music industry to unleash its marketing muscle on their subcultural capital. But there’s still astonishing music coming out from the underground. Scratch the surface and find Ruff Squad’s ‘Bring It Down’, forlorn synth sweeps and voices used as chainsaw riffs. Check Terror Danjah transforming urban pop into delicate waves of destruction. Feel Lethal B’s ‘Forward Riddim’, set to be the biggest crossover smash since ‘I Luv U’ (albeit with a chorus of “I’llllllll crack your skull”). Hear Essentials’ ‘Jenny’, a tale of a crew who realise they all know Jenny to the sound of a kaleidoscope imploding. It’s just that with Dizzee traversing the globe and burning brighter with every touchdown, Kano about to go ballistic with his princely pervo-pop, you can sense history repeating: as the majors sniff out new territory, the soul is being sucked out, another case of underground resistance conquered by overground assimilation. Don’t let it happen. Immerse yourself in this senseless dystopian daydream.

Summer Sun Grime Fun

2005-03-22T23:07:51Z

‘What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.’ - Gilles Deleuze

Monstrous immaculate conceptions. That’s what you need this summer. Synths like heatseeker missles, or sweet soul loops, or dirty noise that is just as likely to be about dirty fucking as about embracing the death-march of modern disinterest and disinterring it completely. Pop that tastes of fizzy pop and glory and is neon. Pop that carries you on its shoulders through the crowds triumphant.

Pop that unearths where rhizomes are spreading out. Since the inception of Raw Blaze FM, you can now hear grime pretty much on-demand in London: if you want some mad bad noise, it’s the crucial place to bend your ears. Terror Danjah ’s mindbendingly lush (imagine Tristan Tzara sprawling alogical inspiration all over the Norfolk countryside with pink paint) work on Shystie’s ‘One Wish’ (Network) remix and Bruza’s ‘Bruzin’’ (Aftershock) teases and pleases in equal measure. Meanwhile, three twelves from Kano, N.A.S.T.Y Crew’s hot cat on the tower block roof make me want to do illegal acts in public. ‘Gangsta Toyz’ (Fl) is the angriest three minutes ever committed to plastic, tag-team threats with East Connection’s Demon that act as adrenaline and gun shot, the sheer textual pile-up ceaselessly engaging, the production so bouncily joyful it’s crippling. ‘Leave Me Alone’ (Paperchase) is jagged edges of psychedelic pop genius courtesy of Davinche that show grime can scrub up neatly to impress your mum. On ‘What Have You Done?’, Kano is trying to steal your girlfriend (and probably will), while Wonder outfreaks the ‘Get Low’ beat. It’s a record to turn dancefloors into violent messy spasms.

The same goes for Diplo’s ‘Diplo Rhythm’ from the slamming *Florida* (both Big Dada), a dancehall/hiphop banger with *Night Rider* synths used *properly* (ie with no truck for anything bar carnage), while Vybz Cartel and Sandra Melody provide infectious silliness that makes me grin like an alcoholic. Kid 606’s *Who Still Kill Sound* (Very Friendly) is mentalist breakbeat hardcore that recalls both of acid techno squat parties and South London youth clubs in 1994 playing ragga jungle as sherbet-sated prepubescents threw bad shapes. Recommended indeed. Planet Mu’s *Amµnition* cheapo sampler piles thirty-four tracks of wide-eyed avant-action from the likes of Venetian Snares, Shitmat and Remarc into an eighty-minute mix that splays your ears into indecently odd angles. Shitmat’s ‘Dis Dancehall Ting Is Better Than That TV Ting Tony’ is just as utterly spastic as it sounds, ‘Walking In The Air’ samples and rave depth charges fighting for attention with fabulously *fluid* insano-beats. Keep these guys off the Venlafaxine forever. Estelle’s ‘1980’ (V2) also makes me happy because it shows us losers born in the year of the monkey aren’t ALL hopeless fucktards, a record to savour because of its optimism and perspicuity as much as its bounding, beautiful strings. On a similar tip, Shystie’s *Diamond In The Dirt* (Polydor) fuses bad-gal slanguage with wonderfully chaotic, shiny post two-step beats. We are in a golden age for young British black pop and if you’re not tuning in you’re a fucking fool.

Pure electro prettiness can be just as joyful, though. Julian Fane’s *Special Forces* (Planet Mu) is what goes through the mind of a 21 year old Canadian NASDAQ trader when he’s not having his soul sucked out. And in this case, it’s impossibly cute MBV dreampop with the just *so* exactness of a Dre beat, and the sighing cadences of Four Tet at his most rough and rich. Munk’s *Aperitivo* (Gomma) is disordered punk-funk with a slick disco gloss that will get you shouting very, very stupid things in public. Dykehouse’s *Midrange* (Ghostly International) is sophis Pet Shop Boys/New Order electro-pop that throws warped Disco Inferno curveballs that will knock you over with how huge they sound. I’m thinking mixing desks the size of manatees. It was all done in his bedroom. A doffed cap, Sir.

And it’s been a long time coming – prison sentences and labels imploding mean *Council Estate Of Mind* (Lowlife) is two years overdue, but let Skinnyman’s debut finger you in all the wrong places, now. Older and more self-aware than many of his peers, it’s a hip-hop record that works as love-letter to his Finsbury Park brethren and exploration of the existential crises caused by bad comprehensives, police harassment and wasted opportunities that never wavers in its sniper precision. It’s a record about failure and success, about turning the daily grind of broke London life into an epiphany that makes me despair for my hometown and make me want to give it a heartfelt hug. The beats are as Kanye-cute as anything this year, UK hip-hop infused with a confidence that’s never anything less than inspirational. Skinny’s flow flips from reflective (‘Love’s Gone From The Streets’) to cocksure and brazen (‘Fuck The Hook’) and what emerges is that he’s smarter than you, a quicker thinker with a neater turn of phrase and more interesting to be around. The bastard. Choruses swell and rise like prime Dexys. ‘I’ll Be Surprised’ is like *Blur*-era Blur and *still* manages to sound glorious. But what drives *Council…* to my Discman beyond anything else right now is the way its anger convinces so wholly, its empathy, tunnel vision and love so attuned to the way hatred overreaches it’s utterly beyond reproach. It’s a fun record that you can play all day without getting bored. It’s also a monstrous, immaculate conception that deserves to destroy your summer.

‘I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I don’t explain because I hate common sense.’ – Tristan Tzara

Paranoid Perspectives

2005-03-22T23:06:13Z

If 2004 has been about anything it’s about drawing a line between those who make you fear the future and those who embrace it. Between the terrifying retro-rock rumble so easily embraced by the students you avoided at uni, and those idiosyncratic geniuses that realise that pop’s still a game to be played.

So grab Milanese’s delirious *1 Up* (Warp), a slinky dubstep six-tracker that starts from the premise that pop should distort your peripheral vision, and then turns its focus on the rest of your body. Melt with *Kompakt 100* (Kompakt), the sound of a hyper-prolific label so confident in celebrating its centenary of releases that they remix their back-catalogue to buggery and still emerge triumphant: from ambient euphoria to jagged, lush rave anthems, it’s all dancefloor mayhem that will make you swoon and shake. Feel Skinnyman’s super-skill *Council Estate Of Mind* (Lowlife) for peach-sweet beats and militant broadsides, for the way hopelessness is suffused with hopefulness, and for the moment of realisation that you can be a genuinely awful human being acting as a catalyst for ultimate redemption. Maybe. One day. Take on *Life’s A Dice Game* (Dice Recordings) comp as it sniggers and thrashes through sixteen tracks of the sublime and ridiculous, ugly and unpredictable (‘Armhouse’ surreally welds a harsh East London pop aesthetic onto Madness’s ‘Our House’): best is Skepta’s mighty ‘Serious Thugs’, Bone Thugs’ ‘Thuggish Ruggish Bone’ cut and slashed into a piercing siren straight out of the ‘Rebel Without A Pause’ school of noise abuse. Dig deep into *Dread Meets B-Boys Downtown* (Heavenly), Don Letts’ ace rendering of early 80s NYC hip-hop, for a time when possibilities seemed so much more endless, when eclecticism meant more than setting iTunes on party shuffle and hoping for the best.

But mostly, embrace Dizzee Rascal’s *Showtime* (XL/Dirty Stank). Back barely a year after Boy In Da Corner shot a warning across the entire pop landscape, it’s a record that makes demands of you, and so demands your attention. It typifies the second-album syndrome in that it’s about a kid lost and scared, trying to negotiate his lack of centre with a terrifying level of tunnel vision.

It’s a perspectival trick. Propelled from the streets that made him into relative fame, Dizzee still clings to paranoid ideation like it’s a second skin. The tropes are familiar from Boy In Da Corner, except Dizzee’s now got the problem of achieving his dreams to contend with. Everyone is a target. Everyone’s out to steal something, be it money, fame, or a piece of your soul. Everything’s for sale. Everything’s going to hell, and getting out quick is the only option. Legitimacy is something that happens to other people.

So just what is it that makes Dizzee the most irrepressible character in pop right now? The trick’s in his cadence, the manner in which he bends phrases into spaces that shouldn’t fit, accelerates into a tongue-tying pace in the middle of a bar and then spits out the money shot. Name me a noise more enjoyable, and I’ll prove you a liar.

That *Showtime* never deviates from ME-ME-ME enough to form a coherent narrative isn’t a problem; indeed, one of Dizzee’s many gifts is his almost painful self-awareness and inability to stand still: his defensiveness is an enamel shell that sometimes he hides in but usually just windmill-punches his way through. He’s still a teenager, what do you expect? You don’t expect a bizarro remake of Captain Sensible’s ‘Happy Talk’, complete with Dizzee’s hilariously off-key singing, which he’s pitching as his ‘Hard Knock Life’, but is more the sound of someone grinding near-genius from the depths of insanity.

The *sound* is no longer so shocking (and with Wiley, Shystie, Doogz and Kano all signed, it’ll continue to be less so), but this isn’t Dizzee’s pop album. Sure, ‘Stand Up Tall’ wheelspins on Youngstar’s atom-splittingly energetic Super NES noise, ‘Girls’ is a pure club banger, and ‘Fickle’ is a pretty and intricate with a gorgeous helium-pitched diva sample – but mostly the pace is slack, the tone sombre, the atmosphere bleak. Wormholes of technoid-bass envelop these songs. ‘Everywhere’ features a beat of desi-minimalism that’s practically hippies banging bongos. ‘Graftin’’ is crafted from the same sublow bass-biznizz as Dead Prez’s ‘Hip Hop’. You’re never more than ten seconds away from a threat of aggression (*“I’m not mad / I’m a lovely lad / I’ll give you the loveliest beating that you’ve ever had”*) or delicious wordplay that will make you giggle.

‘Respect Me’ features the most impressive vocal performance I’ve heard all year, Dizzee wrestling with the tidal wave surge of the beat and his conscience. *“You people are going to respect me if it kills you.”* Jesus. It’s thee suicide-pact singalong of the year and it’s certainly protesting-too-much. From Tim Westwood to the photo-pullouts in *Sneak*, some jealous UK hip-hop types apart, who *doesn’t* respect Dizzee? But you get the impression that if he cheered up for just a minute, or even just accepted a hug, he’d lose the perspective that’s fashioned the two most consistently stunning, boldly brilliant albums of the past two years. So, Dizz: feed that paranoia, suckle down on it with earnest, and same time next year, eh?

Mr Robinson

2005-03-22T23:05:30Z

‘It’s new approach to raves and people are still coming to terms with it. Grime’s about the MC, not the DJ. About lyrics. When we go to raves, and someone’s playing a bashment tune, everyone’s dancing. When we come on for a grime set, everyone’s watching. It’s just a different way of taking it in. When people hear a bar they like, they go insane. It’s more like a rock show. It can get messy.’

Grime seems lyrically limited. In a sense, it’s thrilling, honing down aggressive lyrics to an essence in the same way as the Neptunes did to production, but sometimes you just want to hear something different, something vulnerable.

‘It’s not just an MCing thing, it’s a way of life. But when people hear aggressive lyrics on the radio they shouldn’t start doing aggressive lyrics, it should just inspire people to write. But saying that, it just doesn’t work as well on radio: on pirate radio you’re not going to hear people playing Dizzee Rascal’s most conscious song,’ he says. ‘It’s about what’s catchy, what beat’s grimey or what’s new and gonna create hype. I think when Lethal B, Demon, whoever, get a chance to do their solo albums, the subject matter can’t be the same for fifteen tracks – you’ll see their depth as well.’

A softly spoken, gently mannered teenager from East London’s N.A.S.T.Y Crew, Kane Robinson doesn’t fit in with the grime stereotype of the angry, gun loving hood-rat. His records don’t fit with this, either. Search out the limited edition ‘What Have You Done’ (New Era) – a quivering female voice on the brink of bursting point glides in and out of earshot, juddering bass gouges your stomach, a synth riff like a heatseeker missile aims for your head, and Kano admits that yeah it’s over, I can’t help it but it’s become a trap, with disarming honesty and bubbly sweetboy charm. It’s one of a number of twelves that’s made Kano the hottest new MC to come from the grime underground: starting with ‘Boys Luv Girls’, written and produced in his bedroom aged fifteen, it’s just one of a legion of super-pop anthems to emerge from the scene that’s criminally ended up only pressed up on 500 white labels. Not for much longer: with the release of Run The Road (679), the first widely distributed vocal grime compilation, it’s easy to see that it’s coming to fruition as something that depicts a diverse, hungry, urban underclass in all its messy glory. It’s not just Dizzee and Wiley anymore: with a first major-backed single (the glorious Davinche-produced stutter-pop anthem ‘Ps and Qs’) and a debut album hurtling towards completion, Kano’s on the frontline, pushing things forwards.

‘I saw something on Jay-Z, and he couldn’t even get a deal, so they did it themselves,’ he says. ‘They shot their own videos, sold their own records, and that’s the way I see people making their mark. Like [Lethal B’s] “Forward Riddim” – they just did it themselves, and now they’re getting the attention they deserve, and now it’s been signed. You can do it yourself. Starting up independent labels – I think that’s the way Wiley’s looking to go. Not everyone has to be a superstar, not everyone is going to be a superstar, and you don’t have to be. Not everyone is a Robbie Williams, not everyone’s a Madonna, not everyone’s an Eminem, so you can do it yourself and sell ten thousand records, then why not do it yourself? Obviously, me getting signed will help the scene. Me doing my thing will probably inspire another person to be an MC, or inspire an MC to write songs knowing that they can get somewhere. At shows, I bring in my people. Everything I do is me and my people.’

Anniemal

2005-03-22T22:59:18Z

Norwegian pop princess Annie Strand is hip enough to namecheck disco legend Larry Levan, breathlessly enthusiastic and knowledgeable enough to play MC5 and Britney Spears in DJ sets without even a wink of irony, and bold and beautiful enough to moisten the most hardened cynic. Her album, Anniemal, released by the same label as The Streets and The Futureheads, has the craft of Pet Shop Boys, the meta-awareness and sophistication of Saint Etienne at their most glorious, and the pristine, perfect production of modern dance-pop. It’s as disposable and durable as chewing gum, and as ephemeral and timeless as her cheeky, sassy single ‘Chewing Gum’. That, produced by troublemaking chart-topper Richard X – of Sugababes, Liberty X and ‘Some Girls’ infamy – had Annie cooing: “I bet you think you’re chocolate but you’re chewing gum”¸ and compared boys to sweets, while thinking of sex.

What was the idea behind Anniemal? “The whole thing was never really planned,” she says with a kittenish giggle. “OK, I knew we were going to do an album, and it was going to be a pop album, or an underground album or whatever. The whole thing started four or five years ago – I was working on my own music, and my boyfriend Tore was working on a track. I suddenly had an idea for the melody for ‘The Greatest Hit’, and we started working together, and it ended up being quite good. We put it out on a tiny label. The reaction was strange. We just did it for fun, and then suddenly a lot of labels were interested, so we decided to do an album.”

While Anniemal sounds too good to be true, it almost didn’t happen. After wowing clubs worldwide with underground smash ‘The Greatest Hit’, Tore suddenly, tragically died of a heart complaint in 2001. “After that, I became withdrawn; I didn’t really see the point,” she says. “It stopped me wanting to work in music, but I knew he’d hate that so about half a year later I started on my own.”

How was that for you? “It was tough,” she says. “When I started again, I didn’t have my own studio, I was quite broke, had jobs in clothes shops… Then I was talking a lot with Royksopp, they wanted to work with me on their album, and was also working with Timo, which meant travelling a lot to Finland where he was working. And then I met Richard X when I was in London – I come here quite a lot.”

Those three producers make up a loveable triangle of the paradox of modern pop music: chart-friendly and melodic, but oddly experimental at the same time. “I’m really into pop music,” she says. “I really like melodic music. To me the melody is incredibly important, but at the same time after being with Tore, I was focused on having really good production, a strong sound. What I do is definitely pop, with an emphasis on being strange at the same time. I wanted to make an album that you can dance to, but also listen to it on your own.

“I think pop used to be not such a dangerous word. I think it’s the same as in England as in Norway, that it wasn’t very accepted as being credible, but then you saw many more interesting producers, for example Richard X, starting to do bootlegs, and went from that to working with very commercial singers.”

Do you have any skeletons in your pop closet? “My first band was an indie-pop band called Suitcase,” she laughs. “We were named after a Beck song – I was and still am still a massive fan. I was the singer, and one of my girlfriends was playing the synthesiser even though she had never played a synthesizer before. The three guys were playing guitar, bass and drums. And it was a really bad band. We only played one gig ever, it was the first and the last. We sounded a little bit like Elastica, and I really like Elastica, but we weren’t anywhere as good as them. Then the band wanted to make trip-hop, and I was like, ‘No! We’re never going to make trip-hop!’, and we split up.”

She’s come a long way since such auspicious beginnings: today, she’s being followed by a Norwegian film crew, managing to slip them at various points to check out import vinyl. “It’s quite weird being followed round,” she says. “But I can’t complain. In Norway I get approached by such a range of people. Screaming girls who are seven years old, as well as women and men who are in their forties who are just as interested and bought the record.”

‘Heartbeat’ is out now on 679 Recordings. Anniemal follows on March 7.

The Things I'll Do For Money

2005-03-22T22:56:45Z

Electric Six are wonderfully ridiculous. After setting charts and irony barometers alight with anthems “Danger! High Voltage!” and “Gay Bar” (the former, featuring fellow Detroit resident Jack White, was only kept off the top of the charts by Girls Aloud’s “Sound of the Underground”), they’ve romped across the globe with disco-pumped rock ‘n’ roll for company. Recent download-only ode to virility “Vibrator” shows they have no signs of slowing down. All madcap synths and overwrought guitar solos, it features the almighty chorus “She don’t need no vibrator / no artifical stimulator / non-organic excavator”. This Christmas sees live favourite version of Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” finally released. We accosted singer Dick Valentine to talk Bush and bangers, Vikings and virtual volleyball.

Hey Dick, what are you doing?
“You actually caught me in the middle of watching Star Trek.”

William Shatner’s just had a record out. What do you think of it?
“I’ve only heard a couple of tracks, but Shatner is an incredible man. We were interviewed together once on a puppet show. These finger puppets were asking us questions and he’s doesn’t bat an eyelid. He’s just ‘pow-pow-pow’ with the answers and anecdotes. He’s so professional. I was blown away.”

What have you been up to since “Danger! High Voltage!” and “Gay Bar”?
“We’ve been touring mainly. The best thing about this job is that we’ve been to so many countries, South America, Japan, Europe, when before I’d be lucky to get to Chicago.

“We went to Moscow, and we were there for three days, and the Russian language threw us. You know how the Russian alphabet has characters from ours, but then their own ones as well? The hotdogs were spelt dead-dog. I think a couple of the guys tried them out without too much ill effect.”

What did you get up to there?
“It was quite a surreal experience, even though we didn’t actually venture that far. We’d go to Red Square, and then back to the hotel, and then be like ‘What now?’ and someone would go ‘Let’s go to Red Square!’. We must have been there and back about ten times. The thing about being on tour for so long is that you keep bumping into the same people at festivals. Franz Ferdinand had done every one in the galaxy, and we must have done seven with PJ Harvey.”

Did you literally bump into anyone?
“No you have to be careful about that. Bumping can get a little dangerous in the wrong circumstances.”

When I last saw you in the UK, you had a slight Patrick Bateman-esque quality in your performance. Was that intentional?
“Thank you. The main thing in New York that makes you want to chop people up is the restaurants. You can go in and ask for a table for two, and they will just laugh at you. “The best place to eat in New York is this place that does sausages – bangers, as you call them – and just covers them in grease. They’re amazing, and only cost like $8. That’s got to be the highpoint of the New York culinary experience. The rest of it for me is trying to get a table at a good restaurant, and realising quickly that I’m not of a high enough status to carry it off.”

How’s the new album coming along?
“We’ve written tonnes of songs, maybe 200. This record is a little darker. It’s a bit difficult not to be, living in America in 2004. There are a couple of tracks that you could take to be anti-Bush songs. Hopefully it’ll surprise people: because of ‘Gay Bar’ and ‘Danger! High Voltage!’, people assumed we had been listening to a lot of disco, thought we were into the Bee Gees or whatever, when that was just one aspect of our sound and essentially, we’re a fun rock band. Not so much like the Detroit garage sound of the White Stripes or the Detroit Cobras, but like the Pixies or something.”

Your new single is a cover of Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga”, which your publicist reckons is “set to soundtrack office Christmas parties everywhere”. How does that make you feel.
“It makes me feel like a hundred bucks.”

Is that all?
“What do you mean? That’s like £50 or whatever. Surely you’d like to feel like that. It’s a song that we’ve been wanting to release for ages – it almost came out last Christmas, and it marks the end of the first stage of Electric 6 and the beginning of the next one.

“The first album was joined together by the theme of fire – lots of the tracks had ‘fire’ in the title. And we initially tried to make this record about devils, and thought it would have a devil theme. But the devil must have got to us, because that didn’t work out, and currently it’s called ‘Detroit Stone’.”

People have drawn comparisons to Detroit in the last few years and Seattle in the early 90s. What do you think?
“I mean it’s similar in the sense that there’s one huge international band who have blown up, and lots of smaller, surrounding ones from the same area. But it’s not like if The White Stripes are Nirvana then we’re the Pearl Jam, or I hope not, although we’d love to do as well as them internationally. But I guess it is similar in that it’s quite a tight-knit community, and everyone’s into a lot of the same bands.”

What’s it like being in the US in the run-up to the election?
“You have a Bush channel, and a Kerry channel, and you have lots of other channels dissecting every single word. It’s quite astonishing the amount of analysis you can have over such minute details, but hey – that’s America for you.”

What’s your life like out of the band?
“When I’m not in the band, and not on tour, and not attempting to sneak into New York’s premiere eating establishments, I spend time on the Internet trying to work out who I am as a person. That’s the great thing, it’s got so many options that you can, say, see if the Viking lifestyle is for you. You can go in chatrooms and talk to people that share whichever weird interest you have. I did that, and found out being a Nordic Viking wasn’t for me. So you just move on to the next thing, which in my case was virtual volleyball.”

And how’s that going?
“Not so well. We’re currently 14-6 down to the Puerto Ricans.”

Fix Up Look Sharp

2003-09-29T15:27:49Z

I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES

“What I’m doing is representing something that’s been happening for a fairly long time,” says Dizzee Rascal. “There’s a lot of frustration and a lot of fear in my ends, but a lot of action and I’m an observer so it all goes into my music. The album is day-in-the-life, getme? It goes from sitting on a wall to lying in your bed. The things I chat about are what happens in my life. Some people find that uncomfortable, but so what? It’s real.”

There’s something that bothers me. Pop’s literal distorted plasticity (bumps or digital ones/zeros marking out sound) makes it pointless to attempt to reconcile to it a trope of realness. But nevertheless, its something that brings out a firing squad of clichés aiming point-blank at your ribcage. *It’s just noise, right?* Or: *no sell-out. Ever.* Or: *pop is not about inclusion.* Fine for the trust fund kids/bedroom romantics sloping/moping around in Manhattan lofts/Hertfordshire cottages convinced that the world owes them an artful living – but the reason that, say, US rap was triumphant for so much of the 90s and early 00s is because the intersection between aspiration, commerce and involvement is so important to how pop works: it slams forwards the innovation of the unknown, rather than the safe comforts of home. That equilibrium is uneasy right now. And it’s about time something took its place. It’s about time. It’s about…

YOU CAN NEVER OUTPLAY ME I’M AN ACE
Dizzee Rascal sits in the shiny new suite in the XL offices, continually refixing a New York Yankees cap, wearing absurdly baggy grey Nike jogging bottoms and a black t-shirt that looks like the Edward Munch’s The Scream. “I like it because it looks like me when I’m vexed,” he says, his lips cracking into a rare smile. (This may be because he’s been freshly delivered a pair of his beloved Air Force One trainers, customised with the “I Luv U” sticker-patches that cover every lamppost in London.)

Your album’s all *about* time, isn’t it? About never having enough, about wasting it away, about it slipping away from clammy fingers, zipping past in XR3i’s before you have time to breathe…
He pauses. “I dunno about that. But we don’t have much time, do we? There’s positive and negative, but you can always see the world slipping away from you.”
Man, you’re only a teenager. How do you think people twice your age feel? Doesn’t that make you slightly pessimistic?
“I know, but in a way that makes it even more crucial. I’ve got so much to do, so much to see.”

HAS IT COME TO THIS?
Perhaps aggravated by our current epileptic fit of nostalgia, but founded in a general malaise that stems back to the post-war years and beyond, youth culture is casually debased, derided and denied – but most obviously, patronised. It’s something that permeates leader columns in broadsheets, broadsides from tabloids, and the numbing tendency towards smaller word-counts in the music and style press. It’s something that blares out of *CD:UK*, every blather from Cat Deeley’s mouth a further argument for the legalisation of hand-guns. And it’s something that the likes of Dizzee Rascal, 18-year-old MC and producer from Bow and member of the Roll Deep Crew, can be seen as a grabbing a 50-foot flamethrower and storming the ivory towers in protest of.

It helps that he’s just released the album of the year. Called “Boy In Da Corner”, it’s a malevolent maelstrom that fascinates on so many levels. The production is crude, minimalistic, and almost nihilistic: snarling synth stabs and rat-a-tat rhythms ricochet off your synapses like flashlights against damaged retinas. On “Brand New Day”, “Sitting Here” and “Live-O”, there’s a quivering unsureness in the ice-hot electro riffage that Squarepusher or Venetian Snares would kill for. “Fix Up, Look Sharp” wheelspins on the freshest use of Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat” since UTFO’s “Roxanne Roxanne”, but it’s the only track that uses straight beats. The rest, like recent top-30 supernova “I Luv U” (written in school when Dizzee was 16), is off-key, abrasive and almost amelodic, and is completely in tune with my times: just like Nasty Crew’s piercing, frantic “Destruction”; the yardcore squall of The Bug’s “Pressure”; !!! and The Rapture shaping post-funk into writhing new forms; Broadcast’s impossibly addictive “Haha Sound”; and, of course, Lumidee’s heartbeat beautiful “Never Leave You”. And his voice is the most distinctive rasp I’ve heard in far too long. Stuttering, insecure, often sounding on the brink of breakdown, he also struts with sureness. It’s pretty much all perfectly contradictory, paradoxical facts. Dizzee is a thug rapper who wakes up wishing he could sleep forever. Dizzee is a sensate and sensitive teenager who casually talks about the increasing prevalence of war weapons. Tough as tungsten, soft as sodium, sad as madness, his lyrics are vulnerable, solipsistic, violent, vituperative, funny, petulant, obnoxious, beautiful, ugly, confused, cathartic. And English, too, flitting from a tearjerking growl/cry to Mockney yelps, its reference-points unfolding exponentially. Dizzee flushes “MCs down the loo”. He “comes old-skool like Aristotle”, but he’s also “old-skool like Happy Shopper”. He claims he’s a “problem for Anthony Blair”, but there’s little overt political protest. When these contradictions unfold on plastic it’s not always pretty. On “Jezebel”, Dizzee tirelessly piles into a young girl who ends up with two kids by the age of 16, bottle of whisky hand-in-hand with regret.

Do you have problems with relationships?
“Way I look at it is that, I’m 18, I’m too young to get settled down. Seen too many people get burnt. Seen bare amounts of girls from my ends losing their childhoods by getting pregnant. That song’s not against women in any way, it’s just about a certain type of girl that goes out looking for trouble and so trouble starts to follow them.”

“Boy In Da Corner” may be the sound of urban dystopia, a repeated image of skulls from the seabeds of *T3: Rise Of The Machines* floating to the surface, but it’s an album born of the 80s. That is, created from the freewheeling tensions that the generation of those of us born in that decade know so well. It’s my generation, the kids who came of age in the 90s. The decade in which, as Michael Bracewell correctly argues, surface became depth. The decade when grunge got big, but when hastily-copied jungle compilations were played on youth club stereo systems next to angsty rock hymns, gloriously cheap sounding rave anthems and Britpop’s yobbish/foppish posing, while sewage-sniffing bravado from the likes of Wu-Tang Clan, Nas and Mobb Deep were handed down from clued-up siblings. (It’s also the reason that The Streets’ “Original Pirate Material” made so much sense last year. The first record of the 00s to turn a narrative to what the 90s were about for people who actually lived through them, rather than those who sat swilling their fat faces and spilling it out on late-night TV as “cultural criticism”.) It was never unnatural. Dizzee loved Metallica and Nirvana and The Prodigy and was a jungle DJ before he started rapping.
“I borrowed that Nirvana album from some kid at school,” he says. “It was the one with that song, ‘dnn dnn-dnn, dd-dd dnn-dnn’, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, yeah? I didn’t know what those guys were on about, but that anger and energy really appealed to me at the time.”

ACCELERATE >>
In 1999, Wiley Kat, Dizzee’s spiritual mentor in (then non-existent) Roll Deep wrote a song called “Know We” that provided the springboard for the current generation of rappers on pirate radio. A step on from jungle crowd-hyping, it applied rudimentary rap skills to increasingly abstruse and lo-fi garage beats (long gone is the gorgeous gloss that marked 2000-era UKG), and begun to flourish on the London pirates and its associated rave circuit. Now, what Dizzee’s generation of pirate-radio reared artists have in common is the combination of the fearless naiveté and belief of youth, their tenure on the illegal airwaves rendering them unsuppressed and unafraid.
“Pirate radio, that was my education, the base, getme? But also, Wiley would take me to raves all over the country, which broadened my horizons beyond East London. Before then I was like, yeah this is my ends, this is it. But the more I see, the more I realise there is.”
You mentioned that being from London is important to you. But what is it about American clothes that you like so much?
“It’s not about America,” he argues. “It’s just that they’ve got the best styles right now. I don’t wear this because it’s American, it’s because I like it. It’s like the music I do: it’s natural to my surroundings.”
It’s something your lyrics seem to focus quite heavily on, too. East London. Bow, Hackney… What’s it like for you there?
“It’s pretty shitty, but it’s what I’ve lived through. It’s real. Council flats, ‘nuff poverty. Shotters. Blotters. Drug dealers, yunno? And mad beef. Guns are regular. And it’s getting worse.”
And music’s your way of getting out of that cycle?
“It’s a way forward. It can be a very positive thing, young people making up new metaphors and new sounds. You might say that this music sounds negative, sounds grimy, but that’s because of the world I’m in. There are bare problems. I saw the generation above getting in beef and using guns and that becomes normal, so my generation starts on all that even younger. And the generation below, bwoy, the fourteen year olds. There’s even 10, 11 year olds getting into all kinds of shit.”

*It’s about time*. A generation being little more than four years is laughable, but the notion of an accelerated culture makes sense for the pirate scene. New heroes regularly emerge or disappear. He enthuses about Tinche Stryder, a 16 year old from the Ruff Squad who has been on the pirates since the age of 12 and raps about ninjas and knockdown ginger. And he’s aware that his current position as president-elect of the garage new wave can be just as evanescent as adolescence itself.

“I don’t care about being the next Craig David, the next Ms Dynamite, whatever,” he says. “That was a different generation, getme? What I'm doing, what Roll Deep are doing, what More Fire Crew, what Nasty Crew are doing, it isn't garage anymore. It's a step on from garage, which was a step from jungle getme? People have been calling it grime because it sounds so murky, but I say, ‘I don't make garage, I make grhyme garage. G-R-H-Y-M-E.'”

Fiction

2003-09-28T23:45:42Z

Women are freaks and nymphos who wouldn’t know a good thing if it stabbed them in the chest. I come to this conclusion midway through a supernova of an argument that has been building up for the past five weeks. The argument was put off because my girlfriend – sorry, ex-girlfriend – had been watching too much TV, and she didn’t want to talk to me until after her programme had finished. (It never finished.) Afterwards, we broke up. Like all the best break-ups, it started with some insane twists and turns down blind corners, took a right into a crossroads of general instability before accelerating at breakneck speed into a full-blown HGV pile-up. Of complete and utter mentalism.

Here’s the story. It started on 23 May, perhaps a day or two earlier. We had been living in her flat for about three months. Summer hadn’t yet quite popped into view, but Big Brother fever had been bubbling through her veins. “But we just have to go along,” cooed The Girlfriend, sweetly. (She was not yet The Demon Ex From Hell.) “No!” I replied. “We are not going to travel miles to stand in pouring, freezing rain surrounded by people whose idea of fun is getting obsessed with slightly more orange people who aren’t even famous yet, just for the fleeting chance of getting spotted just to the left of Davina McCall’s earlobes.”

We didn’t go. We ordered a pizza and watched Anoushka re-enact her pubescent Friday nights while a sweaty swarm of wannabe CD:UK presenters and the fat one with glasses held their heads in their hands in the mortal terror of it all. (Metaphorically, of course. In reality, they grinned their toothy grins, drunk their lukewarm drinks and got on with strangers in a manner that only comes natural to the completely cretinous.)

I never heard the end of it. Or at least I didn’t for a week. For by then, she had claimed sick leave and had begun a daily stakeout in front of E4 with only her friends Pot Noodle and The Sun for company. Our loving relationship had had a brick wall erected in front of it by a mutant version of Waynetta Slob, a media studies student and the man across the road who used to intently stare at fourteen-year-old schoolgirls from his car window. No, not Gos. Her. And, no matter what you do, there’s only so much a man can take. I tried to remain calm, tried, for once, to not to appeal to my baser instincts. I offered bribes. I offered gifts. I slaved over dinner. I even ignored her for three days and begun the proofs on my diary-of-an-urbane-slacker novella. It was as if I was an illusion, but you can’t blame me for not trying.

Then, my nerve endings dangling over a canyon of love and regret, I cancelled our cable subscription and the flight towards fright begun. My actions were justified – but hell hath no fury like a woman deprived. I pleaded for her to consider what had happened, but all rational thought had been thrown out of the window. (The TV nearly followed.) She screamed. She questioned my manhood. She was stooping low. But when she attempted to defend herself using Big Brother anecdotes (“B-b-ut…Steph said…”), I knew it was time to go. TS Eliot once observed that “mankind cannot bear too much reality.” My own wasteland of emotional trauma testifies than man cannot bear a woman who watches too much reality TV. Now, can anyone recommend me a new place to live?

YOU FUCKING FUCKING FUCKS

2003-04-20T18:52:01Z

It's been a long time, and I've left you. Without even a dope beat to step to.

- Ends -

Climbing Out Of The Abyss

2002-11-29T01:51:30Z

"What we must lose now is this insidious, corrosive knowingness, this need to collect and contain. We must open our brains that have been stopped and plugged with random information, and once again must our limbs carve in air the patterns of their desire — not the calibrated measures and slick syncopation of jazz-funk but a carnal music of total release. We must make of joy once more a crime against the state."

We slide down cheeks like crocodile tears.

Beginnings

2002-09-13T22:28:13Z

This was the last day I remember being at home.

I was curled up tight in the foetal position. Stupidly scared. Degradingly scared. I felt sick: sick of being sick. And this only redoubled my piss-streaks of anger. In the crevices of my mouth, traces of leftover vomit swum for attention among slivers of vodka. As I yawned, saliva dripped down my chin with aching slowness. Fuzzyheaded from bodily abuse and glowing with rage, I was backed into a corner with nowhere to go, with nothing left to hate but hate itself. I plucked at the plastic rose by pillow and passively, impassively sniffed, numbly unaware that I was trying to inhale what was essentially painted shit from a gumtree. I looked at the bruises on my thighs and smiled. I knew that there would still be those marks from him. His bruises. His beautiful bruises. Beautiful like him. In my dreams he spins swords around his head like a samurai.

Self-harm, to me, isn't an act of vanity. It's an act re-enlivening the deadening flow of modern life. Of course, every cut isn't cute. It's a cure.

It was daylight. I knew this because the tranqs hadn’t kicked in yet so my spatial awareness was slightly above that of a retarded rottweiller. The engine of a big car, a Range Rover perhaps, purred gently outside my window. Quickly rising from my slumber, I peeked. Inside was a pretty brunette woman cutely stroking her baby’s feet, its face crinkled up like a ball of paper. The woman had a warm smile on her face, a smile that suggested that she had worked out a way that love didn’t have to hurt so much, didn’t have to twist your brainstem like the turbines on a jumbo jet: moving too fast, it’s too sharp and too dangerous.

I hated her for it.

This was the first day I remember being alone.

The Muses Are Heard

2002-08-19T21:39:18Z

I'm in slo-mo. Sweat trickles down her neck with the slowness of a stalactite grasping for the floor. Fear tingles through her fingers like electricity. The petulant summer has just begun to bloom. This makes living on the third floor of an admittedly elegant hospital for the mentally infirm slightly more tolerable. If only if it means that Samuel appears from the gardens with somewhat dustier shit caked all over his face at three in the morning.

We all smile.

We all sing.

Terminal Velocity

2002-08-08T17:24:46Z

He doesn't want to be here. He wants to be curled up in bed with the love of his life, the girl who has dug deep into the abyss and left marks on his soul with indelible ink. But what can a girl do when the the floaty world of ketamino is throbbing like Priapus through the pulmonary vein? So. You flow onward, float upwards, and suddenly you wake in the morning and find your pretty pink bed splattered with cumstains like blood from an assassination. This is a future. It's just a future with no flight, just fright, the sound of sirens; beatificy; jouissance.

Come save me.

Work In Process

2002-08-03T21:51:46Z

Paranoia Bites by Clare Falry

The vanquished last cries of the living dead. As first lines go, it's probably empty and probably suffused with enough portent that you'd believe it probably came from teenage daydreamer probably brought up with the realisation that the only thing you don't doubt is self-doubt. And that if existential crises wrack up on you, they do it to show love, to drive you forward, to prove that walking arm-in-arm among the daffodils with childhood friends is only a solipsistic trace away from a perspicacious remark from some old sage that your beloved country garden is in fact a double-decker car park somewhere between Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City. And that your old friend collapsed in a fit of rage six months ago and you might as well be talking to fairies hiding around the rim in McDonalds toilets. It's at times like this that you need some sort of medication.

Aside from these fucking pills, all I've got right now is a 2000 page collection of poetry with pages as thin as a King James Bible. It's too confessional. So confessional I feel like sticking a fork down my throat and puking up bile to show my utter disgust with the sheer isolationist vapidity of these classic characters. For weeks, I haven't eaten anything except husks of fried bread cut up into small squares and drunk strawberry yogurt flecked with small crystals of sugar glistening like diamonds. It's kinda worked: I can visibly see myself shrinking: my ribs now stick out proud. And it makes me feel proud. When there's nothing but empty triumphalism threatening to breach my ever-quickening suicide pact, I can't possibly not sign up. It wouldn't be fair.

It's not just dissatisfaction with the world, it's the realisation that everything I've ever thought or done or worked towards being pumped through the printed circuitry and distended synapses of a futuramic cyberman; fucking, grinding, opening the sluice gates and drifting away into an airport lounge with no destination. Into nowhere. Of course, nowhere. That's just everywhere with the lights switched off and a candle fluttering its way through the costal breeze. I wish I could close this window. Sometimes. Sometimes I just wish I wasn't blinded by crippling myopia and could see the other side.

When I half-close my eyes, ghosts rest on my eyelids and talk to me. And like it. I do. I really do. They show me their tar-black insides scarred by life, their beautifully still, undead hearts and minds. I don't think they share my deep, deep paranoia and dissatisfaction with the world, my sense of being blinded by the primordial fug. They're happy. Because death, to me, is the future, deferred. I'm looking forward to it. And because of this awful tightening of the noose, this defiling absolutism is what enacts the sadistic (realistic) fatalism (truth) of muggy millencholia (everything else). It's not the politics of the personal; it's my life being dragged into something less worthwhile, a pallid, squalid orgasm with the most inevitably pathetic release. My mind's so spaced out on these fucking chemicals that it makes the usual parallax blurred, inchoate. At least I'll have something to die for.

I'm not scared of the future because I know I'm bound to it. The future's bright. It's spiritual. It's just…empty space. Bright lights. Dead ends. I hope I'm right. The alternative is an existence weighted down with enough ennui to sink an aircraft carrier. Reincarnation would kill me. I want those bright lights and dead ends. I should have told you to lose that girl, but I'm guessing that all the modern world is useful for is images spatialised to decay, like autumn leaves cluttering up on paving stones. I'm guessing, but it emerges as an indistinguishable truism, too: as I try earnestly to carry on typing and not force my too-skinny too-flabby (moods are more important than opinions) wrist through the paper maché skull, crafted with the care of a perfectly-formed origami swan, that sits ominously on my desk, scarred with fucking awful fragments of pre-teen poetry. I can't make this phone call. I can't not make this phone call.

The pert blade cuts through pink cute flesh, digging deep. Not even a trace of blood drips onto the plate below. It's only chicken breast, but it's practice. And practice makes perfect, right? It's a way forward, a way on. It's a way. It is. It IS. It is the only way – other than this imperfect midnight recollection – of ascertaining if anything happened today, as all my life has become is a blur of immolating-pills and thought processes interrupted by carving gothic imagery into bricks in the garden. Brevity supercedes the confession.