An interesting piece on The Streets's A Grand Don't Come For Free by Fergal Kinney at The Quietus...
.... it got me thinking about "Dry Your Eyes" and a certain strain of emotionally-frayed post-Britpop... loosely-speaking in the New Wave tradition: observational realism... ordinary blokes and blokettes singing about workaday worries and mundane luvlife miseries... one of those phases when the weak become heroes, or at least the protagonists, in pop.
Despite the blokey-ness, or geezer-ness, of The Streets, the bulk of Mike Skinner's progeny, or fellow-travelers, are women.
The very first time I heard this it struck me as a post-"Dry Your Eyes" move, and a calculated one most likely (if not by the artist, then the record company).
But in the Wiki entry, Mike Skinner doesn't appear in the long, large list of Kate Nash's avowed influences.
One of those avowed influences is John Cooper Clarke - which I can't quite see but it would bolster this notion of the 2000s wave as New Wave flashback, the reactivation of a tradition of tragicomic verse and grubby realism.
I can't think of another vocal delivery that is so glottal-stoppy.
Mind you, rather than a female Mike Skinner, Kate Nash could be seen as a post-Lily Allen artist.
In recovery from an amorous setback:
"See, you messed up my mental health
I was quite unwell
I was so lost back then
But with a little help from my friends
I found the light in the tunnel at the end"
Now right as rain but revenge-minded
"You left me in such a state" - the emotional bruises still yet to fully fade.
My favorite on the album, "Everything's Just Wonderful" - the title is ironic.
Distraught and insomniac from the pressures on the modern metropolitan girl - fashion-implanted weight-worries, mortgage-impossibilities
"Do you think, think
Everything, everyone is going mental?
It seems to me we're spiraling
Out of control and it's inevitable
"...It seems to me, we're on all fours
Crawling on our knees, someone help us please
Oh, Jesus Christ, Almighty
Do I feel alright? No, not slightly
Lyrics shift from the personal (worrying about that spag bol for "days and days and days" after eating it) to an existential-political register:
"Don't you want something else
Something new, than what we got here?
And don't you feel it's all the same
Some sick game, and it's so insincere?
I wish I could change the ways of the world
Make it a nice place
Until that day, I guess we stay
Doing what we do, screwing who we screw
By "The Fear", even Mark Fisher noticed and approved.
"I don't know what's right and what's real anymore
And I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore
And when do you think it will all become clear?
'Cause I'm being taken over by the fear
Life's about film stars and less about mothers...
But it doesn't matter 'cause I'm packing plastic
And that's what makes my life so fucking fantastic
And I am a weapon of massive consumption
And it's not my fault, it's how I'm programmed to function"
Lily Allen is addressing the same kind of malaises (personal-amorous and small "p" political) as Florence Shaw, but in a more pop-forward and lyrically more direct, less artfully fractured, way. (It's one reason - along with his Sleaford Mods admiration - that I have argued that almost alone of contemporary groups, K-punk might have rated Dry Cleaning).
While he had his canon, Mark could always surprise us with a taste swerve - e,g, his fondness for Dido (for similar reasons). Who belongs in this company, I think.
'White Flag' was one of my favourite pop singles of last year.... Belying her reputation for AOR confectionery, 'White Flag' is a song of desperate love, coming from the thin line between loving dedication and stalker-obsession..... Dido's delivery - almost stilted, lacking in the throaty passion de rigeur in these r and b dominated -times - is refreshingly cool. 'White Flag' forms a neat contrast with 'Life for Rent', the title track of the LP, which sings of the opposite condition: a dissolute inability to commit. It's like Jean Paul Sartre meets Sex and the City. Wandering aimlessly through the hypermarket of the postmodern, fingering all the options but never settling on any one of them, Dido castigates herself for her failure to really engage, to stick at or believe in anything for very long, to make meaningful choices. She concludes that, if this is the case, she 'deserves' nothing, because nothing is really hers"
Probably my favorite bit in the Kinney piece on A Grand Don't Come For Free is when he quotes Skinner discussing "Dry Your Eyes" with his record company and telling them "this is the song that's going to put me on regional radio"
I actually heard this next song on a regional radio station - indeed, not living in the UK I might never have heard it otherwise. We were driving to Dorset after my brother's funeral, to visit one of his favorite places on Earth, Swanage, scene of our boyhood holidays. Perhaps my state of mind made me vulnerable to its AOR charms? But no - t's a gorgeous song - I love the curling melody of the chorus, the way KT Tunstall's voice seems to shift and catch the light.
It's not actually as melancholic as other songs in this selection - the stance is resilience... battered a bit by life, getting older but with nothing figured out as yet.
It's that wistful whistle that places it in this company!
(Somehow I have never got it together to listen to anything else by KT).
I suppose we ought to have some Skinner...
This, and "Blinded By the Lights", were my favorites on A Grand
But overall, I wasn't taken with the concept / narrative. And the sound seemed Happy Shopper cheapo - shabby and spindly - compared to Original Pirate Material.
Probably that very flimsiness is what enabled "Dry Your Eyes" to cross over so massively: its Jona Lewie-ness put it across on Chiltern Radio and the like. Radio 2-ready from the off.
As opposed to the first album which rhythmically and sonically was closer to the sound of the, well, streets, rather than the sound of the suburbs.
This is probably the bleakest song on Original Pirate Material, because it has a memory of better days, a higher way of life, taunting at it.
The prototype for "Dry Your Eyes" in some ways, much better though
Winding up my selection - mostly stuff I like or love - here is my favorite album of whatever year it was: the s/t debut of The Good, the Bad and The Queen.
I described all this stuff as post-Britpop... and Lily Allen and Damon Albarn's supergroop fit that in two senses:
1. It's Britpop corrected - multi-racialised in sound, with Jamaica at its core (lover's rock in Allen's case, dub and roots with TGTBaTQ) and Africa too through Tony Allen's contributions to the latter.
2. I always like to contrast Damon's affect in TGTBaTQ with Blur - how he carried himself. The perky, perpendicular cheeky-chap persona of "Parklife" is replaced by a slumped bleariness. There's a documentary from around this time in which Damon appears - he's unshaven, he mumbles, seems vaguely downcast, and is clad in a drab-colored hoodie. You can practically smell the stale weedsmoke. This album likewise captures a man sagging into middle age, looking out at a crumbling and stagnant society, an England that's no longer Swinging Again... where the NuLab initial excitement has long since soured...
"A stroppy little island of mixed-up people"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Bearing in mind that I didn't live in not-so-Great Britain for the entirety of the 2000s (well, except for the summer of 2002, when I came over to do Rip It Up research), I must have missed a LOT of Sadsack UKpop of that era.,,,
Nominations please!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Ed suggests Adele's "Chasing Pavements", pointing to the Anglicism of the title.
Can't really hear it as being part of this company - the song seems too dramatic, retro-soul, pop-classicist. Sonically there's not that sense of exact-same-size-as-life. But I remember my mum really liked Adele at this point, i.e. before she lost all the weight, partly because she seemed like an ordinary person plopped in the middle of pop.
Anonymous suggests this by Jamie T, an artist I have never heard (not living in the UK) and only very faintly heard of
The frail vocal tones reminded me of Calvin Harris's "I'm Not Alone" which feels like it kinda belongs in this zone while not having the mundane mise en scene particularly
It also has the glottal-stop chorus, which creates a sort of just chatting not singing feeling, and a gulped emotionality.
The one true megastar the scene - if it was that - produced: Adele. Her first hit, 'Chasing Pavements', definitely lives in that sound world. And makes a consciously UK English statement with its title.
ReplyDeleteAmy Winehouse and the XX both also in that territory, I think. And my personal favourite, La Roux, although she was also a bit electroclash.
How many of these people were from Croydon (born, educated or resident), or Croydon-adjacent? Feels like a lot.
My review of A Grand Don't Come for Free, part 1 (Christ, even typing that grammatical error flossed my punani and no mistake).
ReplyDelete2002, along with continuing the streak of every year of this millennium being utterly crap, saw the release of Original Pirate Material, the debut album by The Streets, a garage/hip-hop homegrown work by Mike Skinner, a talented emcee from Birmingham, who pretended to be Cockney to the bones. Now, I started university in 2002, and beforehand I spent some time in London, and I can tell you that Original Pirate Material was everywhere in the capital, for good reason. Original Pirate Material presented a recognisable portrait on contemporary youthful London life, both hedonistic yet somehow unsatisfied, loving the pub-club-spliff-takeaway treadmill yet wondering if life should be so shallow and focused on instant gratification. Mike Skinner proved a witty, incisive lyricist, a man steeped in that British tradition of the clever-beyond-his-class songwriter, and it demonstrated that UK hip-hop, oft a kicking-boy of British music, could foster an independent, worthwhile voice. This is not to say Original Pirate Material was perfect; many found The Streets grating and oafish with justifiable reasons. But I was not one of them, and I had moderately high expectations for what The Streets would achieve in the future, and A Grand Don't Come For Free could have cemented Mike Skinner as one the great British lyricists.
I hated it. I found this album abysmal. It is the sound of a starving artist being offered a banquet, then pigging out and disgusting everyone by pouring custard onto a beef wellington and subsequently vomiting all down his front. Every decision made on this album proves to be exactly the wrong one, and I have no idea why this, instead of Original Pirate Material is on the list.
Harsh, I know, but the deterioration from the first album to the second is palpable. For his second magnus opus, Mike Skinner decided to make a concept album. That sound you just heard was you releasing the safety catch off your grandad's luger. So, a concept album about a poor young man who meets a girl, blows all his dosh on an ill-considered bet, gets drunk/stoned/pilled-up, loses the girl, then either sits in his flat resenting his bad run of luck, or finds a grand down the back of the TV (yes, that last part makes absolutely no sense). As a narrative, it sounds and is pretty banal. But the main issue with the story is that even though the chap goes through a series of common experiences, the listener doesn't empathise with him at all. He just seems such a twat. He goes through these experiences with little genuine reflection, almost like a philosophical zombie, an entity with no internal life whatsoever. The girl leaves him because she clocks that he is just a loser, an opinion with which the listener agrees. The albums second greatest weakness is that you just don't care about him.
The biggest weakness? Mike Skinner's rapping. All his talent, all the lyrical flair on the first album has vamoosed. Try saying this couplet:
I might ask my mates where they'll be drinking
From the sofa giving them a ding
Seriously, just say it. It feels awful in the mouth, because it is an incorrect use of metre. The entire album is constructed from similarly jackknifing lines, lines which invariably end in the worst rhyming couplets conceivable. Again, look at the cited example, which manages to be both lazy and laborious. And then Mike somehow succeeds in making it worse by STRESS-ING EV-ER-RY SYL-LAB BLE. Mike Skinner seems to be aiming not so much for Roots Manuva as Pam Ayres. A Grand Don't Come For Free is one of the most wince-inducing cases of second album syndrome I have heard.
Part 2 (yes, I'm being self-indulgent)
DeleteThe biggest hit from this was Fit But You Know It, which was a huge song at the time. Fit But You Know It doesn't quite slot into the risible concept of the album, which can only be to its credit. But consider the song's half-life. Dapper Laughs was a comedy character by an already-forgotten estate agent-turned comedian, whose schtick was short skits on Vine depicting a wilfully crass lad (his catchphrase was "Proper moist!"). His routines consisted of 6-second bits where he would say, for instance, you shouldn't eat a banana next to a gay man, as he'd think you'd want to suck him off (ba-dum-tsh!). ITV2 (the number tells you it's crap in advance) gave him a short-lived TV show, where he tried to parody dating advice shows by granting his wit and wisdom to actual members of the public (such as shouting "GET YOUR GASH OUT!" to show off your adventurous side). A few rape jokes down the line, his show got put out of our misery, and the comedian had to go on Newsnight and announce he was retiring the character. Anyway, the theme tune to Dapper Laugh's show was Fit But You Know It. That's what I now associate the song with: a pillock shouting at passing women to show him their boobs for proper bants.
I think you need to start a blog!
DeleteI don't know how to read that statement. Was it a nod of acceptance, or were you telling me to fuck off with such drivel? Sorry I'm so sensitive.
DeleteNo, I'm saying you've clearly got a lot to say, on a lot of subjects.
DeleteBut also sometimes the comments are a little long for the comments box format.
Mind you I do tend to do elongated comments myself - things keep occurring...
And throughout this piece, you didn't mention Coldplay. Mike Skinner latching onto the sad indie kid vibe? There was a group fulfilling that payslip.
ReplyDeleteOasis' Stop Crying Your Heart Out came out the same year as A Rush of Blood to the Head. Very much the pupil teaching the master, only nobody cared to remember Oasis songs at that point.
Though I tell a lie, since the song was covered as some abysmal talent song travesty, which did lead to the perversely upbeat consequence of another Oasis song entering the popular canon (I'm not going to hide my fondness for Oasis, and I'll go as far as saying Be Here Now is nowhere near as bad as its detractors say (though not even approaching the first two albums, obviously)).
Yes Coldplay are certainly morose (more so early on in their career) and the singer does have that sort of frayed, crumbly, peaky vocal texture similar to Kate Nash (apparently it comes from singing at the upper limit of your vocal range, so that strain is audible, it sounds like you are on the edge of bursting into tears). But not sure they quite belong in this precise company - I don't associate them with lyrics drawn from mundanity - that oh-so-English mise en scene. I'd bracket Coldplay as post-Radiohead. But admittedly I only know a handful of the songs. In recent years (well the last decade or so), their singles have been "up" in mood.
DeleteThe related tendency in British pop / rock of that era are all the deeply sentimental post-Coldplay bands beloved by TV reality show producers: Snow Patrol, Keane, etc. Sometimes generically known, following Alan McGee's dismissal of Coldplay, as "music for bedwetters". McGee later partially recanted his attack on Coldplay, on the grounds that the bands that came after them were even worse.
DeleteTom Ewing has a great line on it in his Popular post on 'Dry Your Eyes Mate':
"Westlife for lads; hug rock; territories being claimed at the time by the wave of post-Oasis, post-Radiohead British bands like Coldplay and Snow Patrol, poets of that zone of muddled male feeling where sorrow and inspiration and catharsis and repression all mix."
https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/01/the-streets-dry-your-eyes/
there's more of this stuff around now, Cat Burns and Rachel Chinouriri. A sort of britpop revivalism with confessional lyrics and a certain mundanity. Un-blokey and quite heartfelt, but the delivery and the music kinda drags, it's serviceable stuff.
ReplyDeleteKing Krule feels like another inheritor of that tradition still working today.
DeleteYes he's got that mumbly, bleary speak-singer thing.
DeleteI like some of his stuff.
Oh, this has just been pointed out to me. If you google Shaun Ryder, it defines him as an "English singer-songwriter and poet".
ReplyDeleteThat last word makes me so happy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZvYkZfAtq0 ...?
ReplyDeleteExactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of, and exactly the kind of thing I completely missed through not living in the UK.
DeleteYes! I was about to mention Jamie T, who has always seemed like a bit of a Poundland Mike Skinner to me, but I guess for that reason fits the bill exactly.
DeleteI note that he has a picture of Ian Dury prominently displayed on the cover of his first album, which shows what tradition he thinks he is working in.
I'm thinking Calvin Harris is sort of in this zone, albeit not the 'mundanity thing' but the frail vocals of "I'm Not Alone" - although that is edging into the 2010s
ReplyDelete