The Streets

“Juke-Box” is a step back from the album format, a return to the building blocks of pop: songs. Riffs, choruses, words and images: those of the video clips, or those that music evokes and uses to seduce the listener.

The aim of this column is precisely to enter into this game of seduction, always crucial and always taken for granted. To uncover its stories and its protagonists, but above all its mechanisms, rules and exceptions. Guided by one simple question: how does a song work?

Birmingham, West Midlands. Here “boat” is said “baut” and the words “choice” and “price” rhyme. You can spot a Brummie from the very first vowel, and his accent is stereotypically taken as a sign of low intelligence. Better to keep quiet than talk like that – especially if you're after a certain coolness.

But a rapper can't stay silent: he has to speak to the masses, has to give voice to the masses. He has to invent something – a trick, a disguise. Like: passing himself off as a Londoner. Choosing, among the capital's various accents, the one best suited to his purposes: cockney, symbol of the proletarian, run-down, multicultural East End.

It's not exactly a new ploy, this one from Mike Skinner aka The Streets. Before him, plenty of others had already resorted to mockney (mock+cockney: an imitation of cockney) to give themselves a working-class, suburban air; Damon Albarn of Blur essentially built his pop credibility on it.

The Streets, however, needs a different kind of credibility. He's aiming for hip-hop's idea of represent: "I say what you live and think." A logic that has never really worked in the UK – the few previous UK hip-hop successes were decidedly more pop-oriented than their American counterparts. Subcultural identification in England has always run through other channels: mod, punk, 2-tone ska. Musical styles deeply rooted in the social and ethnic fabric of English cities, quite unlike hip-hop, an "imported product" good only for second-generation immigrants and hotheads chasing exoticism. Not for the white working class – which, in fact, holds little interest for Skinner. He wants to target the middle classes, the twenty-somethings living in those pretty nineteenth-century terraced houses, who "don't study, don't work" and prefer DVDs and PlayStation to TV, who smoke tons of ganja while their parents are out of the house. And who have never wanted anything to do with hip-hop.

Mike Skinner needs to make work what has never worked. He has to iron out the kinks, and if necessary redesign the whole mechanism: mapping out an English Way for hip-hop. Faking an accent isn't enough – for his character to hold up, he'll also have to flaunt a precise lifestyle, act the part with ease, and if possible exploit some of the tricks that have proven effective in the past… And of course, make it all as pronounced as possible.

“Let’s Push Things Forward”: it's a manifesto and a statement of intent.

Cue the video: clouds, a train on a suburban overpass, a double-decker bus, a phone box – red. Underneath, a nice Madness-style skank (horns, organ, the requisite upbeat). Skinner doesn't even need to open his mouth: London is already everywhere, and the lower-middle class is right there in the houses, in the cars driving around, in his ostentatiously casual clothes.

Then he comes in: “This ain’t the down it’s the upbeat / make it complete“. Or rather, something that's written like that but pronounced in a way that would horrify any language student – the t's vanish who knows where, the rhyme squashed into an untranscribable diphthong. “This ain’t yer archetypal street sound“, “This ain’t your typical garage joint“; he goes on stacking up negations, hammering home the distance from a hip-hop stereotype he sees as dead weight. Skinner comes across as confident, and provocative: he takes aim at American niggas (“‘round ‘ere we say birds, no‘ bitches” – "round here we call girls 'birds', not 'bitches'"), but also at compatriots he'd rather not call "colleagues" (“I make bangers, not anthems / leave that to The Artful Dodger / the broad shouldered, 51% shareholder” – "I make bangers, not anthems, leave that to The Artful Dodger, those broad-shouldered types with 51% of the market"). Then, over a Jamaica-tinged chorus, he even drags in the unsuspecting listener: “You say that everything sounds the same / then you go buy them” ("You complain that every record sounds the same, but then you go and buy them anyway") – the blame for the stagnation, in short, lies with whoever keeps feeding the business.

The pattern is, in the end, a rehash of classic hip-hop boasting (“come son figo / come son bravo / vi smonto ancora prima di prendere il microfono”), but the degree of obliqueness and offhandedness sets it apart from the ghetto canon. Rather than simply glorifying himself (which he does anyway: “I excel in both content and deliverance“, he states almost right at the start, Skinner lays out the merits of his track and tries to build himself a persona by indirect means: “This ain't a track, it's a movement“, and even though it's unclear how his babyish apathy could ever lead any kind of uprising, you almost find yourself believing him. As per the playbook, he indulges in flash imagery and wordplay, but he's quick to poke fun at himself over it: “So it’s just another showflick from your local city poet / in case you geezers don’t know it / let’s push things forward” (It's just another bit of zapping from your little city poet, in case you hadn't got it, but let's move on).

Let's stop for a moment on the word geezer. It's a term used across the UK, meaning an "eccentric old man". But among young people it points to a different human type: in the East End, the ordinary laborer, part hooligan, part good-natured mate, who gets smashed on beer at night and lives for Sunday's match. Now, though, with Estuary English having colonized half the country – and certainly all of London – it means something looser: white male, twenty-something, layabout, son of a working class that's grown wealthier – by now practically indistinguishable, economically, from the middle class proper. Exactly the "customer" The Streets is speaking to.

And precisely the guy who does not buy into his boasting. As often happens to working class heroes, Skinner actually breaks through mostly among hipster students chasing the next big thing. Which isn't surprising: the whole "washing your dirty laundry in the Thames" routine sounds too contrived for the children of London's post-proletariat, but the novelty factor and the sarcastic little vignettes filling his songs are catchy enough to win over anyone perpetually on the hunt for the next made in UK phenomenon.

The new kind of represent Skinner shrewdly cooked up doesn't really work, but he still does decently with his debut album “Original Pirate Material”, sold under the tagline “A day in the life of a geezer“. And then? By the time he returns in 2004 with “A Grand Don't Come For Free”, he's largely left behind the scruffy, idle character of his early days. Now he dresses well, hangs around upscale restaurants, talks about cocaine and £1,000 bets. From suburban boredom to the alienation of the star system – and the album shoots straight to number one.

In the meantime, though, something has shifted in UK hip-hop. A young East London tearaway – black, of course – emerged with a sound that was acidic, hammering, jagged; his name is Dizzee Rascal, and the album is "Boy In Da Corner". His style is built on violent, fractured UK garage beats, tight rhyming, liquid structures, and sub-bass turned up to the max. It's the tip of an underground iceberg involving both black and white kids in a new street subculture – the very movement The Streets could only ever pose as. Music that doesn't chart, but brings the first authentically English strand of hip-hop culture to media attention, under the name grime. But that's another story altogether.

(19/09/2010)

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06/02/2026