Buddhist monks find that by focusing on the pain in life they can learn to accept its inevitability and thus transcendence the material world. It might be shocking to them find out that they share a brotherhood with British rapper Mike Skinner a.k.a. The Streets, whose second album is so full of the annoyances and pain of daily life that I expected the album to end with chanting.
Skinner’s first album, Original Pirate Material landed him critical success of the highest order on all sides of the globe, and left American listeners scratching their heads wondering how a Brit learned to rap like that. Despite the UK Garage leanings of Skinner’s style and the guy-with-a-Playstation feel of the beats, the album highlighted his incredibly gift for weaving a story and his focus on the everyday life. If American mainstream rap is too focused on excessive commercialism and gaudy lifestyles than Skinners album was its perfect antithesis, the story of a regular guy who smoked weed, dealt with depression, and got too drunk too often.
Since Original Pirate Material was released the concept album has gained more and more followers in all
musical formats, but rap world such given forth some of the best efforts, including the incredible Madvilliany, The College Dropout, and The Black Album.
And, with his latest effort—A Grand Don’t Come For Free—Skinner joins their ranks.
Unlike The College Dropout and The Black Album, this is not an album that can easily cull a single. Despite stellar tracks like “Your Fit but You Know It”, “Such a Twat”, and “Dry Your Eyes” the album works best only when listened to from start to finish, each track completing the next. A Grand Don’t Come For Free is, in many ways, the opposite of a silent movie. Instead of a picture with no words, this is words with no pictures. Skinner’s story-style lyrics reach new heights here, creating a movie clearly in the listener’s minds.
The story is the basic romantic comedy plot of Boy meets Girl, with a lost $1000 and a trip to Ibiza thrown in the middle. The only time Skinner throws off that formula is at the end of the album when he loses the girl. As he’s a self-proclaimed lout it’s somewhat shocking that Skinners best moments occur when he’s at his most heartfelt and poignant, such as “Could Be Well In”, “Dry Your Eyes”, and “Empty Cans”. “Empty Cans” becomes the perfect falling action for this album, with the added bonus of an alternate ending and a new philosophy for living.
In the end what makes A Grand Don't Come For Free is not just the beats (livelier and better than Original Pirate Material’s), or the pioneering literary style of rhyming, but the subtle touches. In “Such a Twat” Skinner talks on the phone with a friend and you can not only hear the faint voice of his friend, but the video game the mate is playing. During “Get out Of My House”, the track that depicts the beginning of the end for Mike and his girl, you can hear Mike’s weak arguments of “Ya know, that thing?/That you do/No, I can’t give you an example/No, I don’t remember the last time you did it/It’s just…ya know?” which both adds realism and hits close to home for all listeners involved.
A Grand Don’t Come For Free comes off like a Frida Kahlo painting, with all the ugliness and wounds exposed and more self-reflection than you’re likely to find in a teenagers diary. Unlike his Buddhist counterparts who are constantly searching the Universe for a higher power, Skinner decides that in the end that yourself is the only person you can truly rely on in the world. He may not be trying to shed the skin of this world for the next, but we’ve always preferred our saviors to keep their noses close to the grime of this one.
Artist:
The Streets