British hip hop has always been a sort of guilty pleasure of mine. As a high schooler my brother and I had a side project called “The Wankers” where we threw down silly rhymes and rapped in faux British accents, a project based off our shared love for the wonderfulness of the British accent and all the delightful nomenclature that can be found in its various dialects. And our biggest influence, by a country mile, was rapper Mike Skinner also known by his on-stage moniker “The Streets”.
There’s many elements of Original Pirate Material that fill me with a sense of nostalgia. There’s the tales of working-class experiences that are easy to immediately identify with. There’s his razor sharp wit and self-deprecating humor, delivered in deadpan monotone that make you laugh when he spits a bar like “This ain’t no wholesale operation/ Just a few eighths and some PlayStation’s my vocation/ I pose a threat to the nation” (“The Irony of It All”) that upon hearing it for the first time makes you almost jealous you didn’t come up with it first. And there’s of course his prodigious sampling ability that combines garage rock sensibilities and house music to create arrangements that turn into bangers, with the epic build-up in “Turn The Page” being a wonderful representation of Skinner’s ability. It is absolute aces.
But what I’ve always appreciated most about The Streets is the intimacy of his storytelling. Skinner has always had a way with words that feels deeply personal and honest, a nakedness to his thoughts that bares his deepest fears directly alongside his boastful bravado. It comes through in nearly every track on Original Pirate Material, but perhaps no more succinctly than the heartbreaking lost love story he tells in “It’s Too Late” that recounts a first-person tale about taking his loving girlfriend for granted until she finally wises up and leaves him. The melancholic gut punch of a line like “We first met through a shared view/She loved me and I did too” is vintage Skinner, a line that cuts straight to the marrow in its brashness while also foreshadowing the loss he’ll eventually feel when that hubris spells the end to his relationship. It is quite literally perfect.
A lot of that intimacy is due to the process Skinner went through in writing and recording Original Pirate Material. The bulk of the album was recorded in a room in his South London flat, where Skinner used an empty wardrobe filled with duvets and mattresses to reduce echo as a makeshift vocal booth. In addition, every beat on the album was recorded and mixed on an IBM ThinkPad and mixed on Logic Pro. Keep in mind at the time this was a rather novel approach in 2002 when studio recordings still ruled the day, and certainly helped contribute to the DIY aesthetic that lends its charm to the album.
So here’s to The Streets and The Wankers, two legendary UK hip hop artists forever entwined in time. Even if only one of them is aware that the other exists.
Standout Songs: “It’s Too Late”, “Let’s Push Things Forward”, “Weak Become Heroes”, “Turn The Page”
