There's one simple reason that Mike Skinner, who calls himself the Streets, is being hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as the best rapper ever to come out of England -- the 22-year-old white Birmingham native knows what it means to represent. As he told New Musical Express just before the English release of his debut album, Original Pirate Material (it was released here last Tuesday on Vice/Atlantic), his moniker refers not to the "inner city" but to the "stressed-out, bored people" of white, working-class, provincial England. The echoes off these streets -- think of the cracked pavement surrounding a neglected suburban housing project -- can be heard in his thick working-class accent and his thin garage beats (British garage, or two-step, is that nation's latest moody dance music, a combination of slowed-down jungle rhythms and stripped-back house refrains). But the reality of drab concrete comes through most vividly in his words: he outstrips most English rappers by turning his cool poses into cutting poetry, or at least solid prose.

And it's largely those words that have prompted English critics to outstrip their own infamous proclivity for exaggeration; they've resorted to brute exclamations (Muzik: "The Streets is lyrical fucking genius") and outlandish comparisons (Mail on Sunday: "This is Shakespeare for clubbers"). Even the stiff-upper-lipped BBC proclaimed, "Not since Never Mind the Bollocks has there been a record that has said as much about being young and living in the UK." The agreement of young Brits on that point aside, some qualification is in order. Unlike Never Mind the Bollocks -- or, for that matter, anything by Billy "Da Bard" Shakespeare -- Original Pirate Material is destined to mean more to "geezers" over there than headz over here. Skinner isn't to blame for this shortcoming, and neither is hype-happy England. It's a problem endemic to hip-hop -- which, after all, is what meaningful rapping over dance beats should be called. Or should it?

To understand why the Streets might not be considered a citizen of the hip-hop nation, consider the pitfall of comparing one skinny white-boy rapper to another. Although the protagonist in Original Pirate Material ingests as many drugs and explores the thrill of macho violence with as much gusto as the antihero of The Slim Shady LP, Skinner's raps lack the incendiary imagination that Eminem lit all over his 1999 breakthrough. In part, that's because Skinner's rhymes are tempered by a sense of consequences that Eminem pointedly eschews. Even the album's bloodiest track, "Geezers Need Excitement," closes with the reminder that "you still got choices/Don't listen to them voices." And when Skinner adopts some of Eminem's smarmy techniques on "Too Much Brandy," a goof about getting fucked up, his tale of self-abuse is nonetheless tinged with the unsentimental pathos of straight observation (which is why it isn't half as funny as Eminem's tall tales). To his infinite credit, Skinner refuses to draw moral conclusions. But he also isn't "being real," just realistic, and that's an altogether different stance, one that distances him from the fantasy-driven hip-hop that's broadcast from America to the world.

Except that for all its larger-than-life boasting and bleating, American hip-hop shares with the British variety a profound sense of place. This loyalty to locale holds fast even when -- or perhaps especially when -- that locale is a burned-out wasteland like the Bronx, or Birmingham. In his bio and interviews, Skinner readily concedes that he spent his formative years trying to imitate American hip-hop. He changed his tack only after a year-long Australian jaunt jolted him into a sense of where he came from. Like some Zen b-boy, he discovered that the only way to be true to his American idols was to leave them behind and reimagine hip-hop as British youth culture.

Granted that Original Pirate Material is a product of the hip-hop nation as much as anything by De La Soul or Aesop Rock, the musical precedents for its raw but ruminative tone are all English. As other critics have noted, you can hear the Specials' cockney ska even before Skinner slips into a reggae groove and mellow horn on "Let's Push Things Forward." And at its most beautiful and haunting, the album is kin to Tricky's 1995 masterpiece, Maxinquaye, an album whose nihilism was relieved only by its dogged ambition to move one step beyond hip-hop's ever-expanding universe. Seven years later, the Streets abandons that ambition to fashion homemade club music for a generation living a life of "sex, drugs and on the dole." Cheeky, that. To quote Ian Dury, the recently departed King of Cockney, there ain't half been some clever bastards.

Issue Date: November 8 - 14, 2002