Maybe this is the sound of head-kicker UK swung-from-the-gutters
grimy-garage stepping out of the underground, out into the glow of a
new day. Or maybe this new day is the first day of a whole new world
of hip-hop, and this sound sounds a new year zero, its current
currency reduced to nothingness, worthlessness. The newly crowned
king of this head-kicking cipher would be battle-hardened Dizzee
Rascal, an 18-year-old phenom from East London, authoring belligerent
beats equal parts bare-knuckled violence and astonishing productional
precision. His compact-digital debut deserves LeBron-like media
coverage; his coronation at head of all this
underground/overground/new-ground/breaking-ground we-be-born-again
vengeance comes with coming-of-age dramatics usually reserved for
genre films. His nascent reign starts as hip-hop again reinvents
itself; this time, as some belligerent missive from English tenements
("don't talk to me about royalty 'cause/ Queen Elizabeth don't know
me so/ how can she control me when/ I live street and she lives
neat?"). This disc is the most savage razing of the genre's
extraneous elements heard since that first Prefuse 73 disc. And it
all starts with "I Luv U." Initially offered up in friends-and-family
amounts on some white-label side last year, Dizzee's shit-hot single
has now been primed for popular consumption by the checkbook-waving
A&R brothaz at XL, the cats who took folk on the precipice of
popularity like Basement Jaxx and White Stripes and sold them large
to the world at large. They've now inked up Dizzee's Roll Deep Crew,
and fast-tracked the crew's hottest head first, getting his gear out
large to the world at large first; he being the first to step off
from this new zero, and all. And, as single, "I Luv U" is a square
kick in the box for all those regular faux-sexual-tension boy/girl
bits churned out by the biz, in which some gruff-voiced hip-pop dude
and some large-haired R&B warbler trade verses with as little sex or
tension as possible. Amidst freaky syncopated rhythms stabs and
dack-cacking atonal bass so shit-kicking it wouldn't be out of place
on a Pan sonic record(!), Dizzee and guest girl Jeannie Jacques drag
the listener by the hair into some (shit)kicking and screaming world
of teenage infidelities, swapping verses of vile spat out with spit
and bile, vivid and vicious in a fashion that's hard to fashion into
communicative syntax. Like, it's impossible to describe the track's
fucking excitement in words. Even better than that are the words
Rascy rolls with on the cut that comes after, "Brand New Day," in
which he, like a poet who composes what the world poses, talks about
the increasing hostility of the youth in his council estates. This
seems to reflect back on the culture originally exported by hip-hop,
seeming like kids the world over have bought the myth of those
mythologizing themselves, like 2Pac's gangsta-pantomime in a hall of
mirrors. But, then, where 50 Cent is slave to playing out that role
all over again, essentially living life as cliché manifest,
Dizzee is way above all this. For this is not hip-hop as you know it;
and, even then, it's rarely garage as you know it, either, with only
a few cuts (like the upbeat beat-up "2 Far," on which he and Roll
Deep colleague Wiley lawnmower-mouth the mic) seeming to really strut
in a two-stepped meter. See, Boy in da Corner defies genre in
a defiant manner, refusing to be defined, refusing, even, to be
dismissed.
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