Original Pirate Material : The Streets : Review : Rolling Stone

The Streets now have a name, and it's twenty-three-year-old musical mastermind Mike Skinner. He's audacious enough to title a track on his first album "Let's Push Things Forward" -- and inventive enough to deliver. The relentlessly smart Original Pirate Material blends two-step garage beats with conversational rapping, low-key in effect but bold in content: "We first met through a shared view/She loved me and I did, too." Skinner is from Birmingham, England, which means that some of his monologues sound like Ozzy Osbourne, only with better beats. The rhythms are spare but groovy; Skinner enhances them with melancholy keyboards and orchestral samples.

The United Kingdom has produced very few rappers of note (Slick Rick and Monie Love are among the exceptions). But Skinner's raps are not only fluid and clever, they're pervaded with Britishness; guys are "geezers," girls are "birds" and weak rhymes are "rhubarb and custard verses." That sense of place goes beyond vocabulary: Original Pirate Material evokes the gray British skies and details the mundane world of English youth -- broke and wasting time on the PlayStation. Skinner has said that the name the Streets was not meant to evoke the mean streets of tough urban life but rather, empty, anonymous concrete.

On "The Irony of It All," Skinner stages an argument as good as Eminem's "Guilty Conscience," playing both Terry, a drunken lout, and Tim, a mellow engineering student who likes to smoke weed. They debate criminality and provoke each other; on the evidence of this excellent debut, few people can challenge Skinner right now except himself.

GAVIN EDWARDS
(RS 908 - October 31, 2002)