FEATURE:
Sharp Darts
The Streets’ Original Pirate Material at Twenty
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I am not sure whether…
there will be an anniversary edition, or anything planned to coincide with its twentieth on 25th March. The Streets’ (Mike Skinner is the principal member and songwriter) Original Pirate Material is one of the best albums of the first decade of this century, and it remains one of the most important Hip-Hop albums ever. Heavily influenced by U.K. Garage and American Hip-Hop, its lyrics are rooted in the working-class lives of British characters. Real, honest, funny, laidback, endlessly sharp and innovative, I don’t think we have heard anything like Original Pirate Material since it came out in 2002. Packed with heart, humour, cheekiness and lyrical brilliance, the album was recorded at Mike Skinner’s house in Brixton. I think its D.I.Y. feel gives Original Pirate Material so much authenticity and authority. At fourteen tracks, there is so many wonderful stories and standout songs throughout. I think that there will be new appreciation of Original Pirate Material leading to 25th March. Such a relevant and influential album, it has not aged or lost any of its wonder! To show why The Streets’ debut album is so important and loved, it is wise to reference some articles. Classic Album Sundays named Original Pirate Material a modern classic. That status and honour is more than just:
“Skinner had moved to Brixton from the suburb of West Heath where he first dabbled in music as a child messing around with keyboards. By his teenage years he was obsessed with US hiphop, particularly impressed by the production skills of figures such as DJ Premier and RZA, whose work can be heard on classic tracks by the likes of Nas, Wu-Tang Clan, and Gangstarr. Inspired by their innovative fusion of sampling and drum machines Skinner began to explore the basic principles of beat-making, an interest which would soon intersect with early nightclub experiences with the then commercially dominant sound of UK garage. In-between shifts at fast-food restaurants he remained a struggling musician, sending out hopeful demos to record labels before eventually striking up a relationship with the independent Locked On, who had enjoyed hits with acts such as Artful Dodger and Craig David.
‘Has It Come To This?’ emerged in 2001 as the debut single of The Streets, becoming an unlikely hit when it reached number eighteen on the UK charts in October. Built around a beautifully seductive chord sequence and an archetypal garage beat, the song is an endlessly quotable ode to delinquency and a rallying cry for homegrown talent. The grimy detail of Skinner’s lyrics, which portray “a day in the life of a geezer”, depict the lazy debris of video games, freshly rolled spliffs, and loose scraps of tobacco, littered around the central mantra of “sex, drugs and on the dole”. The notable lack of gloss offered a realist counterpoint to garage’s typically aspirational lyrics, which centred around the glamorous fantasy of the nightclub, and in turn perhaps represented the lives of those listening to the music closer than the genre itself. Despite the languorous lifestyle it revelled in, ‘Has It Come To This?’ showed a level of ambition that outgunned many of the high profile club MCs.
Skinner’s versatility became abundantly clear with the release of Original Pirate Material the following year. Playing like an amorphous blend of UK music history, the album traverses sound system dub and reggae, punk, new wave, house, garage, and (whisper it) brit-pop, with the naturalistic ease of an artist emerging at the dawn of online artistic consumption. The syncopated stabs and pinpoint sound effects of ‘Let’s Push Things Forward’ offer up a novel blend of Jamaica, Brixton, and Birmingham, as Skinner’s voice surmounts an equation which theoretically just shouldn’t work.
Opener ‘Turn The Page’ echoes the faded glory of The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ with its grandiose string arrangement that elevates the lyricist’s everyman to the level of mythic warrior. The utopian yearning of ‘Weak Become Heroes’ is underscored by chords imported from Detroit or Chicago and sustained by the eternal pulse of the kick drum which unites the crowd of an imagined rave. Primarily working out of his South London room, these vivid and varied tracks proved just how adept the young musician was at forming innovative combinations with a limited set of resources.
Skinner’s unlikely charisma on the microphone underpins Original Pirate Material’s surprisingly complex depiction of modern masculinity. Despite living in London, throughout the album the MC expresses a provincial sense of boredom and a pent up rage that manifests in binge drinking, chip shop fights, and lary confrontations with friends and lovers. His self-awareness can be fun: on ‘Hold It Down’ the banter is infectious and the self-defeating nature of male heterosexual desire is hilariously skewered. Likewise ‘Too Much Brandy’ offers a queasy perspective from the midst of a European stag-do gone horribly off the rails. But elsewhere the routine grows torturous: ‘Same Old Thing’ vocalises the creeping dread of the repetition, and the way in which its protagonist attempts to break this monotony through a serious self-destructive acts hints at a low-level depression rumbling below the surface. By the time we reach the album’s closing song, ‘Stay Positive’, Skinner’s disenchantment is overt and devastating, the loneliness articulated by his listless lyrics which were recorded whilst the MC was suffering from a cold. It is Original Pirate Material’s fading afterglow – a moment which frames the preceding forty minutes as some kind of existential crisis just waiting to erupt”.
In 2009, The Guardian named Original Pirate Material as their favourite and best album of the decade. The fact that its core was all about U.K. Garage, I think, accounts for its popularity, relatability and realness. This is an artist who was representing what was happening in 2002, both in music and on the streets of London:
“At first hearing, the almost pathological self-effacement of Tim (the mild-mannered bong-builder who goes head to head with lagered-up Terry the law-abider in the Streets' Socratic dialogue The Irony of It All) seems about as far from the defiant self-assertion of the Who's "Hope I die before I get old" as you could possibly get. But for those who would like to remember the Noughties as a period in which British pop actually moved forward at the same time as regressing into The X Factor's primordial ooze, Mike Skinner's generational rallying cry is every bit as potent as Pete Townshend's ever was.
The two most important criteria for any self-respecting album-of-the-decade contender to meet are that it could not conceivably have been made in any other 10-year period, and that it should be impossible to imagine how that decade might have sounded without it. And the Streets' triumphantly down-home 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material, ticks these boxes for the first decade of the 21st century with the same winning flourish as Massive Attack's Blue Lines did for the 1990s.
Whatever bold claims you might make for Derek B or Mr C or even Massive Attack's 3-D, Mike Skinner was the first to prove that a British rapper could speak directly to a nationwide constituency in a voice entirely his own. The raw-boned but finely honed debut of this "45th-generation Roman" established that British hip-hop could be more than just an aspiring frontier outpost of the imperial American homeland. It also turned out to be the missing link between the observational songwriting of the Kinks and the Specials, and the current pop apotheosis of Dizzee Rascal.
As large as the album looms over the British musical landscape of late 2009, its roots were to be found in the heyday of UK garage. "Every garage MC to my knowledge at that time was really a rapper," Skinner remembers. "The thing about garage was, it gave you a chance of breaking out and reaching a wider public, whereas if all you were doing was making 'UK hip-hop', there was no hope of that happening. Yet at the same time, being a garage MC was not generally regarded as prestigious. If you're a rapper, that's a good thing: you're a wordsmith. But if you were an MC – at least until the momentous Dizzee Rascal came along – that was more like being a holiday rep."
So as well as giving Skinner confidence, did the crossover success of UK garage also give him something to react against? "I've probably said it too many times now," he nods apologetically, "but that's where Original Pirate Material came from: all this stuff about get the girl and drink champagne on the dancefloor, it sounds nice to my ears, and I like that bass line, but sorry mate, I don't know what you're talking about.'"
"My experience of listening to UK garage, which was huge," Skinner continues, "was in people's cars and houses … and the idea behind Original Pirate Material was to make music which reflected that – to be someone who was on the one hand very English, but at the same time a bit like Nas, and could come up with these cool-sounding couplets about all the weed that gets smoked and all the little adventures that you go on”.
I think Original Pirate Material is an album that will still be celebrated and explored decades from now! In a year when the British music scene was changing, along comes Mike Skinner and co. to deliver this incredible album that caused a huge stir. A truly original and staggering album, Original Pirate Material is coming up to twenty. In 2017, FADER spoke to various people to ask what the album means to them fifteen years after its release. I have picked out a few responses:
“Annie Mac, DJ and broadcaster
I first heard “Has It Come To This?” on Ross Allen’s radio show on BBC London. It was late on a Sunday night, in my bedroom in the house I shared with my brother’s band in Forest Gate, east London. I had never heard anything like it. His references were instantly recognizable — the mundane everyday issues of public transport, cheap drugs, fast food, and hangovers. There was no self aggrandizing, just brilliant phonetical descriptions of street life and culture. And it is hilarious in parts — the characters we meet and the pictures painted are so vivid.
Last year, we did a discussion feature for my radio show on BBC Radio 1 with Laurie from Slaves, Matty from The 1975, and Little Simz. All of them cited Mike Skinner as one of their biggest influences. The album is a bona fide classic, and it’s still reverberating through popular music and influencing our U.K. artists left right and center.
Rob Mitchum, journalist
In 2002, the nuances of British electronic and hip-hop culture went way over your typical American music critic’s head — which is my lame excuse for wildly misinterpreting Original Pirate Material when reviewing the album for Pitchfork that year. Since then we’ve had grime and dubstep to put U.K. garage in retrospective context. But I was pleased to discover Original Pirate Material still sounds bonkers 15 years later. Tracks like “Don’t Mug Yourself” and “Sharp Darts” are like head-on car collisions that somehow build a motorcycle — there’s no way these combinations of beat and flow should work, but they do. Mike Skinner was also ridiculously adept at mixing the grand and the mundane, with severe, ragged orchestra loops scoring the most minute of observations. “Weak Become Heroes” might still be the most accurate song about raves in existence, with a woozy pulse, a relentless, wavy piano loop, and stream-of-consciousness imagery detailed enough to trigger flashbacks. Call it first-timer luck or genius, but The Streets’s sound aged a lot better than its genre labels and clueless reviewers.
Kojey Radical, artist
I remember hearing [Original Pirate Material] for the first time and thinking, This feels like the perfect medium between garage culture and indie music. It was like the perfect soundtrack for not knowing what you want to listen to. Hearing “Stay Positive” in [2006 U.K. film] Kidulthood confirmed it was the soundtrack for growing up in London and marrying all the cultures that you come across. I’m from east London and the way [Skinner] spoke reminded me of just going to a cafe on Roman Road and speaking with the people there. Lyrical rap can feel daunting, but Mike Skinner’s approach removed all that tension in understanding lyrics, and made it sound like a conversation. (As told to Jacob Roy.)”.
Could an album like Original Pirate Material exist today? DAZED revisited it in 2017 and noted how it is distinctly British. Maybe it was a reason why it was not really known in America. I think that has changed in the twenty years since its release:
“Original Pirate Material was as British as it got, but unlike Britpop a decade earlier, it wasn’t an aggressively patriotic celebration of Albion that came striding in with a Union Jack-adorned guitar. No one who describes themselves as “45th-generation Roman”, as Skinner does on “Turn the Page” with sly wit, believes in pure Britishness; if anything, they’re drawing attention to the absurdity of such an idea. Original Pirate Material was the lives of common people as told by one of their own, shot through with deadbeat realism – no wonder it struck a chord with so many. Skinner intelligently examined the ritualistic lifestyle of “sex, drugs and on the dole” with a sympathetic eye. Everybody knows a Terry, the loutish moron on “The Irony of It All”, emboldened by alcohol: “I down eight pints and run all over the place / Spit in the face of an officer, see if that bothers you.” Terry, the target in Skinner’s merciless crosshairs, is exactly the type of bloke who gets drunk on lager and “Wonderwall” karaoke-singalongs, the sort of hooligan stereotype portrayed in the media by the riots at Marseilles beaches during the France 1998 World Cup; Skinner’s Britain, meanwhile, is multicultural, a place where you can meet both rudeboys and foreign strangers on E in clubs, as on the elegiac “Weak Become Heroes” (“I known you all my life but I don’t know your name / The name’s European Bob, I’m sorted anyway”).
The album soundtracked the beginning of a decade – recovering from the Britpop hangover and comedown from New Labour euphoria – but also defined it. If you weren’t old enough to be one of the stoned night-owls playing Gran Turismo or “discussing how beautiful Gail Porter is” (in “The Irony of It All”), then your older brother and his mates definitely were. The poignant “Stay Positive” explored the despondency of a generation bitten by drug-induced paranoia and inner-city brooding: “You’re going mad, perhaps you always were / But when things was good you just didn’t care”; the point at which “weed becomes a chore (...) so you follow the others onto smack.” Mundane things became loaded with significance, like the choice between “Maccy D’s or KFC” or busting moves in your Reebok Classics.
The album was of its time, and it’s hard to imagine something like it existing now – in 2017, club closures, the high cost of living and gentrification are leaving the sort of audience Original Pirate Material embraced in its day poorer and even more marginalised than before. The pangs of nostalgia that arise from “Has It Come to This?”, a bass-heavy wobble flexing with skipping 2-step rhythms and cannabis calm, might leave them wondering: what has it come to? Furthermore, today’s dominant sound is no longer Skinner’s, despite grime’s resurgence: pop is far too scattershot and diverse for breakthrough records that catch the nation’s imagination”.
I am looking forward to 25th March and seeing how people react to the twentieth anniversary of Original Pirate Material. An album that s so characterful, contrasting and hugely accomplished, I wondered whether a reissue would come out with extras and demos. I guess, as the album sounds quite raw and urgent, there might not be too many sketches and other bits we have not heard. No matter. The Streets’ Original Pirate Material is a wonderful album that is…
PERFECT as it is!