Mike Skinner's Simple Common Sense

Twenty-three year old Mike Skinner is a "geezer" -- a young, suburban British male immersed in the nation's electronica scene, a scene currently dominated by such homegrown subgenres as "garage" as "two-step." Although black Britons have pioneered much of the music itself, Skinner is white. "I'm not middle-class and I'm not working-class either," he described himself to The Guardian's Alexis Petridis. "My dad didn't work in a factory, he was a salesman, and he ended up being quite successful . . . suburban estates, not poor but not much money about, really boring."

Fortunately for kids like Skinner, technology has become both affordable and accessible -- even a modestly financed child of the British suburbs can now afford to make a killer record in the privacy of his own bedroom studio, utilizing easily downloadable computer programs. And that's exactly what Skinner did. Incredibly, the resulting album has not only become a runaway success in Skinner's homeland, but it was also nominated for the country's prestigious Mercury Prize alongside such heavy hitters as the Doves and David Bowie. (The prize later went to another fledgling artist, British R&B thrush Ms. Dynamite.) Original Pirate Material (Vice/Atlantic) is the cocky name of Skinner's knockout debut, which he credits to "The Streets." "It's the English streets, the reality streets," he elaborates. "It's not inner city, but it's stressed out, bored people."

That's an important distinction to make, because the Streets happen to be the world's very first true hip-hop act of note from Britain. Predictably, rock critics have been making a bigger deal about the nationality and ethnicity issues inherent in that achievement than those in Skinner's target audience, but that doesn't mean those issues aren't worth addressing. At the very least, negotiating that fine line between imitating your exemplars and representing your own is delicate business. When the Beatles and their kin echoed American rock and roll back across the Atlantic in the early sixties, the point was, naturally, to sound American. The Fab Four referred to girls as "birds" in conversation amongst themselves and their friends and popularized scenester words like "fab" and "gear" throughout the world, but they rarely used British slang in song, and certainly didn't sing with their true Liverpudlian accents. That all began to change with British punk, but the mainstream apotheosis came with Neil Tennant's raps in the verses of the Pet Shop Boys' immortal "West End Girls." For Americans, it was a shock and a pleasure to hear Tennant intoning in his natural voice; for the British, it must have felt something like home.

For his part, Skinner began by copying the American rap records he adored, mostly mainstream stuff -- Run-DMC, Snoop Doggy Dogg, De La Soul. The turning point came when he hooked his raps to the music of the British garage and two-step scene, started delivering his lyrics in his own Birmingham accent, and began to construct narratives that reflected the "geezer" lifestyle of himself and his friends. "I'm totally talking about me and my people," he told Entertainment Weekly. "I think [English] people get so passionate about rap music that they kind of forget who they are."

Original Pirate Material very much stakes a claim for Skinner's British subculture; in fact, that's one of its greatest strengths. In truth, Skinner doesn't have a traditionally great rap voice -- his slight frame guarantees he won't ever be able to bellow like a Chuck D or Rakim -- but he uses his thin timbre to great advantage, and his pungent accent punctuates every word. Also delightful is the very British orientation -- in one of the most quoted lines, he waggishly asserts, "Around 'ere we say 'birds,' not 'bitches,'" a very funny statement of policy that establishes a distinct Anglo identity for the music, yet still explicitly implies the music's debt to African Americans. And yet, nevertheless, the music itself owes far more to Afro-Britons, as Skinner's brew jettisons the funk and soul samples associated with American hip-hop for the rhythms of his native garage scene. Far more hectic and driven than the rap Skinner grew up with, his music chatters and sputters like the pill poppers in his songs, with the dub and dancehall elements welcome and surprising touches.

But Skinner's real gifts would seem to lie in his talent for compelling narrative, pithy lyrics, and biting irony. "Simple common sense," is how he describes his worldview in one of his many memorable choruses, but here's how that chorus goes: "Geezers need excitement / If their lives don't provide them this they incite violence / Common sense / Simple common sense." For Skinner, common sense seems to fall somewhere between accepting the reality of your situation and ignoring it because you're past caring about the consequences. The cognizance of both realities makes his raps thrilling -- in the last scenario of "Geezers Need Excitement," a "geezer" fools around with a "bird" who's not his girlfriend, only to find his own girl "laughing and joking with a bloke." But though Skinner comes up with a spiffy euphemism for getting violent on that bloke ("show him who's man, football fan style"), he also advises, "Even as they smile, you still got choices / Don't listen to the voices / And at the end of the day you may just have caused this / So leave the forces." Great advice -- but how can we trust that advice was heeded when the chorus makes a final appearance, and repeats ominously to the close?

Many of Skinner's other lyrics are equally as cinematic, worthy of the orchestral sweeps and tympani rolls that accompany them. "Too Much Brandy" details a lost weekend in Amsterdam with aplomb ("Then you drink doubles / The same speed you drink singles"). "It's Too Late" could very well be the only love song in which a narrator loses his girlfriend because a liaison with his drug dealer fouls up a scheduled romantic rendezvous. And yet, despite the seedy subplot of that song, Skinner gets off some of his most extraordinarily elegant lines: "We met first through a shared view / She loved me and I did too," and, in a line that perfectly encapsulates the excitement of love in bloom, "Standing at the top of this huge mountain, smiling and shouting." Later on, he comes up with what could be the most beautiful song ever written about dropping a first tab of ecstasy: "The weak become heroes / Then the stars align / We all smile, we all sing." Once again, Skinner accepts, in theory, that the drug scene is a dead end -- in the last verse, he's returned from that youthful memory of his first rave and is back in the present, greeted by "the same Chinese takeaway selling shit in a tray." But faced with what's going on around him, he seems to ask, what other alternative to drug and rave culture is there?

Skinner makes his best argument for the geezers in the supremely sarcastic "The Irony Of It All," in which he casts himself as two sides of a bar fight: drunken middle-aged lout Terry and pothead college grad Tim. "Who cares about my liver when it feels good?" Terry demands to know, and he reminds the pub repeatedly, "I never broke a law in my life," making one wonder how many he broke when he was young enough for that claim to matter. Skinner, predictably, has stacked the deck in the best possible way -- sure, Tim's so sweet he won't yell at the pizza man for screwing up his order, and sure, he uses his engineering degree constructively (to fashion homemade bongs). But he's also self-serving and patronizing -- under a snidely fey piano loop, he tells Terry, "According to research, government funding for education pales in insignificance when compared to how much they spend repairing leery drunk people at the weekend." Who's to say that the irony of it all is that Terry could be Tim only if he could magically be given back his youth, and that smarty-pants little bastard Tim knows it, and just loves to rub it in?

Original Pirate Material is rich stuff, and best yet, it's the most noteworthy debut in a year when artists on their third and fourth records are producing most of the best music. The album is so sure of itself that it will be interesting to see what Skinner will do as an encore. Certainly, the song with which he closes, the haunting "Stay Positive," is as tough as they come -- an unsentimental anti-heroin song the advice of which sounds like it came pretty hard for Skinner, regardless of whether he's actually done smack or not. What's most remarkable about the song, though, aren't the warnings about escaping harsh reality via hard drugs, but rather Skinner's grim acceptance that everyone is alone in that reality to fend for themselves -- "I ain't helping you climb the ladder / I'm busy climbing mine / That's how it's been since the dawn of time." Of course, such grandiose statements are always up for grabs, the subjective nature of what we perceive as reality is a given, and Tim and Terry could argue what is and what isn't until Terry gets pissed and punches Tim in the face. The truth? Maybe. For now, call it common sense -- simple common sense. Let's just hope the next time this geezer needs excitement, he turns it into song.

Chicago, IL
November 2002