"Is that some English Shit?" - Gold Chains vs. The Streets - TS

gold chains = dishonestly "honest."

Has anyone else here heard of Goldie Lookin' Chains?
I think the name is just a complete coincidence but they sound a bit like The Streets.

Here's their website with free (that doesn't mean poor) music:
http://www.youknowsit.co.uk/

a "positive" review, too.

But Skinner cannot flow! He can... talk. This may sound exotic to ears across the Atlantic, in the same way that women in crap films always find British accents sexy, but still... Ironically enough, extending it to the SSC, Neutrino can flow quite well, but, content wise, he must be the worst rapper around at the moment (sample line: "Your IQ must be about three", or, of course, the forever great "I'm sicka these fake MC's, soundin' like Mr Blobby").

"it'd be incorrect to write off The Streets as either poseur or gimmick, and in a genre where unique lyrical perspective is especially important, the UK vibe is an intriguing element."

Plus even features self-referential "safe hip-hop for indie rockers" line... ;)

(* heh, bob z to thread.)

I like Skinner's flow OK, I just don't find it as wildly wonderful as others do (I think his rapping has been favorably compared to Nas and his beats to RZA's on ILM, just for starters).

And MC Pitman really does crack up! Probably I couldn't handle more than a few tracks from him either, but he's hysterical.

Really, I don't think I want Brit MCs to play up their Britishness.

But don't all MCs play up where they're from? Call it representing or just aligning themself with the east/west/south sound, how many rappers can get through an album without a reference to Crooklyn or the Shaolin Isle or whatever? Surely, it's better for, say, Blak Twang to make an album that is so obviously London born and bred than for Mark B and Blade to make an album that sounds, lets be frank here, like it was made by Americans. And crap Americans at that.

(i think the beats are easily the weakest part of the streets album. then again the rza hasn't produced anything really worth hearing in a long while now.)

i totally agree on the slang part, but i don't think it goes any real way towards explaining why ca$h money or no limit sold 500 billion records around the world.

To take a random example, with Massive Attack/Tricky, you never felt like they were particularly about being British.

But this is just me. It's certainly true that hip-hop is about representing where your from.

(nas is just the first example that comes to mind! i could search through all the threads and come up with a whole list of comparisons)

dom, not being british i have no real idea, but didn't uk garage "get big" with "rewind"? (i can't believe "bound 4 da reload" was the first garage hit to get into the top 10, maybe the first to number one, yeah.) (i also agree that it's novelty, but i have no real problem with novelty. my derisive use of novelty was mostly skewed at ben's assertion above that you have to be a misfit brit rapper to get attention.)

Trying to work out whether these successes were more or less authentic to garage than "Bound For Da Reload" is a mug's game - in many (even most senses) any garage track that gets to number one is by definition a novelty, because it's clearly appealing to something outside of the confines of the garage audience. The true measure of garage's crossover is not how well a single track did but rather how many tracks were doing well at any given time. And Truesteppas, MJ Cole, Sweet Female Attitude, DJ Luck and MC Neat, Wookie etc. were all charting impressively prior to "Bound For Da Reload". If you said that "Bound For Da Reload" heralded a paradigm/generational shift within garage then I would agree with you 100%.

dom sometimes i think you come from planet nofun.

ha, you might say 'Bound 4 Da Reload' 'killed' garage in the same way people said 'Charly' killed rave i guess

"Flowers" would have gone top two anyway with or without garage, because it was a local radio savvy girl-n-b track with remix potential.

dom sometimes i think you come from planet nofun.

I'm currently listening to The Police. No, seriously, I am.

Gold Chains vs The Streets FIGHT!

Although more properly, the same people who produced Bound 4 Da Reload went on to produce the SSC as an exstension of their work.

v. funny.

Re: Bound 4 da Reload.

I'd say this actually signified a return to the original chart garage paradigm established by Double 99 and Da Click in 98-99 - these were rough-sounding records with prominent MC elements, just like SSC and Oxide and Neutrino. (talking about the Double 99 remix with Top Cat, obv).

the video was funny too, i was waiting for him to just loose it and throw himself on the tour manager there like some crazed bald midget wrestler.

Jacob that's a *very* selective reading of the history of garage! Where does Rosie Gaines/Tuff Jam/Ramsey & Fen (ie. the "original garage paradigm") et. al. fit into this? And what about the fact that "Good Rhymes" was really just a throw-forward to "Do You Really Like It" (done by basically the same people)? Seeing as there was a steady increase in MC tunes throughout 98 --> 99 --> 00 --> 01 I don't think So Solid Crew were picking up on abandoned threads so much as drawing logical conclusions and running with them.

The shift with SSC that had *never* appeared prior in garage to my knowledge was the idea of MCs being dark and paranoid. It's interesting listening to MC stuff from 2000 - no matter how moody the music was the MCs were always fairly upbeat (I'm thinking right now of Kie's great line in TKS's "Fly Bi": "K - Kinder Surprise! I - right through the eyes! E - just realise!"). When "Oh No" hit it was pretty groundbreaking because it signalled a=that shift in MC-ing towards self-conscious pessimism and arrogance that the novelty factor of "Bound For Da Reload" had obscured.

In CHART garage, anyhow...