Can Someone Please Explain The Streets To Me?

"being a townie" vs. "'rapping' about being a townie" FITE!

i'm not sure, i loved Has It Come To This? but i've not been quite so impressed by the rest of what i've heard (although it has been ok)

i don't think of his voice as being unemotional though, anything but, hes not the impartial observer, more the partaking chronicler, maybe?

people are mentioning the specials. i guess this is because of that track with the trumpet? i can sort of see this comparison. theres a little bit of a parklife meets snatch type thing which i'm not so sure about.

somehow the tracks i've heard seem a bit more schticky than the single, but then i do kind of like schtick, a Brit Green Velvet maybe???

can you tell the diff between this and middlerow though? hmmm. i'll buy th'album anyway though

the new album is album of the month in this Muzik's magazine but there's 2 reviews of it: one giving it 5 stars and saying it's a clever, ironic & extremely funny album that is the sound of now and the other review giving it one star and basically saying it's complete and utter bollocks...

haven't heard much of it myself but it does seem to be polarising people's opinions into love it/hate it...

The last record I can remember getting the double-review good cop bad cop treatment was Bowie's Low in the NME way back in '77 - rave review by Ian MacDonald, slag-off by CSM. So clearly an era-defining document. Personally, can't wait for it to come out.

Comparing him to the Specials is a joke, because The Streets says absolutely nothing about what it's like being a youth nowadays. He probably projects an idea of what the NME would like to think the youth are like in these days, but...

well, its one conception of what that is, just as the specials was. but, playstations, kebabs, pills and rizlas. these are very common things are they not? so, i would argue that these are prominent and normal things, relevant today?? (unless things have changed radically in the last few years)

Anyone can reference the cultural and material influences of the day, but it takes a much more special person to capture the feel and zeitgeist of it. Qf "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies for proof...

Just defeated your own argument there, haven't you?

Jesus, the Barenaked Ladies. And this guy expects to be taken seriously?

Eh... I meant that BNL say lots of pop cultural things, and that doesn't make them musical Couplands, does it?

Whoever's idea of youth it is, it ain't NME. I don't remember them ever documenting the hazards of chip-throwing in their endless veneration of the YOOF.

matt (groovypanda@hotmail.com), March 15, 2002

hullo matt :)

"The Streets says absolutely nothing about what it's like being a youth nowadays."

i wish i could think of a good way to write the sound of the family fortunes our-survey-said- sound. Eh-eh is like a deaf old man if you don't know what i mean, and uh-uh is like some mumbling jim jarmusch ny cool thing. anyway the sound is yours! you betray yourself when you called him a towny... no one knows what towny means in town. i expect you use the word pretentious a lot, another concept that is alien to city youts. mentally you live outside of london. you feel very pleased when you laugh at tim westwood. it's ok. how old are you btw? cos somneone the streets age/culture would call himself judd nelson cos he was the voice of hotrod in transformers the movie rather than his part in the breakfast club which is what i expect from you.

i don't like the streets. actually i am indifferent, it's not a suburban daily mail angst thing.

at first i thought you called yourself judge reinhold. where is that guy?

"Videos, televisions, 64s, playstations, Web henry with precision
Few herbs and a bit of Benson, But don't forget the Rizla"

I think I might like the streets, but I can't get past how boring the generation it's being the voice of is.

I think that's sort of the point to that segment, innit?

So when's the album out, anyway?

Next week in the UK, don't know about Oz Tim.

Oh, I know it won't be coming out in Oz. We haven't gotten So Solid Crew, so why would we get The Streets? No, I'm not bitter. Not bitter at all.

I think I might like the Streets but I can't get over how boring the generation it's being the voice of is

True but I mean, these preconcieved notions of generations are complete bollox anyway. I mean, we all do what we all do. I'd be more comfortable with them being described as being really insular to their own scene in a good way that allows them/him?? to describe it accurately. Not a big fan of "voice of a generation" type blurbs.

Well, above around Bleeker Street, the East-West crosstreets start being numbered sequentially as you go North. The North-South avenues are, more or less, start in the East after FDR Drive and are named backwards from D, then sequentially from 1st Avenue after Avenue A as you go West. Lexington, Park, and Madison Avenues replace the nonexistent 4th Avenue, in that order, from the East.

Fuck it's good. I've never been comfortable with the idea of bands speaking for me (call it fetishisation of the Other if you want to be a cunt, but I want my pop to be hyperreal), but sonically, it's just so damn sumptious I can ignore that.

It's definitely more of a hip-hop album than a garage album (but in the same way as Stankonia was a hip-hop album) because it fits so uneasily culturally with UKG's parlous position right now and more with the Big Dada / Son et al.

(But if you do want to go more garage, there's a wicked wracked-out mess of space and bass on the Zed Bias mix of the new single)