C/D: Plan B, "Sick to Def"

Musically, I loathe the whole guitar schtick. I'll admit, though, that I found his backwards verse more captivating than "Rewind." Blasphemy?

ILM in a nutshell.

"My name's Ben like Nigel"

the video is ace too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByvQ8ExmXq0&search=plan%20b%20mama

And "Sick 2 def" is breathtakingly relentless.

xxpost - hes not even from the grime scene so he cant be the token white emcee plucked from there and hurled at the liberal broadsheets and critics at time out who love the idea of a rapper with a guitar who works with ugh, the earlies. i like the guy, he tries a bit too hard, and theres only a few tracks where he really lives up to the hype, but he could be great later on.

Without a pause, Plan B's answer: "Jo Whiley".

What an utter utter fuckwit.

xp

is one of these the one that was on the first run the road? that was good.

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wauIGhax9xg

i knew he would end up singing

didnt know he would end up sounding so much like lenny kravitz though

that rap in the middle is just shit though

fucking terrible

he should just do one or the other

no one wants to hear kidulthood in the middle of their mark ronson album

i keep seeing this twat acting badly in films about 'broken britain' (well london). why does no one see the fake-ness?

holy shit what the fuck

oh god im my own worst enemy

the fucking trailer for plan b's godawful new album kept coming up on spotify

and eventually i kind of semi-wondered what the concept was at the heart of his concept album

...

resisted this kind of weird morbid-curiosity thing for weeks, but eventually looked on wiki

it's about a bloke who's wrong done up for rape

oh, great

i predict he will be singing and leaving rapping behind in no time.

Titchy = (Pre-coalition) Vince Cable of ILM

its about rape? ugh/lol. apparently it was originally going to be a conceptual DOUBLE album but the label but the smack down.

id like his new reinvention a lot more if he just stopped rapping completely. its like having kidulthood stuck in the middle of alfie or something.

She Said is quite nice. For about twenty listens. Then the rap begins to annoy. Then the rest. I did send the youtube link to my dad. It's very much in the style my dad likes. But I bet he was convulsing by the time the rap bit came on.

The last track, "What You Gonna Do" Strickland is in court again as new evidence has been brought up on his case. The album finishes with the listener not sure of whether he is sent back to prison or released, leaving it open to interpretation.

Clever. Very clever.

When he won the award for Best UK male (clear and obvious winner), he was saying his next album was going to be hardcore rap again, the next one "reggae, maybe" and that he'd never make another 'soul' album.

And I was saying "OK, bye then..."

New single.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=s8GvLKTsTuI#

Try again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=s8GvLKTsTuI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8GvLKTsTuI

The video, the beat, the inevitable Daily Mail furore and the fact that a mainstream platinum-selling pop star is doing this *at all* all considerably outweigh the fact that Plan B still can't really rap.

Heart's in the right place but it's not a patch on Alles Neu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD0A2plMSVA

that ill manors song sounds like Danny Dyer wrote it.

seriously impressed by this song/video! i'd never been into plan b before (lol reading the first bit of this thread) plus i had a bit of kneejerk suspicion re: people fêting rappers the minute they agree with them politically BUT this is seriously good as well as politically necessary. really impressed with the way he crams in & connects so many references into the verses, and how he's so knowing about the media lens and how things are perceived. it's so much more than sloganeering but it's viscerally angry as well.

think i saw someone on twitter point out that the leningrad sample is a good connection to another city under siege...

"we got an eco-friendly government, they preserve our natural habitat / built an entire olympic village around where we live without plling down any flats"

keep on believing what you read in the papers
"council estate kids", "scum of the earth"
think you know how life on a council estate is
from everything you've ever read about it or heard
well it's all true, so stay where you're safest
no need to set foot out the 'burbs
truth is here we're all disturbed
we cheat and lie, it's so absurd
feed the fear, that's what we've learned
fuel the fire, let it burn

^^AMAZING

great stuff from DL too http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/mar/15/plan-b-ill-manors

The Siege of Leningrad, also known as the Leningrad Blockade (Russian: блокада Ленинграда, transliteration: blokada Leningrada) was a prolonged military operation resulting from the failure of the German Army Group North to capture Leningrad—now known as Saint Petersburg—in the Eastern Front theatre of World War II. The siege started on 8 September 1941, when the last land connection to the city was severed. Although the Soviets managed to open a narrow land corridor to the city on 18 January 1943, lifting of the siege took place on 27 January 1944, 872 days after it began. It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history and overwhelmingly the most costly in terms of casualties

caualties and losses

Red Army:[6]
1,017,881 killed, captured or missing
2,418,185 wounded and sick

Civilians:[6]
642,000 during the siege, 400,000 at evacuations

sounds similar to modern day London yes.

I really enjoyed this song. I'm with Lex in thinking his rapping is actually pretty good. I had no idea he had become so hated, guess I missed this thread until now.

"become so hated"? i thought everyone hated the guy from day 1

he had a couple of promising joints really early on but yeah swiftly turned pretty shit

Ok, well I obviously got to the station too late to jump on the hate train. That previous album really does suck based on the songs posted here. The song he did with Jose Gonzalez was tolerable but I can't really think of any other material of his I actually like.

that ill manors song sounds like Danny Dyer wrote it.

not that bad, basically like a prodigy b-side. thought that then saw a remix by them in the youtube side bar. british limp bizkit.

Growing up, Plan B felt outcast from the rest of the school pupils.[4]

"We weren't working class but we weren't middle class, we were in the void in-between. I've always felt like a social outcast."
—Plan B, The Telegraph (15 June 2006)[4]

who can forget the repeated stonings of the not middle class not working class

I'm just going to stick this here:

http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/2012/03/plan-b-is-not-your-saviour/

I mean, the first paragraph was obv what caught my attention in terms of "why oh why yet AGANE is The Left lionising yet another career rape apologist?"

BUT as much as I hate "takedown" interweb culture, the author goes on to say some pretty incisive things about Plan B's responses to the riots, both now and at the time, and how they play into some Liberal myths which could be pretty dangerous? I don't know. It seemed a pretty good counterpoint to me, because the writer isn't attacking Plan B or the working classes, he's attacking the myths that Liberals are buying into, by lionising this guy? Interesting to me, anyway.

Seems like a counterpoint to some of his commentary about the riots at the time, rather than the song itself. Which is fair enough, but it's not what people like DL were talking about, i think.

The message of the song, for me, is that if you treat people like criminals, they'll act like criminals. If those in power take away social amenities and employment then they can expect their lives to be impacted in a different, but connected, way to the lives of the people they are affecting. The safety of the comfortably off is dependent on not treating everyone else like scum. That seems to acknowledge that the riots were political, in at least one sense, and that the issues are structural - not simply a question of people not having the right role models or attitude to 'wealth creation', etc. idk.

"It is the destruction of capital that will end poverty."

I for one am shocked that Plan B's single does nothing to bring about a Marxist revolution.

Weirdly Brendan O'Neill's Spiked piece yesterday accused Plan B of doing exactly the opposite - ie excusing the riots - but at least both writers can agree that Guardian-reading liberals are to blame.

Yeah, I completely get why people would dig the song, and consider it a salient and to-the-point response to the riots.

But when it goes beyond that, and people start giving the guy Guardian columns and TED keynote speeches, I think it's appropriate to ask "what is this guy about?" and look at the, erm, questionable parts of his message rather than that whole "Lo! Behold the Voice Of The Riots!" DL is a Guardian writer so I can see why he's butthurt.

I just have a zero tolerance no-rapists, no-rape-apologists policies which means that me and the bulk of "The Left" parted company a long time ago, but hey. I'm glad to just see someone actually mention it. Because it gets too easily swept under the rug too often if people like the other parts of a guy's message, because, like, the whole "treating women as human beings" is not ~really~ part of the whole left wing "treating human beings as human beings" thing, right.

But whatever, Posts Very Much In Character.

i actually had no idea that's what plan b's last album centred around (iirc i half-heard the lead single and didn't like it musically so avoided hearing any more). why didn't i see more commentary on it at the time? (that's directed, i guess, at people who did hear it and did write about it.) even trying to avoid it i managed to pick up that it was a "theatrical" "in-character" work so that's his get-out clause but we all know it's not really a cast-iron one that shouldn't be interrogated.

would quite like to hear that album to see for myself i guess, but i have a massive backlog of stuff i do want/need to hear. what's plan b said about it in interviews? and indeed what's his attitude towards women been "irl"?

it doesn't change my view of "ill manors", and that post is way weaker when it attempts to criticise plan b for not toeing the anti-capitalist dogmatic line. it puts a lot of words into his mouth, which is a pretty typical political blog strategy. and the entire thing seems to be unaware of adapting your message depending on who you're talking to: cf the video of pauline pearce yelling at the rioters for being selfish dickhead thugs (rightly), but when she was taken to the tory conference emphasising that the problem is systemic and political. both of these things can be true!

In a lecture for TED and The Observer last week he encouraged people to ignore the government and instead each find one person that they can help.

oh how AWFUL of him. i already know that the concept of actually reaching out to disadvantaged kids on a one-to-one irl basis is anathema to most in the "young hipster left" bubble, thanks.

Thanks for putting it so well lex re: the anti-capitalist dogma. The rape-allegation plot device on the last album bothered me too but I don't know deep it goes. It struck me more as a crass device to get the character wrongly convicted rather than an issue he was particularly exercised about. I don't recall reading any interviews where he was pressed on it so I don't know. It's certainly not the main theme of the record - just the song She Said:

http://www.lyricsreg.com/lyrics/plan+b/She+Said/

It's certainly worth flagging up and interrogating but I'm not persuaded it means people on the left should disregard everything else he does.

hmmmmmm can't say that's helpful in a climate so skewed against victims of sexual assault and if i was writing about it i'd point that out, but at the same time false accusations are things that happen so i'm not sure it's fair to label plan b a rape apologist for that. it's limited & blinkered in its unthinking reflection of the male fear of getting falsely accused of rape, and it's unempathetically up its own privilege, but it's not a song worthy of outrage really.

also i'm not sure the response of "the left" to plan b is to make him their new hero so much as to point out "here's the first mainstream song that really captures and conveys something important about the riots, it's worth paying attention to"

Exactly. It seems weird to me in 2012 that people can't grasp that you can acclaim a musician for one powerful political record without giving them a free pass. In hip hop that's kind of a given, and She Said is a long way short of, say, Black Korea.

It struck me more as a crass device to get the character wrongly convicted rather than an issue he was particularly exercised about. I don't recall reading any interviews where he was pressed on it so I don't know. It's certainly not the main theme of the record - just the song She Said:

mmm, the biggest hit off the album? Which sounds, at first, like a classic soul number heading for the Valentine Day comps...

It gets the character 'wrongly convicted', and shows him to be a bit of a git as well, true. There were other ways to do this, mind.

Totally. There were other ways. The issue isn't whether it was a terrific idea but how much bearing it should have on what he does subsequently.

Well, allowing for the fact that PlanB did not do this 'irl', and this discussion probably should be on the "Strickland Banks" thread, yeah.

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2012/03/26/two-views-plan-bs-ill-manors

man i was flipping channels eating breakfast this AM and palladia was showing the 2011 isle of wight festival and there was this fat mook lookin' motherfucker trying to act all slick in a business suit (but you could still tell he probably like limp bizkit and shit)...i was like what the fuck is this shit? jesus, it was like the nickelback of style council or something, barfffffff on england

hardman lyricist puts out leaden, unintelligible soundtrack to graphically violent movie, pleads for mutual understanding, asks what you are looking at, you fucking rich boy

i feel bad because it seems like his heart is often in the right place but he gets tangled up in this weird macho thing

also his music, at least live, just gets lost in its own frug

i feel bad because it seems like his heart is often in the right place but he gets tangled up in this weird macho thing

Most emo/aggro music anywhere to thread?

Britain's new #1 sounds like the guy found a copy of Defamation lying around and thought, well, if he's not using it anymore then I will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfihYWRWRTQ

wait a minute -- is this thread about the same plan b who did this ridiculous song? i had completely forgotten about it until just now and realized i could look it up. what a shitty song!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eAcCPJwCB8