speech debelle

how did she suddenly become so popular? i know big dada dont have money to spend on marketing so im guessing people in the media genuinely like it or think its 'worthy' at least, but its just a bit... i was going to say boring, but thats a bit cruel. its just very 'polite' or twee. kind of like the uk hip hop answer to all these nice but bland singer songwriters. still, its a nice change i suppose, and good to see her doing well, she seems like a very sweet person, and i know shes had quite a tough time (from what ive read) but its just odd to see see this sort of thing (even if its with a shrewd 'live band' makeover) being covered so much, even if it is like post-blunt backpack rap.

cosign on all of that really. saw her live not too long ago and she seemed REALLY raw - she's not untalented but in terms of stage presence or material she's nowhere near ready to be excited about.

yeah she seems a bit too premature. like the lyrics are the first things shes ever written.

agree about the lyrics but the songs sound great. all the good bits of that twee-ness: nervous and excited. catchy while being pretty MOR jazz "class", which actually feels novel and neat right now.

sigh, fucking mercury nomination getting middling-at-best artists completely unwarranted overseas attention

"catchy" is the last adjective i'd use for this rambling, unmemorable album

she's remarkable, and i'm disappointed that you can't recognise that.

halfway through the first song and I'm digging this

ok im sort of warming to her. even if it is starbucks rap.

i can't walk through the village square without hearing about her. only the other day mr guthrie's applecart had a big poster with her new album on it, then i get to the post office and mrs harris is nattering away about whether she's the voice of young female black britain... i remember when this were all fields.

must every high profile black artist have to represent the entire race?

Yes.

Yeah, get some perspective Mrs Harris

I have to say I didn't expect her to sound like a softer version of Lady Sovereign

i didnt expect her to sound like what a guardian reader wants all hip hop to be

prob a mail reader too

That's a pretty stupid way to criticize her, IMO; all you're doing is saying she's not fulfilling your stereotype of what a hip-hop artist is supposed to be.

no im just doing the reactionary hip hop fan thing when someone slightly 'alt' gets all the attention lol. why must it be that i have a stereotype though? the only stereotype i have is that hop hop it isnt twee music, and speech is exactly that. its not like i hate rappers backed by live jazzy bands, or introspective lyrics or anything. still, got to rate her for making twee hop. it seems quite fresh in its own way.

*hip hop

(and its not like i only listen to young jeezy or anything)

Do you mean "twee" or "soft"? I think her subject matter saves her from being twee. At any rate it's hard for me, an American, to say she's getting all the attention since, as far as I know, no one has actually heard of her over here (I only heard about her when the Mercury Prize shortlist was announced).

There is kind of a "Lady Sovereign over Kate Nash" thing going on here which is weird but I don't really find it offensive or anything.

i think she said she wanted to make a hip hop tracy chapman album. i personally think thats being a bit complimentary tbh. james blunt hip hop album seems more accurate. gotta say whoever decided how her album would sound - big dada? - was fucking genius. totally nailed the sound/market for that type of thing at the mo. yeah her subject matter isnt banal or anything but it still just sounds a bit twee overall. a bit hot mug and slippers.

Dunno if this true but I read somewhere that she'd sold less than 1,000 albums before the Mercury nomination so maybe it's not intrinsically in tune with what the GBP want? I dunno

i had never heard of her before watching the mercury awards and she was nearly as bad as the horrors

SPEECH DEBELLE TO MEET PRIME MINISTER ON WEDNESDAY
Speech Debelle, alongside other artists, has been invited to a reception at 10 Downing Street to celebrate "British Talent." in association with the Talent and Enterprise Taskforce. The photo will happen with Brown and Mandleson @ 6pm with reception after....

KlAXONS BIG UP SPEECH DEBELLE
http://www.nme.com/news/klaxons/47222

The Klaxons have said about Speech's win, "We couldn't be happier that Speech won this year. To have a rank outsider like her win, it's reminiscent of us because nobody was expecting it. She totally derserves it. It's a massive F*ck off to to big labels and I mean that from the heart!"

calling speech debelle a "rank outsider" - olfactory racism y/n

Maybe Brown and Mandelson are hoping she'll be able to teach them how to pull off an utterly unlikely victory against all odds?

she needs to call them out for saying she was 'rank'.

SPEECH DEBELLE QUITS BIG DADA
Speech Debelle has announced that she is quitting her label, Ninja Tune subsidiary Big Dada, apparently because of the poor sales of her Mercury Prize-winning album 'Speech Therapy'. The rapper claims that the label failed to properly distribute the album, and failed to meet consumer demand after the Mercury win.

Despite winning the high profile music prize, the album peaked at number 65 in the UK charts, and is estimated to have sold just 10,000 copies in total, compared to the 300,000 copies shifted of the previous year's winner, Elbow's 'The Seldom Seen Kid'. The discrepancy, Debelle reckons, is partly because Big Dada didn't have enough physical copies of the album on the High Street at the crucial moment.

Comparing Debelle with Elbow doesn't really work, of course. 'The Seldom Seen Kid' was a widely acclaimed album, while Debelle's debut has had a mixed response despite the Mercury win. Elbow were also an established band making music that appeals to a large demographic. Their album also included a killer single that became the anthem of that summer. Basically, for Elbow, the Mercury was the icing on the cake, whereas for Debelle it was the sponge and jam as well. Still, the fact Elbow were signed to a major record company with large pockets and a big distribution network, and the fact Debelle was not, is not totally irrelevant.

Speaking to BBC 6music, Debelle said: "The Mercury Prize was on a Tuesday, and the Friday there were no more physical albums in the shops. So on the Mercury weekend, which would have been my biggest selling weekend, people couldn't get it".

She continued: "I wasn't disappointed that it didn't sell well, I was disappointed in the people I was working with. I wasn't on a big label and the machine wasn't there. So even though the album won the Mercury it was still only able to do what the label was capable of doing, which just means that I'm more prepared for next time".

She added that she is already speaking to a number of labels about releasing her second album, saying of her experience so far: "One thing I've learnt is that having bargaining power is important. It's important to walk into a record label and say 'This is what I have, and these are the kind of terms I want'".

Of course what Debelle has experienced is the main downside of working with a smaller indie label. They can't afford to press up thousands of extra copies of an album on the off chance it wins the Mercury Prize, especially when the album is a real outsider to win in the run up to the presentation of the award. Actually, in the current climate there's a chance not even the biggest major would have been able to take that risk, but it's true they could have staged an impromptu advertising campaign the week of the win directing people to sellers of the digital release, and paid HMV to put what physical product was available by the door.

But it's swings and roundabouts really, isn't it? For every indie-signed band with tales of the frustration of knowing your brilliant album isn't reaching record shops, or getting advertised or plugged to Radios 1 and 2, simply because your label doesn't have any cash, there are bands with horror stories of being signed to a major who spend two hundred thousand pounds on studio time, production and pressing fifty thousand CDs, only to fire your A&R contact and then almost forget they're releasing your record. That is to say, both majors and indies come with pros and cons.

The big pro of Big Dada for Speech Debelle prior to her Mercury win, presumably, was that none of the majors would probably have even considered signing her. Now she has a Mercury Prize in her hat, I suppose you can't blame her for trying to find a record label with bigger pockets.

i think she's going to realise this was a big mistake pretty soon. i think the album's great, but she is by no means a 'major label artist', and she'll soon miss the nurturing she received from an impassioned label like Big Dada once she's just another (underselling, hard to market) artist on the roster of a major.

It's like when footballers get a flicker of recognition and suddenly start agitating for a move to a bigger club where they will spend the rest of their careers sitting on the bench before being carted off to a smaller club than the one they were at in the first place.

Does sound like Big Dada fucked up the immediate aftermath of the Mercury prize though. Maybe they just never expected her to win.

debelle won with the pinnacle of her career, elbow won with their worst album. there's a big case for saying she won 'too early' - look at other acts who won with their debut (lol klaxons and the pulled 2nd album)

dylan?

Dizzee maybe the only debutant winner who's been able to improve on that success commercially this decade

tho Arctic Monkeys are on a fairly even keel still

really hate the way that once an act wins the mercury, they become almost entirely judged on their commercial success - yes yes i know that's important but it's not necessarily a failure if they don't go on to become household names. speech debelle may well go on to make a really good album - she does have latent talent - which sells fuck-all, and that'd be a success in my book. ms dynamite's unfairly used as a punchline, but she's made some incredible tracks since the mercury which blow the actual winning album out of the water => i don't give a shit if they didn't sell b/c radio wouldn't play them or whatevs.

Did Big Dada stop people coming to her shows post-Mercury too? Coz her Sheffield one was deserted.

I find music makes more sense if you never think about the mercury prize.

go to a major by all means, but to kick big dada on the way out of the door isn't the best way to go about these things.
they worked hard on getting the album love.

debelles just got a big mouth is all, and a bit of a big ego too. xpost re: her show attendance, she should be moaning about that really, but its harder to blame that on someone else (promoters maybe?) than it is to blame things like sales on the label. shes just annoyed cos people dont like her enough to turn up to her shows and buy her cds enough. not big dadas fault really.

Mercury winner Speech Debelle was booed by Take That fans as she tried to rap one of their songs at a London event in honour of the group.

Debelle chose to rap her way through the 1993 hit single Pray, leading to boos from some of the 500-strong crowd.

She was also criticised by host James Corden, who said "anyone can rap", before launching into a rap of his own.

That's pretty rude. She didn't deserve that.

Doesn't change the fact that she's not very good, though.

is there a thread where we discuss our plans to execute james corden because maybe this should have gone in there?

who the fuck is james corden? and why hasn't he been punched in the face yet?

I bet you any money he's been punched in the face more than once lately.

Here he is interrupting an interview with Boris Becker and being a hateful turd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EFwRcmKDhU

Lex, your position re: artistic success is perfectly valid as a patron/connoisseur but kind of unsustainable for the artist, who still is going to have bills to pay at the end of the day and is going to feel on some level that not being to pay them via their chosen vocation is something of a failure.

leading to boos from some of the 500-strong crowd

basically the reporter booed and then wrote a story about it

A bit more detail:

Speech Debelle was booed by fans of Take That last night (November 25) when she attempted to rap the band's 1993 hit 'Pray'.

The Mercury Prize-winner was jeered off-stage at the launch of the boy band's new video game, SingStar.

Debelle, real name Corynne Elliot, reportedly upset the 500-strong audience with her cover, and when they booed, she said: “I'm a rapper. I don't do Take Shit.”

Her reaction prompted host and star of Gavin and Stacey James Corden to respond, saying: “That was shit, anyone can rap”.

That was from here btw.

this album is decent enough that I like playing it once every few months

Corynne Elliot (born 1983, London, England), better known as Speech Debelle,[1] is a British rapper currently signed to the Big Dada record label.[2][3] She was the winner of the 2009 Mercury Prize for her debut album Speech Therapy and has since had a lucrative career.[4]