Features

THE COOL SONGS IT WAS NEVER COOL TO LIKE

Reputation re-examined

The Streets A Grand Don't Come for Free

Mike Skinner's second album has won universal critical acclaim (Album of the Year Q and NME magazines), spawned a number 1 hit and is one of the 10 best-selling albums of 2004. Caroline Sullivan in the Guardian claimed Mike Skinner was the one point on which the contemptuous critics and the fickle music buying public could agree.

A Grand Don't Come for Free is, of course, a "concept" album about the narrator's chav life, his attempts to retrieve his "grand" and get/keep a girlfriend. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a pop star in possession of an unfulfilled artistic ambition must be in want of a concept album. In usual circumstances this would have awakened the gods of Spinal Tap and cast the artist out into credibility and sales oblivion. Why this didn’t happen is a complete mystery to me. Why were music critic's whelm factor to be set so low as to be "overwhelmed" by lyrics such as "why did I have to do a stupid thing like that/ I thought we were through/ I could have ruined it/ I'm such a twat"? Or there is a problem with HMV's computer that keeps clocking up the albums sales twice. Or Something Else. Or not. But really it is crap.

I admit that Mike Skinner is an interesting poet with an uncanny ear for speech rhythms and an ability to string expressions together and to make rhyme sound like normal speech. And yes it is weird hearing the way the naughty kids at school talked reassembled into something coherent. However, the story behind A Grand Don't Come for Free is pathetic, at the end the eponymous grand is found down the back TV, how on Earth could you loose £1000 down the back of your TV? Did he have the money in one hand, the TV in the other, and absent-minded reassembled the two together? Its just such a bad pay off for the album, and the melodrama with which the moment is delivered is astonishingly out of place with the incident. As for the love story, this is done okay, but this ends with a sing a long chorus of there being plenty more fish in the sea. With this sort of philosophic revelation we can cure relationship heartbreak once and for all, oh no hang on its a cliché ... Getting together, breaking up, telling a simple story, these are the staples of the great pop songs, offering unexplainable insight to enhance the crazy hormone raging moment with an amazing melody, not to make it completely dull. What I find disappointing is that unlike in pop's other chroniclers of working class life Skinner has nothing to say on whether he is happy with his life, the chav culture he lives, the mates he hangs out with, etc. Dizzee Rascal is full of disillusionment at the poverty and pettiness of council gangs and rivalries, Eminem full of rage and hate for parental neglect, Jarvis Cocker celebrated (mostly female) triumphs in the face of twat boyfriends. Skinner is happy when something good happens, pissed off when something bad happens. Maybe that's what it’s like, but it doesn't make great art.

As for the music. There are no interesting hooks, no melodies that grab you with a driving beat, hold you so hard you have to scream, or at least dance. In fact nothing that wouldn't sound melodic unless you had 8 pints and a full frontal lobotomy. There are no funky beats, or nothing that can be set alongside contemporary R n B. Where is the good stuff in the sound? These are all the criticisms usually levelled at concept albums, pop is fast, unpretentious, explodes with emotion and then finishes. Concept albums simply do not work, they are too self important and too long, and the critics are too anal to get it, they read Mojo too much, they are too old, have no friends and vote A Grand Don't Come for Free album of the year.

Colin