YOUR GRAN DOESN’T COME FOR FREE
There is something admirable about Mike Skinner from The Streets. It has been suggested that he is one of my recruits, sent undercover into the garage/hip-hop and whatever other name British dance music is being called these days scenes. And I can understand this attitude, it could be that with his tremendously unmusical TALKING he may be trying to destroy music from within.
Mark this friends: I would never wish this on anyone. Not even someone as lumpen as inarticulate as Mike Skinner. The torture actual musicians have to put up with on a day to day basis is deserved because they are musicians. There can be no excuse to deliberately forcing a music hater into listening. But luckily Mike Skinner is a musician so he deserves all the torture he gets. And having stumbled across this rock opera of his I can say the torture is well deserved. As would be hanging, drawing and quartering.
I remember in the bad old days when Rock Operas were about the War Of The Worlds, or a messianic cult based on a sensorily deprived pinball player. As bobbins as they were they at least showed some imagination. Why in The Wall, Pink Floyd went so far as to build a wall between themselves and the audience: a fantastic idea, let down by a lack of decent soundproofing. But has it come to this, that these days our concept albums are so low concept they are about a bloke losing a thousand pounds down the back of his television.
Question: Have you ever lost anything down the back of a television? They seem pretty well sealed up to me.
So Skinner spits out his half rhymes in his dullards accent as the listener is driven mad with tedium. YAWN – as Mike tells us how he did not lose any money in the bookies because he did not go to the bookies. STRETCH – as Mike recounts another tale of not going out with his mates and sitting in watching the TV instead. FALL ASLEEP IN FITS OF DESPAIR – As Mike tells us about not pulling someone whilst on holiday. He truly is the most boring man in Britain. And as for Dry Your Eyes…
The “story” behind Dry Your Eyes is that Mike is getting dumped. No fucking shit. Speaking as a girl, I can tell you that if my blokes idea of a good night out was sitting at home roaching a spliff and watching ITV programmes about how to pull he would be out of the door in ten seconds flat. If it turned out he was an inept Brummie rapper at the same time he certainly would be drying his eyes. Of all the blood that would be pouring out of the gouged sockets.
The sad thing is that this catalogue of the ordinary displays that The Streets are aware how piss poor they are. Why else would you peddle a song about how rubbish you are at even returning a DVD, getting money and phoning someone. It is quite clear what Mike Skinners problem is. He is shit, but my gosh, don’t he just know it.