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Mike Skinner Trips Over His Words On His Way To Geezerdom

Maura — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Our look at the closing lines of the biggest new-music reviews continues with a roundup of reactions to Everything Is Borrowed, the new album from the newly contemplative UK MC Mike Skinner’s proejct The Streets:

• “The Streets might have a happier, more positive outlook on the world, but it’s hard to share Skinner’s optimism: Even when you get on the same page as him and realize we’re all just bags of self-replicating DNA on a cold rock hurtling through space, it doesn’t help stave off the worldly worries of the day.” [Aversion]

• “Fortunately for Skinner, however, his increasing mastery of the pop hook–from laddish sing-alongs such as ‘Heaven for the Weather’ to soulful anthems such as ‘The Escapist’–makes this a highly listenable album, despite the high duh! quotient.” [Sunday Times]

• “Skinner’s still wrestling his party-animal dark side (’Heaven for the Weather’) and trying to get laid (’Never Give In’). But his vivid introspection recalls rap forefather Rakim, whose mind power and love of fish are echoed on ‘The Escapist,’ a lush soul jam about thinking your way past barriers. It’s English lit for the hoodie set.” [RS]

• “In the end, though, Everything Is Borrowed’s musical high points aren’t enough to save it from its lyric sheet, and that, going forward, constitutes a real problem for Skinner. Given that he’s threatened repeatedly to retire the Streets after five full-length albums, it might be an issue he’s already well aware of. Either way, something’s got to give; another record of similarly hollow platitudes might be enough to undo his legacy.” [Pitchfork]

• “Fans of Skinner the man will want to give him a hug for all his hard-won serenity. Fans of his old work will miss things getting messy. A cannier move would have been to wrap up all this existential baggage in some euphoric pop music, as Roots Manuva’s recent record did. As it is, you can’t help but feel the Streets are on borrowed time.” [Guardian]

From The Streets To The Beach, In A Series of Walking-Away Shots

Michaelangelo Matos — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:30:00 +0000

This video for the Streets’ new single, “The Escapist,” was, according to uploader “The Beats” (a.k.a. Mike Skinner a.k.a. the Streets himself), made “under the radar of the label and done totally for us by us on a shoe string. It was totally different from any other promo that I’ve made in that it was something real that we just filmed rather than trying to create something real looking using lots of people and lots of angles.” Its art-house feel works well with the song, which after three plays I still haven’t decided whether I like or not. Then again, I hated both of the first two Streets albums when I first heard them–both took me a few plays to “get,” and became big favorites, whereas I liked the third one fairly immediately, and have barely played it since. I won’t penalize anyone for calling this “boring,” though. [YouTube]

Kate Richardson — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:15:00 +0000

Extremely British MC Mike Skinner, a.k.a. The Streets, walked from Dover, England to the south coast of France/paid homage to Michael Palin for the video for “The Escapist.” Couldn’t he have just shown up to a courtroom as a sassy Cardinal Richelieu impersonator or something? [The Guardian]

Kate Richardson — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:15:00 +0000

Why Does Mike Skinner Of The Streets Hate Us?

jharv — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 04:15:03 +0000

Because he sounds like a Cockney head trauma victim haltingly reading the lyrics off a teleprompter as he struggles to force his tissue-thin vocal range through a tuneless, pitch-fucked, dare-you-to-get-through-it version of Elton John’s “Your Song” that’s streaming on his MySpace page and was recorded for that BBC Radio 1 anniversary covers comp I was bitching about a few months ago.

Pitchfork calls it “tender,” by which I think my colleague Mark Richardson means “like the painfully tender yellow bruise that forms the day after being kicked repeatedly in the stomach by a steel-toed boot.” This may, in fact, be the worst song I’ve heard in 2007, making me feel like I should apologize to any of my friends who bought his Skinner’s albums at my recommendation in the first half of the decade.

The Streets [MySpace]