The Streets' fifth album will be the last - but let's hope it's not the end for Mike Skinner the lyricist, who's been mentioned in the same breath as Dostoevsky, Pepys and Dickens - and not wholly ridiculously, writes BRIAN BOYD
POP MUSIC lyrics are (perhaps rightly) regarded as semi-literate, solipsistic, adolescent doggerel by the literary establishment. But one lyricist who makes "high art" literary types sit up and notice is Mike Skinner of The Streets, who is widely regarded within the groves of academe as the pre-eminent wordsmith of his generation.
As Skinner puts it himself: "I've found myself compared to Shakespeare, Dickens and Pepys, which sort of takes your breath away". He was once memorably described as "Dostoevsky on Tennent's Super".
The last ever Streets album, Computers and Blues,is released on February 4th. It's the last one because Skinner feels The Streets have run their five-album cycle and he wants to move on from "singing about kebab shops and drug binges".
A massive influence on Lily Allen, Plan B and Jamie T, to name just three, what distinguishes Skinner's work is that he is not content to plough the same furrow as Ray Davies, Paul Weller, Morrissey and Difford/Tilbrook. Those lyrical touchstones said nothing to him of his life - instead, Skinner took his cues from Nas and Raekwon.
Skinner has been rapping since the age of seven. He has said: "my brother had these Run DMC tapes, and I used to record the intros from the songs on to another tape and then record them over and over again, so it kind of looped. And then I would rap over it and record that back on to another tape recorder".
But when he came to write his own lyrics, all he had to draw on was a fairly mundane Birmingham middle-class background. "I didn't have the drama of murder and violence that US rap has, so I've always tried to make something dramatic from nothing."
For Skinner, nothing is trivial.
People sometimes forget that Skinner is from Birmingham. He once told me "I don't know where people get the idea from that I'm from a block of flats in London. I'm not middle-class, I'm not working-class, I'm Barratt class [ after the British house-building company]. I'm from a suburban estate. Not poor, not rich, and really boring. I lost my Brummie accent because when I moved to London I was in Brixton, and it just wasn't seen as the sort of accent to have on the Brixton MC scene."
His first album, 2002's Original Pirate Material is simply one of the great British albums - up there with Ok Computer and Blue Lines. And there has never been a better lyrical description of rave culture than Weak Become Heroes: "Point to the sky feel free / A sea of people all equal / smiles in front and behind me / Swim in the deep blue sea / cornfields sway lazily / All smiles, all easy: "Where you from, what you on and what's your story?" / Mesmerising tones, risin' pianos, this is my zone."
What Skinner has managed to do is to write lyrics so resonant they exist outside the framework of a song. It's a lot more difficult than it sounds. If you look at the last big poll of best-ever lyrics you'll find Nirvana's "I feel stupid and contagious, here we are now, entertain us" at No 3 - despite the fact that the words really don't work unless accompanied by the accompanying ferocious guitar work. At No 1 was U2's "One Life, with each other, sisters, brothers" to which you can apply the same argument. The only lyric in the top 10 that can stand by itself is The Smiths' "So you go, and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry, and you want to die".
So much, though, of Original Pirate Materialand A Grand Don't Come For Free(2004) has a pure literary merit independent of the beats used in the background. Asked to review the latter, the professor of modern English literature at the University of London, John Sunderland, wrote that "Skinner's journal-in-song is half Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and half Samuel Pepys . . . it's a narrative masterpiece constructed around Christ's parable of the lost pieces of silver".
Sutherland did have enough sense to add that "to make this point is probably to invite a Skinnerian accusation of generating critical wank".
Getting academics to stoop down and examine the prosody at work in rap/garage lyrics goes back to the old Keats-versus-Dylan argument of the 1970s. This dreadful literary parlour game was instigated by the playwright Dave Hare, who had the temerity (in a fit of "grooviness", no doubt) to suggest that Dylan was a better poet than Keats. Handy hint: he isn't.
Using broadsheet literary supplement epigrams such as "the poet laureate of chav culture" to describe Skinner's work is not just patronising but merely a lazily convenient bridging of the old high-art/low-art divide. Yes, Skinner's lyrical subject matter is of fist fights in kebab shops, dodgy dealers, narcotic and alcoholic comedowns - and yes, many other rappers do that (or similar) too - but no one in the contemporary popular music world can quite transform the commonplace the way he does.
It's his deep knowledge of prosody that makes his work so superlative.
The last time I spoke to him he was talking happily about the use of assonantal slant-rhyme in Kim Carnes's Bette Davis Eyes: " She's ferocious / And she know just what it takes / to make a pro blush".
He enthusiastically explained that while assonantal slant-rhyme is effective for musical verse because the vowels (which are the part the voice sings) stay the same, it's a different story for consonance rhyme (where the vowels change), and that's why the latter is better suited to the printed page and not the chart hit.
He went on to talk about his new-found love for trochaic hexameters on his The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Livingalbum. "I wanted to get away from the unstressed/stressed metre of the iamb, so I went for the stressed/unstressed trochee," he noted.
He went on to criticise Kanye West's overuse of the homophone before pointing to the places on the new album where he had to "wrench" the rhyme (forcing a word out of its natural pronunciation to force a rhyme). Try getting that out of Tinie Tempah.
Computer and Blues is released on February 41
The lyrics board Three triumphs
1 WEAK BECOME HEROES
Written as a protest song about the British Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, a paean to KFC, Ecstasy and Paul Oakenfold.
2 DRY YOUR EYES
Still his biggest hit and one of the most poignant break-up songs. Chris Martin originally sang the chorus but was scrubbed off the released version.
3 HAS IT COME TO THIS
Described on its release as "the most original, lyrical British rap in memory". Sex, drugs and on the dole.
