MUSIC REVIEWS
The Streets - The Hardest Way To Make A Living
David Allun Jones
The Streets, aka rapper/ producer Mike Skinner, has enjoyed massive success and critical acclaim internationally with his take on the English working class, but so far American attention has eluded him. It’s kind of sad, seeing as though his first two albums (2002’s Original Pirate Material and 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free) are generally likable, if only for establishing a distinctive niche of stretching a single moment over an entire song. The magic seems to be fading, though, by his third album, The Hardest Way To Make an Easy Living, which dramatically diverts his attention to the paranoid, substance-abusing underbelly of being a celebrity.
No longer the innocent weed-smoking, lager-drinking bloke that won over millions of fans before, fame and money have transformed Skinner into a pathetic brute. “The rock and roll clich walked in and then smacked me” he admits, unable to release himself from the drug and booze haze that has consumed his life and most of the album. It seems the invasiveness of the tabloids and public (“How the hell am I supposed to be able to do a line in front of complete strangers/ When I know they’ve all got camera phones?”) have created a reality that he finds increasingly suffocating. Unfortunately, the unhealthy ways he chooses to handle the situation takes what could have been a shot at introspective art into something that’s unbearable to listen to. Coupled with Nintendo-like blips and bleeps and cheap 2-step drum beats for production and The Hardest Way becomes a challenge to get through.
After he’s repeatedly painted himself as a scumbag he’s embarrassed to realize he’s become, it causes the rest of the album to fall into an unappealing slumber. The Streets’ take on the art of hotel trashing (“Hotel Expressionisms”) is bogged down in a cloud of wordy boredom, despite it’s energetic musical arrangement, while the relationship advice he doles out on “War of The Sexes” is shamelessly crass. Glimmers of his earlier sparkle do occur on occasion though like “When We Were Famous”, which follows Skinner’s fling with a UK pop star, revealing the dark side of her squeaky clean persona (“My whole life I never though I’d see a pop star smoke crack/ And I must admit I was quite shocked with that thing you did with me on my back”) or the somber “Never Went To Church”, a tender dedication to his late father that’s delivered with clumsy prose as he realizes the subtle gift his father left him (“You left me behind to remind me of you”).
In all due fairness, The Streets does show some versatility and artistic growth here. His lyrics, when understandable, remain sharp and his chatty tone is tighter and more in alignment with the beats than ever before, though his constant descent into half-sung choruses is annoying. “Two Nations”, in which he compares America to England, resonates the most as he attacks the way we appreciate our own music greats (“We build up our stars and then papers sweep them/ And you build up on stars and maniacs shoot them”) with some cheeky sidebar humor thrown in (“I keep having to say that I’m only joking/ In New York when I have to buy fags on the road”). It’s the greatest example of Streets’ attraction and ends the album in a hopeful moment of what more he has to offer.
A stop-gap moment to concentrate on The Streets’ inner demons, The Hardest Way’s overtly dark sentiment dismisses all of the rapper’s previous charms for a self-realization that he hasn’t seemed to fully grasp yet. It’s best to appreciate as a curious notch on his career path that he could bounce back from on successive releases, but for the moment it proves the theory that even in England, a rapper’s best album tends to be their most earliest work. It’s a little too hard to still be able to keep it real when you’re biggest problem in life is dealing with the paparazzi.
