English MCs Dizzee Rascal and the Streets are the first wave of what might be the next British invasion. The relevant word in the preceding sentence being might.
Even with a steady following back home, and the triumphs of past British cultural exports to coast on, the Streets (actually just one guy, Mike Skinner) and Dizzee Rascal (Dylan Mills on his birth certificate) have no guarantee of success State-side. After all, there's plenty of British culture that even the most Anglo-obsessed Americans can't stomach. Call it the Bangers and Mash phenomenon.
This summer, while taking their first, tenuous steps onto the American music scene with a tour in support of their new albums, the question most likely on the Brits' minds is: will our music go the way of the Beatles or the blood sausage?
It's a relevant question since, like British cuisine, the Streets and Dizzee's style of music, with its electronica-derived production and Cockney accents, is attuned to the palate of someone who grew up with the stuff. It's very British music, maybe even overwhelmingly so for American ears.
The flipside of that claim is that there's nothing quite like it happening in the U.S. right now. Calling it the British answer to hip-hop isn't really fair; not only have we already heard the British answer to hip-hop (remember Roots Manuva? Trip-hop?), but Dizzee and the Streets are just as indebted to genres that traditionally never had much of an impact in the U.S. - dancehall/ragga, drum'n'bass - as they are to American hip-hop.
In fact, their music is so unprecedented at home and 'cross the pond that critics and artists have spent the last couple of years clambering to give it a name. What started out as a type of Garage (a nod to a style of house music popular in Britain and New York) quickly became 2step and then finally Grime - a classification best suited to Dizzee, whose music sounds like the film of grease on industrial decay.
Both the Streets and Diz are now two albums deep into their careers. Skinner pulled ahead early on with Original Pirate Material (2002) and his follow-up A Grand Don't Come For Free (2004), which has been nominated for the Mercury Prize and currently has a single in the UK's Top 40. With his unconventional delivery - a sort of speak-rap that flows in drips and spurts like a leaky faucet - Skinner earned himself a following in the U.S. that the Beastie Boys enjoyed during their prime: white hipsterish kids who like hip-hop music but are weary to invest in the culture.
It was Dizzee, though, who proved to be the golden boy of the scene. At only 19, he released his career-making debut Boy in Da Corner (2003). Partly recorded on the young MC's PlayStation, Boy featured the cerebral, icy production that is a trademark of Grime. It also showcased his prodigious verbal talents. Where Skinner is restrained, Dizzee unleashes a whirlwind of ragga-inspired vocal calisthenics. His new album, Showtime (2004), which tackles his new-found success and belies an obsession for one-upping Jay-Z, is currently available in the U.K. and by less-than-legal means in the U.S.
But the Streets and Diz are just the tip of a whole constellation of artists with names as foreign-sounding to Americans as joie de vivre: the Artful Dodger and Ms. Dynamite, Wiley and the Roll Deep Crew. Played mostly on pirate radio stations and making rare appearances on the charts, it's still an underground movement in the U.K., albeit one that's about to hit critical mass.
But how will the music be received beyond the scepter'd isle? There's no question that Skinner, Mills and their cohorts are creating brilliant music, all the more so because they're doing it without a template to follow. The real question is how much of said brilliance is contingent upon its Cockney-ness? In other words, how British is too British?
This brings us to Boston, USA at a June show at Avalon, where the paths of the Streets and Dizzee Rascal have converged to put on a concert for an audience brought there more out of curiosity than fandom.
At first, things looked bad for Dizzee, who went on before the Streets. The audience tried to shuffle along to his jittery music with little success. They tried to follow his tales of life in the East London suburb of Bow but couldn't get past the accent. People didn't look entertained or even amused, they looked confused.
Then Dizzee turned off the music .. a capella. As the words tumbled from his mouth, the audience began to warm up. By the time the Streets took the stage, half the crowd was ready to choke down a heaping bowl of black pudding (don't ask) for another song.
