The Streets

Mike Skinner's the Streets liven up the Garage/2-step world, and dance music in general, with these London-based tales of cannabis-addled youth out to score food, girls and Playstation points. The club-kid commentary is a welcome relief from the genre's standard diva trills and MC braggadocio.

The Streets now have a name, and it's twenty-three-year-old musical mastermind Mike
Skinner. He's audacious enough to title a track on his first album "Let's Push Things
Forward" -- and inventive enough to deliver. The relentlessly smart Original Pirate Material
blends two-step garage beats with conversational rapping, low-key in effect but bold in
content: "We first met through a shared view/She loved me and I did, too." Skinn... More >

This succès d'estime--"cult classic, not bestseller," he says it himself--ventures closer than you'd hope to the ignoramus whine that hip hop isn't music. More even than in our underground, it settles for rhymes-with-accompaniment. In England, where the garage Mike Skinner claims to "push forward" is techno's last big thing, he may be the answer to "Who Got the Funk?" By the parochial standards of the Neptunes and Timbaland, however, his beats perk up mostly when he skanks them. As for his realism, I took it more seriously once he claimed he'd be in museums 500 years from now. All I know about his education is that he name-checks Carl Jung, but the streets he represents are a literary creation. Sometimes they rock, definitely. But sometimes words fail him. There's plenty of detail, and feeling too--not just anger, tenderness. By my parochial standards, however, his one cult classic thus far is "Too Late," where he loses the girl because he doesn't know how to keep an appointment. (Grade - A-)