Street Level

Nearly ten years ago, after I had blown yet another $20 on CDs at the shitty strip mall suburb next to our shitty upper-middle class hippy suburb, my father asked, “Why do you waste your money on that shit? You are just going to turn around and sell it.” And I did. It was Temple of the Dog. But some of those albums still sound magical: Nirvana Nevermind and Wu-Tang Clan Enter the Wu-Tang 36 Chambers. (This was before I met the punk rock guy who reminded me of my childhood loves, the Ramones and the Clash. After that, Jawbreaker records were just around the corner.)

Now comes The Streets, (A.K.A Mike Skinner), a crazy Brit kid rhyming over beats he created in his room. The beats sound like rave culture and ska and hip hop and house music. Maybe these Brit kids have been listening to all of this all along. When I was in London, I was so obsessed with being in the city that produced the Clash that I missed the whole Brit Garage scene. And now I’m sorry for it. After seeing Mike and his band at the Bowery Ballroom, the Mercury Lounge, and the Warsaw in New York City, and watching those crazy Brit and Aussie fans do their run/dance bounce thing, I know I didn’t see the best of the London I miss so much, the part that seems to embrace everyone willing to drink a pint.

“In it’s own little way my body was trying to say that you better stop drinking brandy.”
from “Too Much Brandy.”

Huge housing projects erratically litter the skyline of the Lower East Side like giant soldiers between clumps of walk-up tenements. At night, each inhabited apartment in those lone towers glows against the dark sky, reminding us of the individual dramas and mundane activities occurring within (love, anger, loss, work, drugs, sex, cooking, cleaning, sleeping). Standing on the corner of Essex and Grand Streets in New York City on a cool and gray Fall day, looking at the brick structures and ladder-rung-like balconies of the Seward Park Houses, the scene seems somewhat similar to the London housing characterized by my old architecture professor as “seventies neo-brutalism.” I’m reminded of the cover of the first record by The Streets, Original Pirate Material, featuring “Towering Inferno,” a photo by Rut Blees Lexemburg. It shows a giant rectangle seventies-era housing building in London that seems to radiate orange into the night from the life going on inside of it. The photo shows the view of the night observer, all those windows seeming both inviting and anonymous.

Preoccupied with modern urban banality, Skinner makes it beautiful. He shows us, "Here I am worried about last night, here I am getting fucked up, thinking about when I was sixteen." This is why it works; the scenarios Skinner writes about with soap opera urgency and honesty happen inside most of those rectangle windows. Skinner's stories about cheating and being late, breaking up and dancing, calling girls, and jealousy and depression occur in and around mass housing, cookie-cutter lives, and the generic fast food joint - everyman's everyday. He uses a ska beat to create an upbeat tense moment, a slow bass and piano loop as an expression of sadness, a rave piano loop to sound like an ecstasy trips' euphoria and timelessness, and rising strings to orchestrate the drama of constantly expecting a fight while walking the streets. Skinner's stories are the stuff of the young black man wearing all black, pulling his sweatshirt hood over his eyes as he walks into the wind that whips east on Grand Street towards the East River. Or the older white man in gray sweatpants with stained knees, a ratty purple sweater, and ski cap digging through the dumpsters behind the Seward Park coop. Granted Skinner's tale is "the day in the life of a geezer," or, rather, very British. But the experience of walking down any street is implicit in his lyrics. Boredom, rowdiness, tearing down ad posters for the next holiday blockbuster or J Lo movie, all the things we do to break up the day. Maybe it isn't sheer boredom; maybe we really want to do something and don't know what.