It's all too clear to me. Hip-hop and rap really do strive to destroy all music. A Grand Don't Come For Free opens with bombastic brass orchestration which is hacked up and pasted together to fit the song's beat. The editor must have been using a cassette tape and a pair of scissors to do such a shitty job pasting this together. It only took 5 seconds for this album to send me off into another angry rant.
If you're a professinoal recording a song, and you want a brass piece to go, "Ba-BAAAAHHHHH BAAAAHHHHH bum-BUM!!!" you'd think it would be easy to hire a group of musicians to play those five notes. It's really about two and a half measure's worth of music. Since this is a hip-hop song they only need to play it once then you can loop it later. It's not like you're talking about paying them for a week's worth of work.
Instead of doing the bare-ass minimum it would take for me to say, "Credit where due, at least they didn't just chop up a sample," The Fucking Streets decided to just chop up a sample. They said, "You know, this sample sounds really cool. We should use that in our song." So they just used it to create the sound they wanted. There's another really short string sample near the end that is similarly cut up. How can anyone who's serious about supposedly great music hear this and not say, "What. The. FUCK!!!"
How did the truly great musical acts become legendary? There were plenty of gimmicks, lots of theatricality, and plenty of great song writers. But to me the absolute cream-of-the-crop greatest music came from people who knew how to create and record an amazing sound. I'll use the most cliched example: The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Whatever else you might say about that record and its impact, you can't deny that when it first came out people were astounded that a pop/rock album recorded on 4-track tape could sound that good. That's because when The Beatles needed an orchestra to play the interludes for "A Day In The Life" they hired an orchestra. They didn't just find tape of an orchestra playing and chop out the notes they needed. That would have sounded like ass, and would have been rightly trounced on as amateurish.
(Then again, they were The Beatles, so odds are anything they released at that time would just be praised as revolutionary and would have spawned the hip-hop wave 2 decades earlier.)
Standards have come waaaayyy down in recent years. I read about how clever certain artists are for their selection and usage of samples in their music. It's just wrong. Using samples to make music to me is akin to those renditions of "Jingle Bells" that are done with dog barks. The producer records different dogs barking at the needed pitches and stitches them together to make a song. It's a funny novelty that no one should ever consider genius. Yet hip-hop and rap producers do that shit on every album and sustain entire genres.
My goodness, I seem to have written a short novel about the first five seconds of the first song on A Grand Don't Come For Free. I guess for the rest of this review I can't really focus on the samples, can I? I guess I could talk about the vocals, which given that the group is British this is by far the whitest hip-hop/rap I've ever heard in my life. I should probably check to make sure the lead "singer" is actually white before I post this review. (googling) ... Yes, he is most assuredly white.
I did a little bit of reading on The Streets, and from what I understand the lead singer, Mike Skinner (not the retired NASCAR driver of the same name I assume) is the artistic center of the group to the point where the other members don't really matter. Skinner's form of rap is pretty loose to the point where songs feel more like one-sided conversations with that annoying bald roommate from Bridesmaids. He just goes on and on telling his story barely keeping to the rhythm, though his rhymes are pretty... uh, fly? Dope? Tight? I don't know.
The third song "Blinded By The Lights" makes me even more angry, because I realize that The Streets are actually hitting on something really funny. So much of rap is really dark, serious, violent, and epic. Lots of hip-hop and pop music is about going to clubs and dancing and making that seem epic. What I like about "Blinded By The Lights" is it features what might be a dark, serious, violent, and epic melody, set to a goofy and laid back story about some bloke in a dance club trying to find his friends, but he can't see them because of all the lights. So The Streets have something clever and useful to say about hip-hop music. Yet they're doing it with shitty samples. ARGH!
Turns out A Grand Don't Come For Free should be titled Let's Make Dave Bi-polar. On the one hand (see above) I'm fucking mad. On the other, The Streets have made a hip-hop concept album I can get behind. I'm so sick of hip-hop and rap being all about how awesome the particular artist is, or how much they like drinking, or how all women are bitches. A Grand Don't Come For Free is a banal slice-of-life story told by an average idiot who just wants to get his TV fixed. I can't really hate on that too much, though the style of some British guy talking on and on gets really tired by the end of the album.
Anyway, I don't know how to feel anymore. I hate samples so much, and The Streets use them more than generously. If it weren't for that I wouldn't not like this album. I'd sorta maybe consider liking it. I can almost forgive the album for using samples because the boring concept is really satirical of modern hip-hop and rap constantly talking trash about how great it is. So... A Grand Don't Come For Free is a mental mess for me, but it's not bad. Fine. 3 stars. Whatever.
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