ellenh

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the good thing about short-term memory loss is you remember whatever it was, eventually...

A while back, Kenneth Cowan asked me if I liked the British rapper Mike Skinner, AKA The Streets. I meant to answer him that I do, but I forgot.

Like any folk music, hip-hop is time and place specific. It's got to be from the heart to make your head nod. Like Guru from Gangstarr said, "It's mostly the voice." The thing about the British rap that I heard pre-The Streets, was that they were all trying to inflect their voices with American accents, which was lame. You've got to represent who you are, where you are. The French can do it. The Japanese can do it too, rocking the mic in well-ironed duds. And now the Brits seem to be catching on, slowly but surely.

Keep your fucked up, lower class cockney accents, party people. We want to close our eyes and see the gaps where your teeth should be.

Mike Skinner raps about going down slow, drinking too much brandy in council flats with the thunder echoing outside. He nails that dank mournfulness that can only be England.

It doesn't matter the music, when someone's for real I always know because my titties get hard. Werd.

It's like with Nirvana--I still walk around with permanent headlights when Kurt's on my headphones.

No wonder Chuck D. said Nirvana was hip-hop too.

(Beats are for Sonny Bono, Beats are for Yoko Ono)

um, there was something else i wanted to say....shit...

(quick switchin lanes and jumpin on planes and)

oh well.