UGK - Ridin' Dirty (1996)

Many centuries ago, just before I discovered the internet and the joy of buying stuff from it, and a few years into most London record stores getting into the concept of selling mainly just the latest George Michael or Adequate Furry Animals shite - and very little else - I stumbled across a second-hand place in Camberwell, apparently mere days after someone's mum had cleared out his entire rap collection, thus meaning such an influx of golden nuggets as to cause my eyes to quite literally pop out on stalks. There on the racks was just about every rap disc upon I had cogitated over the previous couple of years, all cheap, and probably a good suitcase worth of stuff. Amongst these were four discs by UGK: the notorious Banned EP - boasting what is probably the most astonishingly and amusingly offensive rap number of all time, the sort of thing which makes Eazy-E sound like J-Live rapping about lettuce; and the first three albums, of which this is the third. Somehow, I hadn't heard too much by UGK, but I understood them to be essential listening, and I'd liked what I knew of them from their guesting on tracks by Jay-Z, C-Murder, and others. Anyway, they didn't disappoint.

I'm not sure UGK ever recorded exactly what you would call a classic album, but on the other hand I don't think they ever made a bad one; and Ridin' Dirty feels like some sort of aural landmark, epitomising the third coast sound at its height before the influence of crunk levelled everything out, reducing something previously too big and diverse for categorisation to a bloke with gold teeth telling you about his car. For those of you who've just joined us, southern rap has never really been any one thing, and has as such always sounded - to me at least - a little broader, more adventurous than forms originated elsewhere in the States, the west-coast g-funk, or one of those headachey New York types exorting us all to wave our hands in the air over sixty flavours of Roland cowbell. Like the south itself, southern rap makes its own rules.

Ridin' Dirty is produced by N.O. Joe, a name perhaps more famously associated with Scarface and Rap-A-Lot Records, and as such establishes a clear link between the bluesy-gospel roots of its practitioners - gumbo funk, as the aforementioned N.O. Joe termed it, evoking jazzy film noir soundtracks jammed out at three in the morning in smoky clubs, wah-wah guitar and soft stabs of electric piano over a deep, warm bass, all slowed down to the pace of the Gulf Coast heat. More than anything else I can think of, Ridin' Dirty is roughly what it sounds like living in Texas, hot, dry, slow, and with quite a lot of death around. It's not only a profoundly soulful listening experience, it's also quietly terrifying, as - I suspect - are many of the darker blues records once you get past the patter. UGK were gangsta rap in the truest sense, that being something entirely consistent with Chuck D's view of rap as being the black CNN. It'll probably be a while before the genre throws up anything quite so classy as UGK again, so this is as good a place as any to get yourself edumacated.

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou - The Vodoun Effect (2008)

My experience of African culture - at least my direct experience - is fairly and perhaps sadly limited. William Bennett of seminal power electronics group Whitehouse has recently taken to recording African inspired confrontational music as Cut Hands. Some have pointed out that this may represent overcompensation for albums titled New Britain and those idiotic statements about gangs of National Front skinheads being an inspiring sight, or whatever stupid crap it was he came out with in the name of annoying liberals; but even if Cut Hands really is something other than William Bennett sitting next to one on the bus, I'd argue that it doesn't really help given its use of Africa as just another set of scary things waved in your face.

On the other hand, my eyes were well and truly opened when the British Museum had a rummage through its basement and put together its African galleries a few years back - African galleries as distinct from the crowd-pleasing and already fairly well publicised Egyptian collection. Even aside from it being the land from which we all originally came, Africa - it turns out - was never really quite the land of black people living in huts, moaning about elephants, and not much else as portrayed in post-colonial entertainment; but the image persists because the place is enormous, poorly understood by outsiders, and for every shovel of sand excavated in Egypt, a mere teaspoon's worth of archaeological investigation is undertaken in the name of the rest of the continent. It therefore came as a surprise to view Africa in terms of its archaeology and realise that it was never a land of cartoon savages, but rather was home to a great number of civilised and quite sophisticated societies with a lot more going on than we had at the time, at least until the Romans showed up and taught us how to use toilet paper. For one particularly striking example, as Janaki Lenin writes:

Farmers of the rainforests of Nigeria, Africa constructed an extensive network of earthen walls and moats. Astonishingly, in some places, the walls are twenty metres high and the moats twenty metres deep. What makes this even more remarkable is that Sungbo's Eredo - meaning Sungbo's Ditch - is thought to have been built around 1150AD on the orders of a childless matriarch, Bilikisu Sungbo (although the dates don't add up, locals believe that she is none other than the Queen of Sheba). The fortifications span 160km encompassing an area of 1400km2, the size of Delhi. Nearby Benin City has even more spectacular walls and trenches, extending 16,000km and covering an area of 6,500km2. This is thought to be the single largest archaeological phenomenon on the planet, an enterprise larger than the Egyptian pyramids. The zooarchaeologist, Juliet Clutton-Brock, believes they may be evidence of man's earliest elaborate defense of crops against elephants.

So, to swing back around in the general direction of the point, whilst I find African culture potentially fascinating, there's a hell of a lot of it and it's difficult to know where to start. Tsotsi was a great film; and I've never quite understood the appeal of Fela Kuti or that psychotically happy music they always seemed to use to advertise sporting events televised by the BBC; and that's about as far as I've got, until now.

To briefly fly off after another indirectly related train of thought, it could be argued that African art has had a profound influence on first world culture, at least depending on how much importance you place on the stuff hanging in our own art galleries. The influence of Picasso on contemporary art has been of undeniable significance, and of course Picasso would have remained just some randy Spanish bloke with the face of a plumber had he failed to notice that European painting was looking a bit saggy around the buttocks, and that those exciting angular wooden masks were just what the witch doctor ordered.

The same process has of course informed the evolution of rock and roll, and quite a lot of the music we listen to - with the possible exceptions of Beethoven, ELO, and all those Death In June bands - most of which can, roughly speaking, be traced back through rhythm and blues to traditional forms originated in Africa; and so in this collection of songs by Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou from Benin in West Africa, I suppose it's fair to say I had an expectation of hearing the pure form of something or other, or, to paraphrase Nocturnal Emissions, what the music sounded like before they got hold of it, they being the agents of the spectacle. To be fair, I had that expectation because I'd already heard a little bit of it when Kevin Harrison posted a YouTube clip of Mi Ni Non Kpo on his facebook page, and I was so impressed that I ran straight to my nearest internet and snapped up a copy of this collection. Interestingly enough, this is not actually your strictly traditional African music in so much as Orchestre Poly-Rythmo were quite happy to reclaim some of that which had evolved from the original template on foreign shores, incorporating all sorts of bits and pieces from jazz, blues, soul, funk and all those other genres which have since come to carry unfortunate associations with overly-earnest middle aged white men. Yet even with the discernible influence of James Brown amongst others, there's an absolutely unique magic to these songs. Without actually sounding exactly like anything I've heard before, this nevertheless feels like a sort of ur-music, a pure seam of the stuff in raw form in which one may discern traces of almost everything else ever - Led Zeppelin, 23 Skidoo, Motown, Can, LCD Soundsystem, even acid house - it's all here, somehow. In fact it's quite tough to think of music which owes no debt to the greater whole from which this clearly derives; and if this claim were not in itself sufficiently preposterous, it might also be worth noting that most of these songs were recorded by sticking a microphone in front of the band and pressing whichever resulting recordings sounded okay as seven inch singles. The recording values suggest early soul records, or Billy Childish, or even Steve Albini, and there's real power in that sound, the sort of thing that might be lost in a better equipped studio, or even one with a roof.

So to summarise, William Bennett likes to pull scary faces, Africa is probably more interesting than you realise, elephants are serious business, Picasso was the Paul Simon of his day, and this CD is like a better version of every record you've ever heard. After 1,076 words of scrabbling around like I've dropped my contact lenses, the review probably isn't too likely to cohere into linear sense at this juncture, so the point worth remembering is probably that The Vodoun Effect isn't quite like anything I've heard before, and is of such robust and honest constitution that it actually feels like it's doing you good as you listen. The rhythms are fantastically inventive, the instruments don't always do what would be expected of them were they playing some more familiar form, and the whole thing leaves you in a frankly amazing mood without doing any of that pathologically happy stuff favoured by other, better publicised African recording artists.

Sleaford Mods - Austerity Dogs (2013)

It seems that in certain quarters there is a generally held view of Sleaford Mods as being the next big thing, perhaps suggested by a recent write-up in Mojo or some magazine of that sort. This seems unusual in so much as somehow I've heard of them prior to the predicted enmassivisation, and that they're fucking great, in contrast to the general trend of the last few hundred next big things being mostly toss, Neutral Milk Hotel for example - Neutral Toss Hotel would have been more like it...

Already the usual suspects are queueing up to forge the definitive summary of the Sleaford Mods sound resembling a fusion of John Cooper-Clarke and the Wu-Tang Clan, which it doesn't; or The Fall, which fails to get any closer, as is usually true of almost every band ever described as sounding like The Fall; or they're punk hop, whatever the fuck that's supposed to be. I'm not sure if anyone has yet suggested Suicide fronted by Pitman on the grounds of blue-collar rude words spat out in an East Midlands accent; or Nocturnal Emissions circa Songs of Love and Revolution mashed up with Skinnyman; or Swans covering Splodgenessabounds because it's an amusing image and not much worse than any other description, but if not, you can have those for free.

Sleaford Mods build songs up from raw loops of what sound like someone's rehearsal tapes captured on a mono-portable cassette player in 1978, and a sort of Tourette's attack of lyrics that really capture the feel of turning up for agency work at a Parcel Force depot at 6AM on a freezing Monday morning only to be told the failed Footballer's Wife from said agency was too busy painting her nails to send your papers through to the gate; and so you're screwed once again. Specifically, Austerity Dogs sounds to me exactly like life in England just before I escaped, at least life for the belching majority who somehow failed to end up in their dream jobs once they left school. Sleaford Mods are not only the opposite of  anything you will ever see on The X-Factor, one voice of the underwaged and supposedly unemployable silent masses against which the British Government has recently declared out and out war, but they're one of those once in a lifetime bands - depending on your definition of what constitutes a band - of such fierce and comic honesty that almost anything stood next to them will inevitably end up seeming affected, ridiculous, and divorced from reality.

The only phone on the road is chlamydia-ridden phlegm stained,
where the fuckers sell processed peas as weed.
It's cold when I look out my window.
Another local pub burned down to the ground.
I hated those fucking Motown nights anyway.
It's Jive Bunny meets Lucy fucking Pinder...
...on ice!

To be honest, Austerity Dogs is so good as to make all efforts to write about it completely pointless - simple, powerful music and brilliant words, and I just can't stop listening to the fucker. As with the cold leftovers of last night's kebab hastily consumed on the way to work in the hope of staving off a hangover, it may not be pretty but it's undeniably nourishing.

Available from Norman Records and probably some other places.

Ceramic Hobs - Oz Oz Alice (2010)

Remember that slightly troubled kid at school whose parents forbade him to listen to records by anyone other than the Swans and Splodgenessabounds? Well...

No. No. No.

Let's start again...

So you've just purchased a brand new shit-throwing machine. You've followed the instructions, duly bolted down all the gaskets, and now you're out in the yard ready to give it a whirl. You throw the toggle and stand in admiration as a controlled storm of stinking effluence arcs across the path, and then fuck—

In a panic you remember too late where you left all the groups last night, and now they're covered in it! The Birthday Party, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Pink Floyd, Electric Light Orchestra - all dripping in reeking human poo! It's a disaster! You rush them into the kitchen, bundling them all into the sink and begin scrubbing away with a brillo pad, trying to console yourself with the thought that at least no-one will be able to tell with ELO. The dog comes in, brushes against your leg and you fall, for some reason, reaching out to steady yourself and accidentally hitting the control for the waste disposal. There's a disgusting gurgle as all the bands are sucked down the plughole - even though that isn't actually how a waste disposal works - and you know it's too late. You go outside for a smoke, then come back in and disconnect the waste disposal from the power supply, then set to work on clearing out the fetid gunk of what used to be the Birthday Party, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Pink Floyd, and the Electric Light Orchestra. You hold a gobbet to your nose and sniff, and if you're anything like me, which you probably aren't, it reminds you a bit of Oz Oz Alice; which is at least preferable to sounds like The Fall, as frequently opined by morons in reference to anything which, bearing no comparison to U2, must therefore logically constitute a Mark E. Smith rip off.

Bollocks.

The mad have by some definition become the last minority upon whom it's still apparently okay to perform dubious medical experiments; and for the sake of clarity here, by mad I mean those of the United Kingdom who have had occasion to be sectioned under the mental health act, as opposed to folks who might wear a Marilyn Manson T-shirt and regard themselves as a bit edgy. Mad - a term reclaimed by the Mad Pride movement - describes those who may suffer from a variety of mental conditions to greater or lesser degrees, and is no more useful as a blanket description of a particular type of person than any other impersonal collective noun - black, white, gay or whatever. Being mad does not necessarily determine one's level of intelligence, sexual preference, creativity, employability, or how useful a person is likely to be in the wider context of society. Nevertheless the mad are the one group to whom an entirely different set of laws are routinely applied in contrast with the rest of us. Things can be done to the mad without requiring the consent of the individual, and any movement in opposition to this finds itself additionally in opposition to not only the legal system, but in some cases - so it has been argued - to the interests of both psychiatric and pharmaceutical professions.

Ceramic Hobs, a band comprising some who have themselves had dealings with representatives of the mental health profession, are amongst the more conspicuous of the Mad Pride bands, at least from where I'm stood; and perhaps unsurprisingly their music really gets in there, representing a uniquely fractured vision of much greater honesty and intensity than the usual Radiohead feeling a bit sad because they don't like working in an office type of deal. From certain angles, it's the more terrifying end of psychedelic garage - the kind with cartoons of evil mushrooms growing from murderous looking band members on the record cover - filtered through Smell & Quim or one of the more unpleasantly odiferous noise groups, and it rocks. It may initially sound like a wall of noise, or at least one of those jam sessions where everyone gets pissed off and the guitarist suddenly starts playing Pictures of Matchstick Men by Status Quo because he's bored - which does actually happen here on Toto In Africa - but the more you listen to Oz Oz Alice, the more sense it makes, or at least the more it takes shape; and by the third or fourth spin, every last distorted crackle and rustle of mangled master tape sounds like art, and good art, as in something that's been put there for a reason.

It's harrowing and bonkers of course, but nevertheless absorbing for representing such a raw and genuine vision, something that is clearly enjoying itself and doesn't give a shit as to the listener getting it in quite the same way as all those Oasis fans identifying with their idols. Also, it's funny and even somehow educational - funny not least during the deathly serious delivery of the when I'm pooing on your head section of the title track, amongst other things; and educational because sometimes it's a good fucking thing to get yourself some insight into how other people think, particularly when they think in ways quite different to whatever you're used to.

Oz Oz Alice is a mess but it's also quite brilliant; and it's the exact opposite of U2, Radiohead, and anything you will ever see on The X-Factor.

DMX - Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood (1998)

Much like The Damned's Machine Gun Ettiquette, this is one of those albums that may not be the greatest record ever made, but sounds like it could be whilst you're listening to it; or it does to me anyway. In terms of brooding introspective menace, DMX always struck me as likely inspiration for the character of Omar Little on The Wire, but he was never a serious contender for world's most amazing lyricist. His strength lies in the power of his delivery, the screw-faced intensity of his artistic vision; and in any case no-one ever quacked their pants whilst listening to a Talib Kweli record. This was his second album, the one that moved things up a notch from It's Dark and Hell is Hot to form a near perfect rap album, despite this apparently being impossible for anything that sells triple platinum without containing at least one track about the joys of eating a delicious Harvest Crunch bar whilst doing a finger painting of that nice Bob Marley - criteria for perfect here being how close it gets to doing that which it sets out to do.

Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood sets out to psychologically profile the life of the artist from the inside looking out, capturing a filmic intensity which parallels the more harrowing moments of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now or any other widescreen quantification of life as both precious and yet unfortunately cheap. To rephrase that without the poor fit of my unimaversity edumacation, it's the blues with specific reference to Robert Johnson stood waiting at the crossroads for the man downstairs, or maybe the black New York Nick Cave; something that involves a lot of blood and not many smiles.

Whilst angry rap albums may not exactly be a limited resource, this one works because it resembles nothing that came out before or since - not even other DMX albums. For starters, Swizz Beatz who produced ten of the fifteen tracks was really firing on all cylinders when he built these songs up from those weird plinky-plonky beats - clipped snares that could have been lifted off an old Synsonics toy drum, Casio keyboard style pizzicato strings, and even that dollar store scratched record effect that probably came from some video game. The guy seemed to go out of his way to find cheap, artificial sounds, making them work in spite of themselves, pinning it all down with a measured bass throb; repeated keyboard smash notes turned into a melody, finally subtracting as many elements from the song as it can stand to lose without falling to incoherent pieces and so leaving us with this big empty space, like a cathedral made out of broken plastic toys and cheap Taiwanese electronics. DMX's violent, almost masochistic growl is thrown into sharp contrast against such a soundtrack, carrying a weight that's positively old testament. It's at least as intense as the cover implies, but nonetheless essential, educational and even inspirational listening, and - just so we're absolutely clear on this - DMX is not suggesting listeners try any of this at home. He already has quite enough of his own problems, in case you're a moron and somehow failed to notice the utter dearth of glamour or lifestyle tips.

Finally, it still astonishes me how something which - on close inspection - sounds quite so avant-garde, quite so unlike anything that had been before, managed to sell by the truckload and clog up the airwaves for at least a year; but of course, being a multi-million selling rap album means it went above the radar for many based on the idea that the musically adventurous must by definition be obscure and unpopular. It's bollocks really. Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood makes Godflesh sound like Haircut 100; most experimentalists may as well be Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen by comparison; and yet it sold so well they couldn't press the fucking thing fast enough when it first came out.

This record is a masterpiece.

Lagowski - Ashita (1997)

Several thousand years ago I found myself sharing a house with a sculpture student from Ipswich named Reuben Pinkney. This was my first time away from home so it all seemed quite strange, but happily it turned out that my housemate and I had similar tastes in music.

'Try this,' he said one evening, handing me a cassette tape of four tracks, no titles on the inlay card, just the name of the band which was Nagamatzu. 'They're from Ipswich. You'll like them.'

I did. They sounded a bit like Joy Division, but about forty or fifty times better than all those other bands who sounded a bit like Joy Division; Atmosphere era Joy Division without Ian Curtis singing one of those I'm referring to something spooky without telling you what it is songs; in fact they were what New Order should have sounded like, I decided, except instrumental. Fuck it - they were actually superior to any of the bands with which I felt qualified to draw lazy comparisons - driving bass, sharp rhythm programming, and the sort of panoramic cloud banks of synth that evoke spiritual revelations on warm summer evenings, but better than that and without lending itself quite so easily to my admittedly purple prose.

Years later I discovered that these tracks - which I still had on a tape somewhere - were actually from the recently reissued Shatter Days, and that the membership of Nagamatzu had included one Andrew Lagowski whose name I'd encountered on numerous occasions without my ever realising there was a link; and within about a week of learning all this, I happen upon a copy of Ashita in my local Half-Price Books. It's all connected, you see. Woooooooo!

To briefly swerve off in pursuit of yet another very loosely associated train of thought, many years ago, but not so many years ago as when I shared a house with a sculpture student from Ipswich named Reuben Pinkney, my friend Carl worked at a massive and fairly well known photography and design studio near the Post Office Tower in London. One afternoon I turned up to meet him from work as we were going to a gig, or to the pub, or to the Raymond Revue Bar or something or other. I went up a floor and into a studio space full of desks and light boxes.

'You see this lot,' Carl told me in sotto voice, a furtive glance to all the others working away at their computers. 'Every single one of them is a DJ.'

The information was not offered as something which might impress me. I looked around at all the heads close-shaven to circumnavigate the onset of male pattern baldness, the self-conscious hipster spectacles, the near identical clothes, and those zippy record bags left laying around stuffed with rare Bulgarian tech-stomp twelves picked up from Flabby's in Soho at lunchtime, records I probably hadn't heard of, but which they had.

I wondered how Carl could stand to work in the place, amongst so many people all trying far too hard, all labouring under the delusion that arranging a group of records produced by other people in a particular order is a profoundly creative act. It's not that the art of the DJ is entirely without skill or merit - and by DJ I refer to the phenomenon as it has emerged from rave culture as opposed to the whole cutting and scratching deal associated with rap and hip-hop - but things seem to have got out of hand, and media driven hyperbole has elevated the status of people who choose records to something far beyond that which they actually do. My guess is that this is because it can be sexy to rock a crowd with your two record players, to be seen to have it large, and to be recognised as someone who knows how to choose a jolly tune - if you'll pardon all the terminology - and much sexier than sitting in a studio scratching your arse and programming a drum machine like a saaad specky nerd who reads books and has never done it with a girl - or a boy depending upon personal preference. As with any sudden and popular shift in that which has caught the imagination of the general public, the past is either revised or ignored with Cromwellian zeal, and so thanks to sexy DJ culture, that which was once unpopular and even reviled is moved to centre stage with a new coat of paint, hence all the clueless fuckers who will swear blind that electronic music was invented by Aphex Twin or Daft Punk; and whatever that other stuff was, well it wasn't the same and it was saaad.; although this view apparently also makes me a hipster.

Due to my having records that you haven't heard of, but which I have heard of, the first track I came across by the apparently award-winning Burial inspired the thought that this sounds like Nagamatzu, but not as good, and oddly the same equation has worked with Autechre and Lagowski. It isn't that I feel I should necessarily be congratulated for having taste when everyone else was rolling up the sleeves of their jackets and listening to Climie Fisher - although it would be nice - but I sense an injustice in so much as it would be nice to see persons such as Andrew Lagowski and the rest getting some credit, or even wider recognition after all this time, and it seems a shame that people will happily miss out on some great and genuinely innovative music simply because it isn't wearing a backwards baseball cap and asking you to check out my jam, yeah?

Ashita is quite clearly tapped from the same inspirational well-spring that informed Nagamatzu, and as such still sounds about ten years ahead of the folks who haven't quite finished reinventing Lagowski's earlier records; and listening closely it serves as a lesson in how to do this sort of thing right, and how to keep it interesting. It's all electronic, roughly ambient or whatever you want to call it, but it feels organic in a quite fundamental sense, sounds and notation which seem to evolve and expand upon themes as though part of some subatomic process, the formation of cosmic strings or whatever. Nothing here sounds like something you will have heard before in quite the same way on another record, even down to snare and cymbal hits which don't ever quite repeat on themselves let alone on anyone else; and crucially everything is at the volume at which it needs to be, so some details remain half heard whilst others move slowly towards the foreground - might be worth noting just how many lesser producers can't mix and keep everything at the same flat level. All of this serves to invoke a space, pretentious as that will almost certainly sound, a great void defined by the musical elements cohered about its periphery, a subtle and pleasant differentiation of the more common result of just whacking the reverb up to 99.9 seconds and deciding fuck it - that'll do.

Ashita treads an impressively fine balance, achieving a sort of split second musical precision without exactly sounding composed, or trying too hard as I guess I mean. Rhythms build up from sparse throbs of deep bass, becoming hypnotic without ever quite sinking into simple repetition. As with the greatest of art, it's as much about what is left out as about what is used, and Andrew Lagowski is a true master in this respect; and as with Nagamatzu, the emotional impact is incredible and subtle, something falling between mournful and sublime without pulling any of the obvious tricks, the plinky plonky boo hoo piano notes that have probably just been reinvented for the umpteenth time by the latest whining incarnation of DJ Tosspot feat. Mercury Music Prize Fuckface.

Whilst it may well be true that I've heard of this record and you, dear reader, possibly haven't, it's not like I have all existing copies locked up in my basement, so the rest is up to you.

Go on, be a devil.

Spice 1 - 187 He Wrote (1993)

That massive supposedly complete history of rap that will one day be written probably won't be dedicating too much page space to Spice 1, for like MC Eiht, Celly Cel and a few other west-coast notables, he did his thing, and he did it well, but he never really made a massive splash in terms of sales, cult status, or whatever artistic criteria we're judging rap by this week. The nineties will probably end up remembered as the decade of Dead Prez on the grounds of their being responsible black men who rapped about vegetarian food, learning to play chess in coffee shops, and lighting up a few incense sticks before you knob your bird on a Friday night after the pub - with a few nods to Malcolm X thrown in just to show that just because a man is in touch with his feelings, it doesn't mean he's, you know, soft. Whilst it seems unlikely that gangsta rap will be entirely forgotten, it'll probably be remembered as something invented by Eminem, because when a white guy describes that stuff, obviously it's art or at least some sort of statement in the vein of a Scorsese or Tarantino, something of merit as distinct from that stuff which is just kids bragging about guns upon which we'd rather not pour too much scorn in case anyone thinks we're racist.

Just so we're clear, the music of Spice 1 belongs in that category which has thus far eluded sanitisation, reassessment, and subsequent reclamation as something you might enjoy over a glass of wine and a few injections of legal marijuana. It tells the sort of stories you almost certainly won't want to hear, which is a good thing because there's not much point bothering with rap if you're only interested in the more soothing end of the spectrum; and the closest our boy comes to moral responsibility is advising us that if we're really going to pop a cap in someone's ass, then we should at least make it count and pop a cap in the ass of someone we can rob. Wise words indeed.

There is of course a school of thought which states that albums like 187 He Wrote glamorise gunplay because that's what sells, and it must therefore be regarded as inferior product, although said school of thought probably wouldn't state it directly to Spice 1's face. Personally I hold to the view that this interpretation is only that, an interpretation, and is, generally speaking, bullshit which should be obvious as such to anyone attempting to engage with the music on its own terms. Whilst I'm sure Spice 1 never had a problem with the idea that he might be able to sell a few records, it seems pretty obvious that he's talking to his people, as in those who've lived the sort of horrendous crap described here, and whether Sting or C. Delores Tucker understand isn't really relevant; and similarly, ignoring this sort of thing isn't going to change the fact that there are people out there who live in the world described herein. Then there's also the idea that songs about gang violence tend to glamorise gang violence, an idea possibly derived from the occasionally filmic quality of much gangsta rap and the apparent absence of a don't try this at home disclaimer, the song ending with our narrator sobbing, wishing he'd stayed in school and studied to become a dentist. So think on, kids...

Bah, I say. Just get over it and listen to the music. I spent many hours listening to Spice 1 whilst pounding the pavements of south-east London as a postman. Contrary to the popular image of the job being much like that seen in Postman Pat - just wandering around with a few letters, happily spending an hour chatting to Mrs. Goggins at the corner shop and so on - it was often a miserable and deeply fucking thankless task, usually struggling to get five or six hours of work done in about four and breaking your back in the often pissing rain whilst doing so; and whilst I never found myself having to dodge bullets, listening to Spice 1 really helped get me through some truly shitty days, just as I expect 187 He Wrote helped members of its intended audience get through some truly shitty days - and I mean the sort of days in which you try listening to Killing Joke but give up because it just doesn't seem angry enough. In fact it's surprising how tame a lot of supposedly grumpy music sounds when compared to that produced by those who, like our boy here, have experienced real world problems more severe than dad forbidding the wearing of nose rings at the dinner table.

The great thing about the music of Spice 1 is that it combines all the reckless nihilism of its gratuitous violence with a surprisingly uplifting quality. You might almost say it's the blues - Robert Johnson taken to an extreme I suppose, but still very much a soulful and populist take thanks to a massive injection of g-funk with a big fat organic bass end emulating the experience of having your arse kicked by a really happy guy, probably; and whilst the man himself may be deemed lyrically limited by certain dubious criteria, he more than makes up for it with the sheer inventive relish of his delivery, and of all the rappers to engage in that vocal scratching thing that everyone was doing back in '93, he's significantly one of the few to record material that still sounds fucking great two decades later. This is probably what distinguishes his vocal style from being a mere gimmick, in that such tics and tricks were never the only thing up his sleeve, and were more to do with a debt to the toasters of Jamaican dancehall than a passing affectation. This, for my money, is probably also one of the reasons why Spice 1 is perhaps the only rap guy I've heard turning out the occasional full-on reggie tune without sounding like an utter cock.

Neither before or since, I would argue, has music quite this terrifying ever felt so joyful. Mine may well be a minority view, but Spice 1 surely deserves at least one album amongst the acknowledged rap all-time greats, and this one is as good as any.