DJ Squeeky presents Tom Skeemask - 2 Wild for the World (1998)

Just the other day I happened to slip upon a patch of oil left over and not yet cleared up after stripping down and cleaning my numerous hand guns and assault rifles, and falling against the computer I found myself accidentally online and unintentionally logged on to a bulletin board dedicated to the children's television show Doctor Who. Naturally I made attempts to sign out but, already confused, I found that I had instead been drawn into a section of the forum dedicated to music, and specifically to a thread purportedly set up for fans of hip hop and rap, although it would be fairer to describe it as a thread for forum members owning one or two rap albums. It took only seconds to locate the first claim of there having been no decent rap music recorded since the first Wu-Tang Clan album, because it's all that Puff Daddy and commercial rap like Lil' Wayne, and Public Enemy were great, and in fact It Takes A Nation of Millions is probably the best rap album ever - and yes, I know I'm going out on a limb with such a bold, unpopular statement - and we don't like that commercial rap because we only like the underground stuff which you probably won't have heard of because it's underground and not commercial like Puff Daddy and that bass music, whatever it's called; the Fugees were good too, and that Will Smith is a great entertainer...

Luckily I had already returned my firearms to the rack in Junior's room, because I really, really felt like emptying a clip into the fuckin' screen, lemme tell ya...

This was about rap for people who don't actually like rap - rap deemed more adventurous and underground than the Puff Daddy commercial rap because it appeals to fans of Radiohead and really interesting groups of that sort, because it's progressive and exciting and not actually much like rap, which is all too commercial and made by angry black men talking about guns and money and saying some really sexist stuff too, like that so-called Fat Joe. Alex Petridis in the Guradian pointed out that Fat Joe has a song called Shit is Real which just goes to show what a stupid, uneducated fellow he is. Shit is Real - I mean come on, it's hardly William Blake now is it snurf snurf...

So that was how I came to experience a sudden and overpowering need to cleanse my soul with some real rap, as distinguished by its copious swearing, threatening behaviour, actual beats, and fixation on real shit of flavours rarely experienced by folks with fucking cLOUDDEAD records; and as is appreciated by people who listen to rap. This will undoubtedly resemble sneering, but fuck it - if you don't like rap just go ahead and say it, but don't claim otherwise whilst referencing some shit that came out a quarter of a century ago as representative of the last time it was good enough for you to bother listening. Piss off and take your friggin' Buck 65 twelves with you back to fuckin' Starbucks.

Tom Skeemask is, for what it may be worth, the real deal. He says stuff you really might not want to hear, but which might do you good to hear; and whilst he may not be the greatest rapper in the world, he really ain't that bad, and if there's any suggestion that maybe he doesn't mean it, or that he's just saying this stuff so as to appear like some commercial rap big shot - you know, like that Puff Daddy, well - he's probably not that hard to track down, so please feel free to go ahead and tell him to his face. It's violent and territorial because sometimes life is violent and shitty and unhappy, and territory is the only thing some people have at the lower end of the economy.

This is southern rap - hard words spat out at machine gun tempo and a hot, slow Memphis vibe timed to the pace of life in the hotter states, places in which the weather obliges you to move around real slow for the best part of the day. It's closer in spirit to Eightball & MJG than any Hypnotize Minds thing - electric piano, lush guitar licks, and a bass so deep you can only hear it in cars, it being designed to scare the shit out of whoever you happen to drive past at snail's pace with your window down. DJ Squeeky lays down the tracks and Tom Skeemask tells it like it is, and there isn't much more to say about it because it speaks for itself, what with being the real thing and all.

I feel better now.

Thank you, Tom Skeemask.

Terror Squad (1999)

Terror Squad are probably best remembered for Lean Back, a massive club hit taken from an album with at least one eye on said clubs, not to mention radio, MTV, sound systems within cars that go up and down, and the ears of men with diamond encrusted teeth drinking Babycham from the fannies of pole dancers. True Story of 2004 was, generally speaking, a decent album, an achievement in itself given that Terror Squad had more or less imploded following the death of Big Pun back in February 2000. Like I say it's a decent album, but the real stuff was always to be found here, on the first one. This version of Terror Squad featured Big Pun plus his trusty sidekicks Triple Seis and Cuban Link, with the three of them representing a lyrically solid - in fact pretty much unbeatable - core to what was, I suppose, the Latino NWA, if we really have to go there.

In all seriousness, whilst Prospect and Armageddon may not quite have quite been first division, it didn't really seem to matter so much with Fat Joe and those other three on the team. The sum of the parts was great, although it should probably be kept in mind that, with this being an album of six guys who had cut their proverbial teeth battling lesser talents, threatening behaviour was always going to be the arena in which they would excel; so what I mean to say here is that for all True Story being a decent album and one that didn't really sound anything like we expected it to sound, what you actually want from a Terror Squad album is less club, and more in the line of disgruntled gentlemen explaining what's going to happen when they catch up with you and you don't have the money right.

In case anyone missed the memo, Big Pun was a fairly generously built gentleman - the Big qualifier being in no sense either ironic or symbolic - who some have identified as the greatest rapper of all time. Personally I'm not convinced he had the range in terms of subject for such a title, but on the strength of being able to stick a load of words together in delivery of promises and threats simultaneously both terrifying and hilarious, I'm not sure there was ever anyone better, or that there ever will be; so yes, he was definitely a giant in his field, and his presence alone makes this disc essential listening. Accordingly most of the album sounds like it was recorded with sepiatone film in a barber shop in one of the scarier corners of the Bronx, probably with some guy called either Beansie or Jimmy No Nose hanging around in the corner and due to get it sometime during the next three minutes. The sound, pulled together by the Alchemist, various Beatnuts and others, resembles faintly claustrophobic loops of Godfather or Goodfellas soundtrack pinned to the carbonate with a pleasantly solid bass set to the pace of walking quickly away from a crime scene before discreetly tossing a firearm once you've wiped the prints. It really does feel like that, and as such it's sort of exhilarating, which would be something to do with adrenaline and a dense lyrical barrage that never really lets up.

Well, I suppose maybe it does sag a little towards the end of the disc, the point at which it sounds like someone noticed how all the songs had thus far been about punching, hitting, shooting, stabbing, or keeping your mouth shut and doing your time - all metaphorically speaking of course - so there was maybe room for a few numbers about shagging, about how much the lads enjoy a pint followed by a spot of how's your father. I don't know - rappers talking about sex has always been a bit of a grey area with me, and here it's just kind of boring, maybe even a bit creepy following the succession of pugilistically themed tracks. Still, that's only a couple of numbers, and the whole holds together well providing you enjoy shitting your pants. I seem to recall the mags of the time greeting this one with a round of non-committal shrugs, which I suppose is typical.

High points make up most of the album, but the stand out is probably the terrifyingly cinematic War, showcasing Triple Seis and with hindsight highlighting what a tremendous loss both himself and Cuban Link were, following their estrangement in the wake of Pun's passing. I don't really know what the beef was between them and Joe, but it's a real shame it had to end that way.

Lack of Knowledge - Grey (1983)

To launch immediately into this week's dubiously relevant preamble,  I seem to have developed a passing allergy to industrial music, or at least to some of that which tends to be saddled with the term for the sake of argument. It was a facebook encounter with one of those noisy cassette types of yesteryear. We used to write to each other all the time, and he now believes unions have too much power and that Margaret Thatcher saved the country - as he put it himself. This seems entirely consistent with an emerging pattern of former avant-garde oscillator-twiddling industrial types turning into the enemy in later years, although I'm beginning to wonder if the seemingly contradictory dynamic of this development results from a misconception on my part, having once equated experimental musicians with the tradition of artistic and intellectual libertarianism as once represented by the Surrealists, for one example; when perhaps it is more the case that so many sonic pioneers have been artistically out there and on their own principally because beneath it all they're mostly ultra-conservative, deeply misanthropic loners, and even more terrified of change and the big bad world than your average Daily Mail reading shut-in. The ironic posturing, mimicking harsh or totalitarian positions perhaps wasn't always so ironic as it seemed at the time. Perhaps that tape was called Face the Firing Squad because actually they really like firing squads, regarding them as an efficient and entertaining means of dealing with lefties and trouble makers blah blah blah Ayn Rand blah blah...

Well, whatever the case, this week I'm in the mood for something far, far removed from the realm of self-important fifty-year old men logging on to see how their Monsanto stock is doing whilst composing another whining I coulda been a contender missive on the subject of a thirty-year old cassette of mains hum with a picture of Peter fucking Sutcliffe on the cover; and Grey is a long way from that. It's also a four track 7" EP which is some way outside of my usual parameters, but I listened to the album, and although excellent, it just made me want to listen to this again.

Lack of Knowledge had a heavily industrial aesthetic - black and white photographs of tower blocks, gas stations, chain-link fencing and so on - but it was something with which they were grappling, artistically speaking - as opposed to just sneering about industrial squalor being texturally interesting whilst lounging around tossing playing cards into an inverted top hat. This came out on Crass Records and is as such as good a refutation as any of the notion of the label ever having peddled the droning monochromatic tedium for which it is remembered by people who probably weren't there.

Happily, there was never much ambiguity as to the nature or general identity of the enemy with anything on the Crass label, and Lack of Knowledge distinguished themselves by going at it from quite a different angle compared to at least a few of their contemporaries. Musically they weren't really about songs so much as pieces of music comprising different movements in an almost classical or progressive sense, so there's a dynamic, but nothing so commonplace as verses or even a chorus. Oddly, this structure isn't really the first thing you notice, or at least wasn't the first thing I noticed, because musically what you generally have are variations on a fairly intense, driving, and melodic sound somewhere between Joy Division's Dead Souls and New Model Army, but without all the fighting and burping noises. It sounds like nothing else released on Crass Records.

Arguably most unusual of all, Lack of Knowledge's shunning rock tradition extended to the lyrical content as much as to that which it narrated. The lyrics - if you really want to call them lyrics - are printed in the fold-out cover, reading more like short stories than anything, there being no concession to conventional song structure, rhyme, or anything of the sort; and these are nevertheless sung and with some passion. The stories - or scenarios might be a better term - are brief dystopian tales of life in an oppressive police state, borderline science-fiction but unfortunately nothing like so far-fetched as they should be given the kind of shite our governments tend to get up to when they know there's either no-one looking, or there are sufficient numbers of people like my former pal ready to cheer them on. The sum of the parts is astonishing and possibly unique in the history of modern music, sort of like what you might have had if Joy Division had been a bit less depressing and had recorded a talking book; and weirdly it works.

Doors burst open, and machine gun death rains in on the betrayed conspirators. The remaining few confess their crimes, and when justice is done, they die. They die but the hope lives on.

One criticism I've seen made of records on the Crass label is that they have a certain didactic quality which some find off-putting, a certain utilitarian naming of names, as opposed to slapping a picture of Peter Sutcliffe's garden shed on the front and saying oooh isn't it interesting and subversive how no-one realises that they're looking at Peter Sutcliffe's garden shed. Lack of Knowledge elude this pitfall by illustrating their anti-authoritarian point in cinematic fashion rather than spelling it out by means of the in-house style of having a dog bark at a swarm of angry bees. This gives their music a tremendous and raw emotional impact. In fact, thirty years later I still find it difficult to listen to these four tracks without getting a bit of a lump in the throat, because it's surprisingly uplifting to know that whilst there are some evil, manipulative fuckers out there running the world, we are none of us alone; and Grey represented the real thing, or as close to the real thing as a vinyl record gets - something political and genuinely revolutionary.

Deviation Social - Compilation Tracks 1982-85 (2010)

Deviation Social were by their - or rather his - own admission, hardly prolific, releases being limited to a couple of cassettes and a lonely 7" selling more as a vague trickle than anything invoking images of hot cakes, but nevertheless they - or rather he - seemed to be a name for a little while back there, sneaking in under the radar of general weirdy music in the spirit of Throbbing Gristle just before somebody suddenly decided that it was not only all industrial but that it was a movement. I refer specifically to Throbbing Gristle because, aside from anything, more or less every fanzine review described Deviation Social as their tribute band. Whilst it's true that Arshile Injeyan's influences were worn pretty much on the sleeve, also incorporating SPK and the like, the Gristle-isms are more apparent in the presentation which, if lavish, spoke of the customary Porridgey fixations whilst insisting that Deviation Social were a multi-media enterprise rather than a pop band, because you know how we all used to have such trouble telling the difference between Abba, the Rollers, Racey, and some bloke stood on a stage holding a skull whilst talking about Charles Manson through an echo delay. Well, we were all young once, so never mind.

Having been predisposed to appreciate a Throbbing Gristle tribute band, I would have loved to have got my hands on one of those tapes, but I was still at school at the time, my income being pocket money and the wages of a paper round. The first cassettes I ever sent for through the post were paid for by getting my mum to write out a cheque, and so sending for stuff from America always seemed like it might be taking the piss somewhat, what with the currency and everything. Still, I got there in the end, seeing as we now live in the age of nothing quite staying past tense forever, and I suppose it was worth the wait for this stuff to rematerialise on lovely thick slabs of vinyl.

So there's a track called She Wants To Be With Manson, and the previously mentioned pretence of being a corporate art assault unit rather than merely some bloke with a few effects pedals, and there's the tediously inevitable recurrence of the number twenty-three; but, you know - musically Deviation Social weren't significantly more a karaoke Gristle than any number of other bands of the time, at least no more so than Gristle were themselves karaoke Hawkwind. There's a reliance on unsettling tapes of speeches made by bad guys, which - let's face it - was a trick pulled by everyone and their fucking milkman at the time, but Deviation Social definitely had the makings of being their own distinct entity in these tracks, and might have been remembered as such had they just been a bit more prolific. There's not much in the way of tunes here, at least not tunes for the sake of tunes, and there are a lot of grating electronics and effects without the disadvantage of Porridge reducing everything to an exercise in studied irony. Deviation Social was, roughly speaking, power electronics before power electronics became a formula, and oddly some of it also reminds me of very early Devo.

This isn't the greatest, most original record you will ever buy, but you could do a lot worse, and it's still a mystery how Deviation Social seem to have been generally overlooked, not least in a world in which people still bother with utter pish like Sleep Chamber.

Prince - 20Ten (2010)

It's difficult to pinpoint quite when Prince went definitively off the boil, although for me it was roughly around the time of the song he recorded for Tim Burton's horrible Batman film. This was annoying as I'd always been partial to the occasional dollop from the Prince spigot, certainly since Sarah - my girlfriend of the time - gave me the Purple Rain soundtrack album for Christmas - and if you hold the sleeve to the light you can still read the biro indentation of her festive greeting written on the wrapping paper: how can you listen to this crap, you sexist swine? To finally answer Sarah's question, I found it quite easy to listen to Prince because, aside from anything, his records sounded nothing like those of the feckin' Birthday Party, which was more her department. More recently, I was coaxed into seeing himself perform at the Millennium Dome, a gig coinciding with that album he gave away with the Daily Mail. I was sat about five rows from the stage and, as anticipated, it was all very watchable regardless of the material, most of which was derived from Planet Earth. He eventually played the hits, but solo as a sort of karaoke set with backing tracks when the band went off to have a rest, which was a bit disappointing, but never mind. It was still a pretty good gig.

Planet Earth, the Daily Mail freebie album, a copy of which also came with the tickets for the aforementioned live recital, isn't terrible, but it's definitely post-crap Batman song Prince, one of those doubtless hailed as a long-awaited return to form by an ever dwindling oxbow lake of die-hard Prince obsessives, long-awaited return to form here amounting to not quite as bad as you might expect; see also Bowie, David. I'm not even sure how I came into possession of 20Ten which must presumably have been given away with Exchange & Mart, or Railway Modeller or something of the sort. I've a feeling it arrived in my hand by the same route as Kiss's Double Platinum, but couldn't say for certain. Anyway, it's here now, so let's get on with it.

Initial impressions aren't entirely favourable, and give rise to the feeling that New Power Generation might be more accurately rebranded Sexy Retirement Community; and in places it sounds as though the band is now just ol' man Prince fiddling about with his laptop whilst perched on the toilet so as to reduce the risk of not being able to make it in time. Compassion and Everybody Loves Me in particular could almost be Go-Kart Mozart, and I'm not saying that as a positive thing. However, once you're over these particular humps, the remainder just about does enough to cast them from your thoughts, and to be fair the same rinky-dink soundcard ambience never bothered me on any of those rap albums built up from the same sort of squelchy synthetic p-funk. Thus allowing the Charlie Chaplin of sexy songs the benefit of the doubt and forgiving him for Batdance, repeated plays reveal the majority of 20Ten to be decent at least above and beyond not quite as bad as you might expect. The second track, Beginning Endlessly raises the tone, reminding us of a time when every song on a Prince album sounded different, and we continue in roughly that spirit. He seems to have reigned in the more lurid excesses of songs about gussets, and the social commentary of Act of God may not hit quite so hard as Sign o' the Times once did but still manages quite a slap. In other words, not only is 20Ten not shit, but it's actually pretty decent - maybe not so immediate as Purple Rain, Parade, or any of the biggies of yesteryear, but it pisses all over Planet Earth.

Tinchy Stryder - Catch 22 (2009)

I've a feeling this was the last CD I bought before I left England in 2011; and so, landing in Texas with only those worldly possessions which could be stuffed into a single suitcase and a music collection chiselled down to about ten discs, this one received a fair old hammering for the duration of my first six months in San Antonio, at least until I was able to ship the great bulk of my shit over in February 2012. Consequently it has a particular place in my affections and carries certain strong associations. During my most recent return visit to the old country, I came close to big manly tears of nostalgia whilst eating proper sausage, egg, chips and beans in a Bermondsey cafe full of bricklayers and road sweepers with the radio tuned to some station playing roughly the same autotuned hybrid of grime and R&B as is heard on Catch 22. I could be missing something but this kind of thing now sounds very, very English to me - actually very, very London to further narrow it down. Possibly there are a million US stations playing variations on Tinchy Stryder, but I can't be arsed to sift through the great wealth of those playing country, western, country and western, western and country, and that We Are Young shite by Fun - which is apparently the name of the band, the really shit and annoying band.

Tinchy Stryder came up through grime as part of Roll Deep, and this album was apparently informed by a desire to break through into the mainstream, which is what it did, and does, to spectacular effect, mashing together all those weird pingy grime beats with big screen stadium trance techno, producing what may potentially be the most weirdly uplifting hybrid ever made. The grime element is true to its roots, raised on the sound of arcade games rather than Beatles albums and yielding sounds resembling nothing heard in nature, and not even heard that much in electronic music prior to 2009 - grinding synths burping away as the tonal equivalent to the sort of alien flavours only found in kid's sweets, the sort of thing Junior always seems to want from the ice-cream place when we stop by - bright dayglo turquoise and purporting to taste like cotton candy soda, whatever the hell that is. Add to this the trippy sequencers, glo-sticks, and Tinchy's confident but never puffed up delivery, and it's air-punching, head nodding, euphoric stuff which doesn't really sound like anything else I've heard.

Catch 22 is one of the most bizarrely artificial things I've encountered in terms of what has gone into the recipe, but it feels paradoxically more human, organic and emotionally potent than almost any other rap record I can think of. Of course, the heavy trance techno element probably disqualifies it as rap for those purists insisting that UK rap is only UK rap if it's been directly sanctioned and approved by Rodney P, but fuck 'em. When stuffing a handful of essential CDs into a bag and abruptly moving to another country, this one was a great choice.

Kiss - Double Platinum (1978)

...and before anyone gets to sneering, let it be known that the Young Marble Giants' Brand New Life is basically Strutter minus the awesome, so shut the fucking fuck up.

Growing up in England, Kiss passed me by in so much as the records were available but you had to make a special effort to hear them, which I didn't because I wasn't that interested. They looked a bit showbiz, very American and wholly ridiculous, and being as long-haired biker-orientated heavy rock was the default at our school I tended to avoid anything which sounded like it might comfortably sit between Judas Priest and Krokus in the record collection of kids who wore denim jackets with Motohead and States Quo written on the back in biro. That said, I was intrigued by the idea that Kiss had their own Marvel comic, and by my pen-friend Steven getting his wires crossed and insisting on the existence of a Sex Pistols album on which Rotten and the boys were quite clearly depicted wearing devil make-up and high-heeled boots with teeth. Then many, many years later as Beavis & Butthead sniggered over the video of I Love It Loud, I realised there might be something to this bunch, and although I'd never really developed any coherent assumptions about what they probably sounded like, they nevertheless didn't sound anything like I expected.

Another decade passed, and I found myself helping to clear my mother's house of the belongings of a long term partner who unfortunately turned into an enormous arsehole and had to be shipped off to a different city by means of a court order, and amongst these abandoned belongings I found this collection of what I assume to be the greatest hits of Kiss.

I really shouldn't be listening to this stuff. I mean seriously, there's a song called Calling Dr. Love and it probably won't come as too much of a surprise that said practitioner should endlessly espouse the medical benefits of good lovin' all night long - although I suppose that's the American healthcare system for you, which is obviously quite different to the NHS as it was back in England; and then there's Love Gun which is I suspect some sort of metaphor for the male generative member. This is why Spinal Tap failed, in my view. It did its best, but it still fell some way short of the genuine article. Even without the raw stupidity of the songs, the band are probably all so Republican as to make Rush Limbaugh sound like George Galloway, and there should probably be some sort of law against it, and yet...

Setting off on my morning bike ride with Double Platinum in my discman, I return two hours later driving an El Camino - passenger side door a different colour to the rest, obviously - wearing a mullet, and now regarding Easy Rider as a film with a happy ending; such is the power of Kiss. I guess I didn't imagine the music would be quite so direct or powerful as it is, direct and powerful in the way that the Ramones were direct and powerful, albeit working from a different, bluesier musical palette roughly equidistant between the New York Dolls and AC/DC. Nor is it really even heavy metal as we have come to understand the term, not with some of these tracks bordering on croaky Rod Stewart balladry but with the advantage of no actual Rod Stewarts being involved.

Kiss probably are the most ridiculous rock band of all time if you have your fingers in your ears, but with the sound turned up it becomes impossible to sustain the argument. I say ridiculous, but perhaps I really mean amazing...