Dizzee Rascal – Tongue N’ Cheek
Dizzee
In doing this they’ll be missing the point entirely, as people often do when they’re caught up in hatred, or love for that matter. Dizzee Rascal has always been what they might call a ‘sell out’. What’s Fix Up Look Sharp is not a pop hit at heart? In fact, grime in general is about 2 things: exploiting a London upbringing and escaping that same thing. Dizzee’s doing that.
At 24, the man born Dylan Mills is without a doubt grime’s biggest star. A tutelage and subsequent spat with Godfather of Grime Wiley set him on the parallel roads of success and stardom, and a Mercury Prize-winning debut album set him apart from the pack. 4 studio releases later and Dizzee Rascal is enjoying success like he could never have imagined: not only is he one of the few UK hip hop artists to achieve real crossover success (being embraced by both the electro and indie-rock circles, admittedly at the expense of some of his street cred) but he’s become something of an unlikely national treasure, even being asked to appear on the BBC’s flagship political show Newsnight.
Beyond the hilarity of the phrase “Mr Rascal”, some ‘is-he-joking-or-is-he-stupid” comments and Jeremy Paxman’s evident bemusement at the whole scenario, this appearance showed a positive, likable guy; a far cry from the cocksure cuntishness of comparable US stars.
It’s this abundance of personality that keeps Dizzee’s music so brilliant. I’ll be the first to admit that I only started listening to Boy In Da Corner for the comedy value, but slowly the genius of the Bow boy started to permeate my prejudice, and catching one of his incendiary Leeds Festival sets placed me firmly in the fan camp.
It’s not that his stuff is perfect. It’s very much flawed, especially the new album. Dance Wiv Me is a fucking nightmare on paper, and the ill-considered 2 bars of discordant duet in Bonkers just proves beyond doubt what we’ve known since the horror of Dream: the dude can’t sing for shit. It’s the snippet of studio chatter in that very song (“How am I gonna pull this off? This is too sensible for me man”), that shows the root of Dizzee’s genius: he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
The very title of Tongue N Cheek hammers home this point, and this excuses the album’s ills, the worst of which is the fact that Road Rage is just a substandard version of Pussyole. It’s also this that helps him dodge the usual bullet of third and fourth albums, namely that by the time an artist gets to this point in their career they have no real relatable problems any more, and not many of their poor listeners want to hear about an overabundance of guns, bitches and bling. Their lives are too comfortable for them to make the serious music they want to make (case in point: Oasis).
Dizzee recognizes this and instead of pretending (like Akon) or flaunting (50 Cent) he’s either hilarious or humble. In Bonkers he claims that “all [he cares] about is sex and violence”, and Dance Wiv Me spells out a situation in which he has to coax a girl away from her boyfriend to grind with him, which is the complete opposite of the ‘dripping in bitches’ attitude we’re so used to.
On Tongue N Cheek Dizzee is just enjoying himself, and it shows. Can’t Tek No More is fucking brilliant, poking fun at the British culture of complaint by listing minor everyday annoyances (“It’s a crowded house and you can’t have fun ‘cos when you have sex they can hear when you come”), Chillin Wiv Da Man Dem and Bad Behaviour belie the pure joy of performing that was so evident on his last Jools Holland appearance.
It’s so, so obvious that since hitting his mid-twenties Dizzee’s become more comfortable financially, musically and personally, and instead of producing a trite album of bullshit he’s somehow managed to pull out 12 tracks of fun.
Fuck man, the guy’s just enjoying himself. Don’t we need more of that in music?