One-man hip-hop outfit The
Streets—a.k.a. Mike Skinner—debuted with "Has It Come To This" on
the respected UK label Locked On in 2001 before scoring fairly big in his
native UK and the U.S. with three LPs: Original Pirate Material (2002), A Grand Don't Come For Free (2004), and The Hardest Way To Make An
Easy Living (2006). The first two were nominated
for the prestigious Mercury Prize, no surprise given Skinner's singular melding
of UK dance music with a literate, narrative stop-start flow unlike any other
rapper on either side of the Atlantic. He rejected rap's usual posturing in
favor of exquisite details about quotidian middle-class struggles like bad
ecstasy and dead cell-phone batteries. With The Hardest Way, however, he moved on to rapping about addiction, male chauvinism, and discontent with success. On his new Everything
Is Borrowed, the almost-thirtysomething
tries to reintegrate peace and optimism into his life and forge a personal
ethos, all while avoiding any verbal references to contemporary technology or
culture. He recenty spoke with The A.V. Club about another wild artistic turn and the imminent end of The Streets.
The A.V. Club: How did you
manage to avoid modern references on the new record? That seems like a tall
order.
Mike Skinner: I don't remember where that specific rule came
from, but anytime I finish an album, it means I've been working on that thing
for years. It's another way of getting away from the album I did before.
AVC: Was it difficult? So much
of your prior work was tied up with modern life.
MS: I was really excited to start off with, and I did write a couple of
pretty good songs at the beginning, and then it all started to get a little bit
weird. I think this is a great example of why it's good to restrict yourself
artistically. It was tough to avoid cliché, and I had to sort of reach for the
sky.
AVC: Were there any peers that
influenced your direction?
MS: I think I was more influenced by the books I was reading on this
album. A good example is "Alleged Legends," which is basically inspired by
books by Susan Blackmore and Richard Dawkins.
AVC: The author of The
Selfish Gene. You seem to come down
the side of a sort of moral evolution.
MS: Yeah. We have morals, a sensibility which we just have deep down. I
think people feel like if you don't write them down, then you have no rules, and
that's actually not true. Morals change all the time, and your subconscious is
actually much better at deciding what's right than your conscious.
AVC: Is this verbal turn away
from technology a sign that you're becoming a Luddite?
MS: I just got a 303 to go with my 909. They're probably my favorite two
toys. I really kind of learned with this album that rather than just fiddling
around with the sound in the computer, if you pick the right instrument
with the right microphone and right player, you can get something that sounds
good rather than playing with something inside the computer. So I'm definitely
gonna incorporate that into the next album, even though the next album is going
to be a lot more futuristic, in a way. Everything on this album was played by
someone at some point. The drums were kind of chopped, put into perfect
quantization, but I spent a long time physically making the drums sound like a
drum machine by covering the drumhead with tea towels to make it sound dead.
That's why it's these beats banging on in time, but they're warm because
they've physically been played rather than chopped up from samples.
AVC: The album is called Everything
Is Borrowed. Are you financially
prescient?
MS: Money is kind of imaginary, isn't it? That's one of those things
that's kind of really coming out at the moment. It's not money made by the
mint. It's made by the banks pretending and lending and borrowing.
AVC: How did you react to
the reaction to The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living?
MS: Every story, whether it's a film or a book or a record, gets reduced,
and people don't have time to look at it in detail unless they're really
interested. Everything becomes reductive. It was partly kind of an explanation
as to why the dream isn't a dream, you know? What's at the end of the dream? I
think I achieved a lot in that way, but it was perceived as this dark album.
AVC: Do you consider it a
failure?
MS: I don't consider it a failure, but everyone else does.
AVC: New York magazine says they liked you better as an asshole.
MS: There's 8 billion people in this world, and they all like different
things. I think I've done okay over the years, and people have a habit of
saying reactionary things when they're made uncomfortable. But they do change
their views when they look back on things and realize, you know, it was good.
AVC: Between the MySpace song
hunt and your regular blogging, how has the Internet played a role in The
Streets?
MS: I was here before it hit big. I'm very creative with the way that I
blog. I'd want to use the blog more after my label contract expires. Ideally,
it would just be the blog. Music will just be totally [available] whenever it
gets made.
AVC: Are you being held back by
your label?
MS: Not held back… I'm not necessarily saying that I would give away music
for free, because I think the jury is out on that one, but I definitely think I
wouldn't be pinning everything around a three-month promotion campaign.
AVC: "Two Nations" examines a
language barrier between the UK and the U.S. How is The Streets being
misunderstood here, if at all?
MS: I definitely think that there were some Americans who were offended by
"Two Nations," but not the Americans I know. I guess Americans are very
patriotic, which is all well and good. Americans, you know, aren't pretty
excited about George Bush, but if anyone else brings it up… Which I don't think
is a bad thing. But it's quite interesting, because America's actually the most
powerful country in the world. You kind of expect that patriotism from
Jamaica, or the Welsh. I think it's because they all come from somewhere else
and bought into the dream.
AVC: On "Stay Positive," you
said you weren't a "preachy fucker" or a "goody-goody." How has that changed?
MS: Nowadays I would say I'd try not to be didactic. But you have to have
an angle; if you don't have an angle, you don't have a story. I think the
balance that I find so difficult is finding the angle to the point, but not
going too far.
AVC: The "Escapist" video has
you walking from England to the south of France. What's your regimen these
days?
MS: I get up and run as soon as I wake up. I don't worry about things as
much. I don't know why that is. I think if you just keep your blood pumping, you
don't have black thoughts staying up in your brain.
AVC: So have the substances
faded into the background?
MS: I've grown older, and there was one year around the time of the last
album where I was clean for the whole year, but apart from that, I've just kind
of gotten a bit older. It's not really been anything that extreme.
AVC: You mentioned wanting your
body of work to be like The Wire.
What drew you in?
MS: It's very well executed, but I don't think it really speaks to me.
It's a bit like rap music to me. I don't think rap music ever really spoke to
me. I never felt like any rappers were me. I mean, there's a lot of my fans, you
know, kind of feel like they are me. I never really had that style, but I always
loved Nas. You feel like you're learning and you're not being sold short. There
are a few characters that I thought were a bit larry [ridiculous]. The black
dude who talked all posh, the guy that [Spoiler warning. —ed.] killed
Stringer. [Brother Mouzone. –ed.] He's weird, really, but apart from that,
I felt like you could see–especially in the schools, you can see where they're
taking a kind of general political dilemma and turning it into a human dilemma,
and they have characters acting out the roles in ways that kind of wouldn't
normally happen. It's bureaucracy, and then expressing the bureaucracy via the
characters. How else could they get that across?
AVC: Anything interesting
happen while you recorded in Prague?
MS: Well, I did the orchestra stuff. A lot of my music is just kind of "throw
it around 'til it sounds right," but when you got an orchestra waiting there,
you can't fiddle around. It really forced me to make decisions for the
first time. I had to make decisions about my music without hearing the result.
We had to set in stone what the strings were going to be playing and hope for
the best. That was definitely trial by fire.
AVC: Do you regret announcing
that The Streets will be over after the next album?
MS: I don't, actually. It turned into this thing that everyone asks me
about. I do mean to do it. I don't regret it, because I mean it.