The single, apparently, is on its last legs. Mostly removed from public display it has been relegated to the darkest corners of the High St – a weird attic-bound cousin compared to the bright shining promise of downloads and ringtones. They might remain a barometer for our weekly chart, but for how much longer will we have to witness their unsightly decline?
Such questions currently preoccupy a music industry in a state of dramatic flux.
Yet record execs could do worse than take a back-to-basics leaf out of Wiley's book. For two years the Roll Deep maestro has relentlessly proved himself as a one-man music machine. While Blue might smash into the Top Three with sales of around 20,000 (ie the population equivalent of a small market town) he has shifted approximately 100,000 white labels. Not bad considering the lack of six-figure marketing budget and celebrity magazine endorsements.
That his music remains defiantly uncompromising is even more astounding. For Wiley's self-proclaimed eski-beat is as raw as nails – a magpied jigsaw of bleeps, loops and dissonance as 'out there' as any beard-stroking cardholder of the avant-garde. And his lyrics run against the bling stereotype prevalent in so much urban music. There is no So Solid-style gangsta posturing – no pretence that he's leading a Gambino crime syndicate. What you get is a UK voice speaking a language as glamorous as the streets of Hackney.
The single "Wot Do U Call It?" comes on like a particularly lurid video game; "Special Girl" goes all Kanye West with a speeded-up sample of SWV's "That's What I Need"; "Treddin' On Thin Ice" is inner-city paranoia personified, while the closing "I Was Lost" is just about keeping your soul while those around you are selling theirs. "Don't worry if you sin, just remember that you're human," are the parting words. Don't listen – find your own way.
Lyrically, it might get a little one-dimensional. "Pick U R Self Up" is about picking yourself up, "Goin' Mad" is about going mad and "Pies" is about having your fingers in loads of…etc, etc. But an insistent energy pulls it through. This is an original album about striving for originality and the search for identity. Tired cliches of haterz, gats, ice and kilos are conspicuously absent.
For too long the UK business has tended to bland out it's urban artists (and what a wanky term that is) for benefit of the mainstream but, ultimately, to the detriment of their careers. (The US wised up to this around the time of MC Hammer.) Thankfully Wiley, like Dizzee Rascal before him, is the real deal: electrifying, challenging and eloquent.
For those who want it – the future has arrived.
