Just what is it we want from pop music? It's got to entertain, for sure, but there has to be more. Perhaps it should provide an escape, or maybe should inspire, enlighten, amuse, inform. Twenty-nine year-old Alex "Skinnyman" Holland is clearly of the opinion that music is only worthwhile when it does all of the above, and then some; and on his long-awaited debut he manages to make it all happen.
As near as the UK's underground rap scene gets to a living legend, Skinnyman memorably and thrillingly rebuked Eminem to his face in eloquent rhyming couplets after Mathers turned in an all-too-brief performance at his first UK gig in 1999. Signed to Talkin' Loud on September 11th 2001, he was in prison when the label was closed down by Polygram, with only three tracks of this debut in the can. Undaunted – and grateful to the Home Secretary for downgrading cannabis to class C, thus ensuring when caught in possession he would be fined, not jailed – he finally got the album finished, and at long last has a long-playing record to go alongside his police one.
And what a record. As driven and thoroughly conceptualised an album as Biggie's "Ready To Die", "Council Estate Of Mind" is, all at once, an alarm call from Britain's sink estates, a self-help text for bedroom musicians and dole queue poets, and as witty, erudite and engaging a rap album as you'll hear this or any other year. From the opening song, "F*ck The Hook", which acts as a sort of abstract or preamble, outlining the themes and arguments to come, to the final shivering samples of the closing title track, "Council Estate Of Mind" is the work of a lyrical intelligence that never lets up, with beats – crucially – that are made to match.
Lengthy samples from the 1981 Tim Roth film "Made In Britain" give the LP a narrative structure, so on the one hand it works like a superlative hip hop record, on the other, it's a 21st century kitchen sink drama, John Osborne meets Spike Lee in London N4. Veering from West Indian patois (Skinnyman grew up around Rastas and his first live raps as a child were in a ragga idiom) through slang of his own devising and ending up, frequently, with extended passages of blunt, erudite perception, it's difficult to single out highlights from the sustained torrent of ideas.
But the final verse of "Love's Gone From The Streets" perhaps best encapsulates the album's entire intent: "Is it that we're all destined to lose?/Is it through life, the things that we choose?/So many man are left out confused/So who's gonna be here to guide the youths?/So many people are scared by the truth/But I'm standin' here to be livin' proof/Rappin' on top of the council block roof/'Cos I'm blingin' it with my NHS gold tooth".
Self-deprecating, funny, caring, clever, musically and lyrically exciting: whatever you want from pop music, Skinnyman's got it.
