The beginning of “Jus’ a Rascal,” the second single and tenth track off of Dizzee Rascal’s debut record Boy in da Corner (XL/Matador), begins with a group of opera singers singing, “He’s jus’ a rascal/ Dizzee Rascal!” The song then abruptly transitions into the main beat, consisting of a bass drum, a synthesizer line that sounds like something removed from a subpar horror flick and some light strumming of a guitar.
Sure, Dizzee Rascal is hardly the first rapper to mix an opera sample into a rap song. I mean, Nas did it on the 1999 single “Hate Me Now.” But this is different. Whereas “Hate Me Now” was a perfectly calculated marketing move, a song devoted to Nas’ reputation as an intelligent rapper that blings, “Jus’ a Rascal” is more spontaneous, vertiginously blending samples to form a beat that somehow seems to work.
And while Nas interjects bland, nonsensical lines like “If you’re going to hate me, then hate me/ what can I do?” to describe his relation to the streets into his songs, Dizzee’s lyrics are infinitely more witty. On “Jus’ a Rascal,” for instance, he drops clever lines like “So don’t keep talking like you’re bright/ ’cause it will definitely get dark.”
But slow down. This is a debut album.
Born Dylan Mills, Dizzee Rascal is a 19-year-old rapper hailing from the rough streets of East London. If you had to place him in a musical style, he is perhaps closest to garage-rap, a British phenomenon that mixes bass-driven dance beats with rapped vocals.
Yet Dizzee’s beats are distinct, owing just as much in influence to electronic music as more mundane inspirations like PlayStation games. And then there’s his flow, a yelping squeal that at the same time imbues the music with senses of fear, confusion and anger.
It makes you question whether what Dizzee Rascal does on Boy in da Corner can be called rap at all, at least in the proper sense. In more than one way, Corner seems like the kind of album that a rapper might make if he were deprived human contact for an extended period of time. It’s otherwordly, bizarre and, at the same time, exceedingly brilliant.
Indeed, a single listen to Corner reveals that Dizzee Rascal has created a debut that is so encompassing in its scope that it seems to evade description. The beat on the first track, “Sittin’ Here,” consists initially of a vibraphone playing over a snare and bass drum. A minute into the track, Rascal integrates tablas and a bass and random instances of a police siren.
Beneath these schizophrenic beats, however, lies a distinct humanity, conveyed lyrically through a sense of paranoia that seems omnipresent on Boy in da Corner. All of the instrumentation on “Sittin’ Here” provide support Dizzee’s manic vocal as he broods about his safety in East London as he raps, “I’m scared ’cause it’s sweet/ But it could turn sour.” Later in the song, his concern about the hostility in the streets around his home turns to anger and despair: “I’m vexed at humanity/ Vexed at the Earth/ I keep getting vexed/ Till I think what’s it worth?”
These aren’t the normal gangsta-rap lyrics we’ve come to expect about mountains of ice and throngs of women. There’s no way you could possibly expect something like that from Ja Rule. But Dizzee’s conscious lyrics are never an isolated instance, either.
On the album’s first single and third track, “I Luv U,” Dizzee speculates upon the questionable existence of love as he raps over a loop of a woman saying “I love you” and a distorted bass solo. He details the complications of a teenage pregnancy based on such “love,” remarking, “Pregnant? What you talking about this for?/ Fifteen, she’s underage, that’s raw … / But it’s your own fault, you said three magic words (I love you)/ When that’s one for the birds.”
But that’s not to say that Dizzee keeps his lyrical focus at the local level. Perhaps the most eccentric and spontaneous song on the album, “Hold Ya Mouf,” features some of the record’s best lyrics. “It don’t make no sense to me/ Why fellas don’t act sensibly,” Rascal says of the violence in East London. He forms this into an overtly political message later in the song, proclaiming, “I’m a problem for Anthony Blair.” Maybe he is, but for rap music, Dizzee Rascal is a much-needed breath of fresh air.
Weinberg junior Vasu Venkata is music editor for PLAY. He can be reached at [email protected].
