That's odd - my reaction to BIDC followed the reverse process of yours, Laces, in that my admiration for it just grew and grew over the months that I owned it, in fact probably culminating at about the time I realised Showtime had leaked onto p2p networks. Perhaps it's to do with familiarity - you were hyping Dizzee in this forum before I'd really heard of him, so I assume you must have been into him /UK garage in general for a while, whereas I had the whole "squeezing a shocking new sound into my tiny brain" thing to deal with.
I'm going to make a couple of comparisons that have elements of beard, but bear with me... BIDC, or at least my reaction to it, reminds me in some ways of Company Flow's "Funcrusher Plus" and Roots Manuva's "Brand New Second Hand". All debut albums with a stripped down, beats'n'rhymes'n'not much else style that on my first hearing sounded startling and exciting, but initially somewhat narrow, until I properly got my head inside them and marvelled at the variation produced from apparently simple ingredients. The difference being that Dizzee has done what I wished the other two acts mentioned were going to do with their second albums, that is, to present a refined & progressed version of the sound they've established. Much as I've enjoyed subsequent stuff from Roots and El-P, and not that I want to argue against artists moving on, obviously, I was always disappointed that they spurged out stylistically so much. There's something so...mmm.. chewy, and satisfying, about an album that has the consistency and single-mindedness of Showtime or BIDC, as if it forces you to get inside its mindset and accept it totally on its own terms. "No, you can't listen to this as you do any old music, this is a Dizzee Rascal album, Motherfucker!"
And it's only about five minutes since the last album! And he's just a wee lad! The guy is incredible. I'm listening to Showtime right now and currently digging on the little parallels between the two albums - "Fickle" and "Do It" for example, the change from the desparate "this shit had better work" of the earlier track (cf Basement Jaxx's "Lucky Star") to the "Next level then. Bring it!" of "Fickle". Or "Young baby mothers yo I got your back as well... that kid's the next generation planet Earth", off "Dream" compared to the entirety of "Luv Ting".
One of the many things I love about dream is the way he quashes any criticism of its silliness with the spoken bits at the start and end of the track, the "how am I gonna pull this off without sounding daft?" ending up as "You love that! Tell me you don't love that!". Plus of course the local-pride moment of "I'm from the LDN, there's no forgetting that, and the big UK, I stay repping that - HUH!"
And yeah - definitely the ultimate walking around London album. The other day I was actually walking past Well Street at exactrly the same moment as he namechecked it on my walkman. Joy! |
