The Streets, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living

How in the heck do you take The Streets’ Mike Skinner these days? He started out on Original Pirate Material (and even somewhat on 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free concept album) as a raggedy, rough-around-the-edges, streetwise, lager lout/rapper, but here he is on his latest, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, coming off like a pampered popstar. Gone are the days of heartfelt, awkwardly sweet love songs or odes to friends and clubbing; they’ve been replaced by sordid tales of drug use and trashed hotels, dumbfounded meditations on the agony of the music business, and braggadocio about screwing fellow celebrities. The kid whose self-conscious tough guy talking made him endearing has gone Big Willie Style. What the hell happened?

Okay, so this can’t really be called a sellout. Even back on Original Pirate Material, Skinner danced along the line between dancefloor bliss-out and hip-hop, with plenty of entertaining detours through song-skits about the life of the down-to-earth London teenager. And despite the brushed-with-fame skeeziness of tracks like “Prangin Out” and “When You Wasn’t Famous” (and no, not being a reader of the U.K. tabloid press, I’ve got no clue which pop starlet Skinner’s claiming to have slept with), there’s still a layer of tense desperation lurking beneath the fancy wheels and lines of coke. Take the title track, which paints a bleak picture of an artist scrambling from month to month to break even on record sales, despite the outward trappings of wealth and success, or even the aforementioned “Famous,” which seems to hint backwards at the yearning to be unknown and ignored.

Part of Skinner’s appeal, as touched above, has always been his awkwardness. For a guy as obsessed with stardom and celebrity as he seems to be, it’s nice to see that he’s still occasionally willing to bare his soul on the gorgeously melancholy “Never Went to Church,” an uncertain, fumbling elegy for his departed father. There’s also “All Goes Out the Window,” a pseudo-love song that seems to warn against playing around and breaking hearts, which points back at tracks like Material‘s “It’s Too Late” — which, sap that I am, I’ve always enjoyed, off-key warts and all. And yes, there’re still a few attempts at social commentary/wit here, like the U.K.-meets-U.S. “Two Nations,” Skinner’s interpretation of the classic dog-in-a-bar con game in “Can’t Con an Honest John,” and “Hotel Expressionism,” which attempts to update the typical rockstar hotel-destroying drama and turn it into bona fide art.

So, does all this mean that The Streets is still The Streets, no change since Original Pirate Material? Not quite. Sadly, there are some major missteps on here, like “War of the Sexes,” “Prangin Out” (what hell does “prang” mean?), and “Memento Mori,” the last of which sounds like something that probably sounded way better when Skinner was drunk and impressed with his own wordplay. The popstar sheen of the whole thing also knocks down the average-bloke-ness of the songs, as well, which isn’t a good thing considering that Skinner hasn’t got the best lyrical flow in the Isles (that award, for my money, goes to Roots Manuva’s Rodney Smith).

Of course, the tracks themselves still bump and jerk along disconcertingly like they always have, except that now Skinner’s presumably got the dough to buy better equipment, and the lack of progression on that front makes me step back and scratch my head a bit. It’s almost like Skinner’s trying to have his cake and eat it too — he wants to remain street-level, but at the same time, he wants the money and the fame and all the bizarre shit that goes with it. And the world just doesn’t work like that. Either you evolve, or you don’t.

All in all, given that there are only a relative few bright spots (“The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living,” “Never Went to Church,” “All Goes Out the Window”), they drag Easy Living down to a sub-par level, below Original Pirate Material or even A Grand Don’t Come for Free (and I couldn’t stand the single from that album). This one’s entertaining, sure, but worth more than a few listens? Thanks, but I think I’ll dig out Skinner’s debut, instead, at least until he comes up with something better.