One thing you can always hope with novelty music is that it’s going to be a short-lived fad that people will turn their backs on relatively quickly. This may have come as a surprise to The Darkness, but you’d imagine that the makers of Crazy Frog knew they were pushing their luck from the start.
I’m sure there are many out there who would say that Lady Sovereign is not a novelty act, but the styling of her as a female Eminem style hero, celebrating all things chav was enough to make you balk on the first attempt. It was more confusing that she earned the patronage of the likes of Jay-Z and Pharrell Williams to help her in her cause, and for a while there it did seem like people were taking her very seriously. In the cut throat recording industry, that she made it a second album is nothing short of remarkable.
This new release is no less odious than the last, either. It opens with ‘Let’s Be Mates,’ which is an exercise is throwing in as many chav-friendly references (degenerating into that old convention, ‘I’m x, like y,’ of which you assumed that all similes had been used up in nineties hip-hop) as possible, rapped in an accentuated cockney accent over the sounds of something purging the entire Vengaboys back-catalogue, bulimia style.
‘Bang Bang’ opens with the words ‘Oi, oi, oi, polloi,’ and features such words of wisdom in the chorus of ‘I’ve got that bang, bang sound, you’d better crank it loud.’ I know all music doesn’t have to be deep, but it has to reach a certain level to be this charmless. Recent single ‘So Human’ samples The Cure’s ‘Close To Me,’ which just makes you a little resentful. The sentiments in these songs are simple, meaning obvious.
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‘Student Union’ cements her credentials as a girl from the street, mocking the geeks and losers that go to uni, reminding us how she doesn’t fit in with that sort of crowd.
I guess this is being marketed to middle-class teens as a glimpse of what it’s like to be part of an edgy underclass, it all sounds extremely cynical and contrived. It’s exactly how excruciating it is to hear white people pretending to be black.
It’s essentially US rap as sung by a white British woman and that’s exactly what it sounds like, and why it just can’t work on any level. It sounds about a decade out of date, where there are many examples of UK garage out there that stomps all over this. Someone definitely had their scrunchie on too tight when this second album was authorised.
Expect some twat to be blasting this out of their mobile phone on a bus near you, right now.
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