Taking The Streets to Snooptown

I just listened to The Streets' 'The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living' straight through. I bought it this afternoon from the last remaining record shop in Soho, a narrow grubby place on Spring Street that has no business still being there. Rocks In Your Head, as it is gloriously named, is filled with scruffy stacks of vinyl, weird DVDs and a tall shelf so overstuffed with (actually good) books on music that they have a tendency to fall from it when you pull one down to look at - a literary Jenga, if you will. And they stock any CD that I'm likely to want to listen to, including the last two Streets records that I bought there.

I love The Streets. In too many ways to write them all out. Just trust me.

So I'd read that the third one was going to be about Mike's disillusionment with fame and fortune, and I was already a bit apprehensive. Now that I've listened to it, I'm more optimistic. Most of the beats are as unsanitary as the floor at Rocks in Your Head - no wonder it's called 'grime'. And he can still pack observational truths into single lines with maximum efficiency. It'll take months of listening to pick up every nugget, but I'm looking forward to it. And I'm pleased to report that 'Two Nations' made me laugh out loud, the last line here especially.

Two nations divided
By a common language
And about two hundred years of new songs and dancing
But the difference is language
And just the bits you got wrong
'Cause we were the ones who invented the language, oi

...but we love Biggy, Johnny Cash and Stevie Wonder
It's no Biggy we got no cash and its no wonder
'Cause I'm proud we gave you people like John Lennon
Even though you shot him as well

In the song Mike tells of being at a Nas gig in the UK when a gun is fired (I don't know the backstory on this one). Strangely enough, in '98 or '99 I went to a Snoop Dogg gig in a London club under a railway station (I think it might have been called 'The Tunnel'), and a gun was fired there as well. Turned out it was no 'Biggy' either - Snoop's a trooper after all and came back out five minutes later to finish the show.

Speaking of Snoop, I can now kill an extra bird with this stoner. Introducing the JamesbMartini YouTube Channel. My first offering is a video I took of the D-O-Double-Gizzle at a one-day festival last summer. I put it up as a test video last week and left it alone for a bit, and it's been watched 268 times already. Shizznit!

'Snoop confuses the lighting tech at the Amsterjam in New York, 2005.'