Full Description
With his debut album Original Pirate Material (2002), Mike Skinner, who recorded under the name The Streets, combined the world of UK dance music with US hip-hop. OPM is the result of the so-called 'bedroom producer', hybridizing previous forms into something novel. This Element explores a number of themes in this album: white masculinity, the everyday, technology, sampling, hybridity, the Black Atlantic, and US-UK transatlantic relations. It examines the exoticism of Englishness from a US perspective as well as within the wider context of Anglo-American cross influence in post-WWII popular music. Twenty years since the album's release, this element provides an investigation of the album's content and reception, as an important case study of (postcolonial) hybridity and (English, male) identity.
Contents
Introduction; 1. Pirate radio and the turn of the 21st century; 2. Big England: the sounds of the black Atlantic; 3. Transatlantic relations: analysing the special relationship musically; 4. Sample robbery; 5. Technology and production; 6. Everyday Laddism; 7. Genre: UK garage and US Hip-hop; 8. Little England meets big England: hybridity as originality; 9. Mainstreaming British popular music in the 21st century; 10. The afterlife of OPM and the streets; Conclusion; Bibliography.
