I like to think that when Wiley heard Pitbull tell dancers to picture that with a Kodak he felt a bit resentful: despite having nearly written the rule book, none of the rapper’s own ridiculous lyrics and blatant dance-pop crossovers had resonated with non-British listeners nearly as effectively as “Give Me Everything” did. Still, these times should suit the erstwhile “Godfather of Grime”, and at least in the UK they seem to: his latest album The Ascent has already yielded three top 10 hits locally, including a number one in “Heatwave”. If Wiley’s career seems to seesaw between rough-hewn respectability (or obscurity, if you prefer) and goofy populism, his latest sweep into the second category coincides with what must surely be considered goofy populism’s golden age. Sadly, this is not to say that this latest career reinvention is executed with particular grace or skill, and instead The Ascent bows to the received wisdom of cramming as many guest artists, producers and stylistic tics as humanly possible into a 50 minute listen, presumably so as to exhaust listeners into submission.
This conscious attempt to please all audiences is reminiscent of Nicki Minaj at times, especially when you measure the distance from the album’s most aggressive moment (the epileptic shudders of grime crew cut “Skillzone”) to its least (the histrionic, hospital fundraiser advert-ready “Tomorrow”, complete with fake Chris Martin chorus). But Nicki has two clear demographics in mind, and deals squarely to each of them; by contrast, Wiley’s ecumenicalism seems to blur the hard edges around each song until the strict stylistic differences hardly seem to matter. Which is a shame, because track for track several of the contortions come off pretty well, especially the obvious but obviously-fun drum and bass thumper “Reload” (random thesis: drum & bass got hooky again by listening to Madonna’s Confessions on a Dancefloor), or the bustling, horn-driven funky of “My Heart”.
On the other hand, it’s harder to get excited about Wiley and friends’ attempts at straight rap (what’s the point?) or numerous stabs at the international colors of EDM-pop. In the case of the latter, the problem is not the sound per se; arguably, the arrangements Wiley draws for are more inventive and sympathetic to rapping than are most of the better-known US counterparts, and Wiley is well-suited to the style, readily treading the tightrope between the fabulous and the fatuous. Rather, it’s that if you’re choosing a style which forecloses off so many sensory options (menace, swagger and so on) in favour of a narrow stripe of geared-up melodic anthemism, then you better ensure your anthemism is top-shelf. But the half-heartedly hedonistic R&B choruses on these tunes suggest that on the international market for bolt-on pop exuberance Wiley’s credit doesn’t stretch very far. The exception is the oddly stirring, string-driven “Heatwave”, which flips the script by having Wiley sound hookier than the blankly raunched-up chorus offered by Ms D.
It seems boring and a bit lazy to say that Wiley sounds best when he’s still offering up recognisable grime tunes, but it’s undeniable that on The Ascent the strongest of such efforts capture the rapper in his best light, in part by offering him space to breathe, and in part because the grooves’ stop-start frigidity, their alternations of yawning gaps and sudden collision of beats, mimic the same qualities in Wiley’s flow, that ceaseless monotone command-style filled with unexpected accelerations and decelerations, like a field marshal ordering troops in time with the beat.
Moreover, the always-ambivalent sonic qualities of grime-- its fussiness, even prissiness, evoking so strongly the idea of guys who want to be hard more than they actually are; hard men of the internet comments box era perhaps-- perfectly complement Wiley’s self-obsession. On “Humble Pie” and the particularly great “Broken Thoughts” (shamefully relegated to bonus track status), Wiley recounts tales of doomed love and precarious achievement with a kind of self-puncturing smallness that seems particular to grime and Wiley as its most emblematic figure. Both tunes feature gorgeously shifting, sighing arrangements from Kid D, their stuttering beats and rippling chimes a world away from crossover, but far more intimately entwined around the rapper’s curious charms.
