Ah, moaning about celebrity. Even when the complaints of the rich and famous are valid, they're still often insufferable. It's no surprise that films about the horrors of being chased by the paparazzi or how awful it is for poor Julia Roberts to sit through media junkets fall flat on their egos. And musically, negative responses to the klieg and camera lights haven't been much better. Tracks about the pitfalls of celebrity culture or the trappings of wide-scale admiration and fabulous wealth-- from Pink Floyd's "Money" to Pink's "Don't Let Me Get Me"-- are often patronizing and grating. There are exceptions, of course: Eminem has been playing a compelling game of cat-and-mouse with his persona, fans and critics ever since he first hit the charts, and Kurt Cobain's wrestling with both self-hatred and a success he simultaneously courted and recoiled against are well explored on Nirvana's In Utero.
When Dizzee Rascal was promoting his debut record, 2003's trenchant Boy in Da Corner, he famously cited In Utero as his favorite record of all time. Perhaps then it's no surprise that follow-up Showtime often deals with the London savant's fishbowl life as he negotiates both the expectations of those who hope he swims and the sharpened knives of those who wish he sinks.
Rascal's level of fame isn't close to any of the above artists-- he thanks the 100,000 people who bought his debut, and he's still pleased just to open for Jay-Z rather than throwing rocks at Jigga's now-abdicated throne-- and that's part of his problem. "Still Dylan the villain from around the way," Rascal is big enough that his detractors want to bring him down and small enough that they probably can. So while a multiplatinum seller like Nelly can wonder, "What good is all the fame if you're not fucking the models?", Dizzee is not only mercifully teased by a woman on Showtime's "Face"-- she calls him a one-hit wonder and mocks his thin wardrobe and low-budget video before ultimately wishing a Jay-Z promo is on MTV Base-- but her words hurt.
"People are going to respect me if it kills you," Dizzee mutters on the follow-up track, and if that's the central goal on Showtime, he's likely to accomplish it. The album naturally lacks the shock of the new, the jolt of Boy in Da Corner-- instead, it's a consolidation of his strengths, lyrically and sonically, and a more satisfying listen than its predecessor. Musically, Rascal continues along many of the same paths-- explorations into orientalism and modal composition; the lurching, clattering futurerattle of jungle, dancehall, and hip-hop echoing through concrete tenements-- although the finished product is much more muscular and confident. Lyrically, he balances his paranoia with the spoonfuls of homespun advice and dew-eyed rallying cries that colored both his debut and Treddin' on Thin Ice, the solo bow from Wiley, another Roll Deep vet. In short, Rascal is keeping his feet on the ground, reaching for the stars, and looking over his shoulder for those who want to lay him in the gutter.
Single "Stand Up Tall" has its finger on "Pulse X" and the exuberance and immediacy of Boy's "Fix Up, Look Sharp". "Hype Talk" ice dances with glitch-pop better than anything on Vespertine. "Imagine" takes fleeting elements of emo and the "Girl/Boy Song" to somehow magical results. "Learn" demonstrates that Rascal can do orientalism as beats-and-banger instead of just minimalist soundtracks to introspection. He also looks further afield to Jamaica ("Face") and America ("Everywhere", "Flyin'"), and gets playful on the one-two combination of "Dream" and "Girls".
The latter features the Kano-like cadence of Marga Man as he and Rascal wink and whistle at women over the track that sounds most like it could have tumbled off of Boy. The former is the song that will likely receive the most attention, and could be the make-or-break point for Showtime fencesitters. Taking its sing-song, Casio-tinkling chorus from Rodgers & Hammerstein via Captain Sensible's "Happy Talk", "Dream" is the record's most overt Jay-Z reference (it's a close cousin to "Hard Knock Life") and could become its commercial equivalent to "Dry Your Eyes", a recent UK #1 for The Streets. "Dream" has a loopy charm and simple philosophy, and Dizzee's infectious exuberance for the track leaves him unable to resist adding his off-key vocals to the central lyric: "You've got to have a dream/ If you don't have a dream/ How you gonna have a dream come true?"
Even when something doesn't exactly work, there are other elements to buttress the missteps: "Knock, Knock"'s central lyrical conceit is propped up by the track's tea-kettle sighs as it moves at night down Jefferson Avenue (it's much too slow for the Autobahn). The female vocal on "Get By"'s chorus (which is more indebted to Kanye than the thug/diva duet template) has a bit of a square-peg/round-hole quality, but the song contains some of Dizzee's most quotable lyrics.
"If I can't find my around/ I'll find a way across/ And if I can't find my across/ I'll bore straight through," Dizzee insists on album closer, "Fickle". Not a Smiths reference ("fame, fame, fickle fame"), the track is perhaps the record's highlight, and the best example of Rascal's approach-- a mix of pragmatism and optimism, of demonstrating bravado without denying his vulnerability. Rascal's is a three-dimensional world, then-- not black and white, us vs. them, me against the world, me against the music, playas vs. hatas, underground vs. mainstream, or mo money, mo problems. There are elements of each of those cliches in his tracks, but he's smart enough to seek the nuances and contradictions in each of those supposed dichotomies rather than approach them as absolutes, an either/or, or a matter of right vs. wrong.
