So you're an armchair Anglophile but you're burnt out on your old Britpop records, which by now seem so humdrum that even your word processor's spellchecker recognizes that genre name. UK garage has fallen into disrepair, as has two-step (or were they the same thing?). Your own middle-American town is already clogged with more British Invasion revival bands and post-punk facsimiles than you know what to do with. You're still not exactly clear on what "grime" is.
But you know you like The Streets. You're feeling Dizzee Rascal. Alas, you've played the available quartet of Dizzee and Streets LPs to the point of depletion. There's tons of Brithop to be found by filesharing, but if you're the old-fashioned sort who prefers label sanctioned releases, the pickings on this side of the Atlantic are slim. Roots Manuva? Fine, but you're looking for some next shit. You feel a profound empathy for fans of Argentine literature, "all three books of it," as Guy Davenport caustically remarked in a recent Harper's article. You sink into a slough of despair.
But then you stumble across Bush Meat by Infinite Livez. You can tell by the cover-- a bunch of Space Invaders-ish creatures menacing a sweating, Cyclopean hand puppet-- that something funny is going on. Since about a fourth of the track names include "feat. so-and-so", you glean that it's a hip-hop record. What's more, there are certain indications-- song titles like "UKKrap", a sans-full-stop "Mrs" (you've read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, natch)-- that maybe it's a British hip-hop record. And it is!
Infinite Livez is Bethnal Green-based MC Steven Henry, a member of the Shadowless Crew, and his alter ego...or collaborator...or publicity stunt...or whatever, Barry Convex, the aforementioned one-eyed puppet. Henry's style recalls London expatriate Slick Rick with its vibrant, merrily obscene storytelling and velvety flow. On "The Adventures of the Lactating Man", a first-person narrator laments his newfound freakhood. It's leavened with clever wordplay-- eventually, the lactating man floods the streets of London, "Everybody staying afloat in boats, 'cause I made it rise with breast milk, way (past your eyes / pasteurize)"-- and plenty of lurid trickling sounds.
Or check out "Pononee Girl", which seems to be a pretty straightforward account of picking up a My Little Pony in a bar. The seduction hilariously unfolds over a bombastic bass track laced with suggestive whinnies. Over dense, bouncy beats that teem with cartoon and video game sound effects, Henry's rhymes are cadenced and musical, and will be more palatable than Mike Skinner's to those of you who dig the accent, but can't countenance his stilted anti-flow. Henry exhibits a broad range and natural sense of showmanship, his voice smoothly tripping between a plosive singsong and an intense growl.
Bush Meat also salutes concept album masters De La Soul, with seamlessly sequenced skits that are inseparable from the imagined landscape of the songs. "Claati Bros", a slyly satirical metaphor about selling art made of elephant dung, is book ended by skits that take place at an art show, where aristocrats with Oxonian accents gush over the scatological sculptures by "Infinite Livez, a young black artist from the gay-to." Others, like "The Forest Spirit Sings the Bush Meat Song", abandon hip-hop entirely in favor of cerebral, digitally mangled post-music soundscapes.
At this stage, when the playing field for British hip-hop in America is so small, it still seems useful to weigh Infinite Livez against the genre's stateside pacesetter, The Streets. While Mike Skinner's music focuses on the mundane, Steven Henry's zeros in on outsized, lowbrow absurdity (he claims Andre Breton and Robert Crumb as influences), embracing rap's more slapstick qualities. But as more British MCs make their way to American shores, Streets comparisons will fall by the wayside. As Pitchfork's own Tom Breihan rightly noted in his review of the Lethal B posse cut, "Forward Riddim", "There are hundreds of MCs running around East London, and they're hungry." We'll see the genre shed its novelty status in the American mind and take on the sort of full-bodied variegation that Infinite Livez embodies in a single LP. That's something to look forward to.
