Playtime, amongst other things: Aside from the possibility of doing some by-request production jobs and mentoring younger artists, Wiley was originally planning on retiring from the grime scene after this album. Yeah, I know, rap retirements-- but he's gone through a lot of shit, whether recent (the fumbled pop-crossover of his Roll Deep crew's 2005 album In at the Deep End) or longstanding ("I'm getting threats but it's never stopped in 10 years," he told RWD Magazine during his "farewell" interview). Considering he had a beef at some point with almost everyone who appeared on Run the Road and is approaching 30 with a baby daughter in tow, the urge to step into the background is an understandable one-- even if there's little indication on his supposed last album that he's had it on his mind.Playtime Is Over caps off Wiley's career in a low-profile fashion, considering that the progression he's taken since he dropped the "Eskimo" riddim on an unsuspecting underground in 2002 can be measured in inches. While Dizzee Rascal took a few risky chances on switching up and Americanizing his style for Maths + English-- released, significantly enough, the same day as Playtime Is Over in the UK-- Wiley has kept his formula mostly intact: skittering, hiccuping bounce rhythms, synths that sound like a turbocharged Super Nintendo with a subwoofer attached, and a manic, borderline-toasting flow that plows through everything in its path.
Wiley's deficiencies as an MC aren't overwhelming, but the possibility that his retirement may just consist of him stepping away from the mic while continuing to produce seems like a decent outcome. His voice is a hell of an instrument in itself, a ragga-inflected string of serrated, lightning-quick jabs, but it spends a little too much time barreling over beats like they're suggestions instead of backbones. Opener "50/50" is a sharp bit of lyrical work, wrapping a few tight phrases around a titular term that typically wouldn't give much room for them ("I'm 50/50, nifty nifty/ Got the best deal, nobody can twist me/ Anytime somebody tries to shoot me/ I flip the ball they miss me, miss me"), but by the second verse he's dropping syllables off-rhythm and his inflections fight distractingly against the beat.
"Gangsters" (one of three tracks carried over from 2006's self-released Da 2nd Phaze) is a loosely-associated string of threats and observations with only one word-- an icy, synthetic female voice echoing "gangsters"-- holding his verses together, and technically there isn't even really much rhyming involved: "We just had a wave of new (gangsters)/ Yeah, I think there's been a rise, more (gangsters)/ Imagine that, I'm a street kid brainy like (gangsters)," and so forth. It's weird that someone with such a straightforward lyrical style is so frequently thrown off by his own beats, but after hearing "Bow E3"-- where Wiley's postal-code hood-rep is halfway submerged under Maniac's production and constantly undercut by a stuttering, omnipresent hook-- you begin to miss how his voice sounds, flaws and all, when it has breathing room.
And there's a couple tracks where he gives himself plenty of it, often with some uncharacteristically gentle touches. "Baby Girl" is the most notable example, a dedication to his daughter that tempers his typical gruffness with a soothing flute/Mellotron loop and paternally poignant lyrics about teaching her the music business when she grows up. "Letter 2 Dizzee" is the other standout moment of raw feeling, where his side of the beef with his onetime protégé is played out with more wistfulness and disappointment than straight-up fury, reminiscing about coming up in the business together and couching a tentative ceasefire in shit-talking lingo: "Nothin' ain't changed except I'm the best now/ It don't matter, I'm still your big brother." (Given how calm and reconciliatory he sounds, it's probable he cut this before Dizzee's alleged Wiley dis "Pussyole (Oldskool)" dropped.)
Still, Wiley's always been strongest as a producer, arguably as important to the rhythmic aspect of grime's development as Dizzee was to the vocal. Even if there's little here that's surprising to anyone who heard 2004's Treddin' on Thin Ice, there's no sign of any creative entropy behind the boards; the Castlevania creep of "Johnny Was a Bad Boy", the elbow-throwing conga line of "Eski-Boy" and the electro tinges in "No Qualms" round out an album that's varied enough to serve as a solid final mission statement. And the guest spots featuring young, ambitious up-and-comers like Scorcher (who sounds like Wiley's smoother-voiced doppelganger on "Flyboy") and Jukie Mundo (growling like a rudeboy version of M.O.P. on "Stars") could serve as a preview for what Wiley's post-"retirement" mentorship itinerary might involve down the road-- dense, precise beats with intricately flexible drum programming, fronted by a new generation of grime torchbearers.
But suitably enough, the best beat on this album is on the final hidden track: Like his name-making "Eskimo", it's an instrumental with icy electronics and elastic bass, but it's also got a massive rhythm built on Lennox Lewis-force handclaps and a loose-limbed tempo that smoothly shifts gears from an off-center grime rhythm to a pounding, pseudo-house 4/4 for roughly seven seconds, just because it can. The bonus track's name: "Where's Wiley". Hopefully not a question we'll have to ask two years from now.
