The back cover of the new Dizzee Rascal CD is a rear shot of the onetime grime wunderkind flipping the bird over his shoulder. Note the number of fingers raised: One, the American-style middle finger, rather than the "V" more traditionally associated with obscene hand gestures in the UK. Whether or not it's an acknowledgment of his American audience, however, is almost irrelevant: Stateside fans can't walk into Target or Best Buy and look at the back cover firsthand. XL has limited American sales to digital distributors. That they made this decision for Dizzee's crucial third album, Maths + English-- a record that features his most Americanized production yet and a Yank-luring guest turn from Houston rappers UGK-- is a bit perplexing. Even if this decision turns out not to be a significant constraint on his American sales (or, let's go crazy here, somehow improves them), it says a lot about XL's lack of faith in the U.S. market for grime's international ambassador: Given how the notoriously fickle audience back home has gotten tired of waiting three years for the followup to Showtime and has gravitated towards the dubstep of Burial and Skream, Dizzee's best prospects for an expanded fanbase may well be across the pond.
Given his career arc, it's not impossible to see a precedent for a potential American breakthrough. With Boy in Da Corner as his scene's import-buzz breakthrough album, Showtime the self-conscious more-of-the-same-but-bigger effort, and now Maths + English as his post-genre American-mythos statement, Dizzee could very well be doing for hip-hop what many UK artists have done for rock: Reinvent its British adaptations on American terms and vice-versa. First single "Sirens" supposedly started as a KoRn pastiche, but it finished as the ungodly offspring of "Straight Outta Compton" and "99 Problems" (with a bit of Chemical-née-Dust Brothers' "Song to the Siren" thrown in). And album opener "World Outside" offers turbocharged ambiance, glassy percussive clinks, subwoofer-stressing bass, and a chorus that ends "There's a world outside of the ghetto, and I want you to see it/ I can see it, I can see it, I can see it."
It's easy to wonder if Dizzee is talking about more than one type of ghetto. You could hardly call the album on the whole "grime" without a qualifier or two, and only one track has a direct and uncontaminated lineage to his solo career's origins five years back: The belligerent touch-tone chirps of last track "U Can't Tell Me Nuffin", which shows up long after anyone who bothers to listen to the record in sequence will have discovered he's not making Boy in Da Corner anymore. And while it's impossible for any album where Dizzee's East London dialect figures prominently to be fully Americanized, there's a lot for the States to latch onto.
"Pussyole (Old Skool)" is the personification of this particular trans-Atlantic exchange: While the chorus hinges on a derisive term seldom heard in the States (at least past the second syllable), the beat is so instantly recognizable as the backbone of a beloved circa-88 club-rap smash that early leaks were described as riding the "It Takes Two" beat. (In a neat production twist, it also incorporates the sample source that was used in the intro to "It Takes Two", Galactic Force Band's 1978 astro-disco obscurity "Space Dust", but features an entirely different, more propulsive section of the original song.) There's other, newer-school forays into Southern turf: The spare, punchy post-No Limit synth strings and drum machine beats of "Hardback (Industry)", which sounds like it could've easily fit somewhere on Ludacris' Back for the First Time, the Timbaland slickness of flosser's anthem "Bubbles" and 2-step b-girl club banger "Flex", and the aforementioned UGK summit "Where's Da G's", which pulls off the admirable feat of sounding like grime when Dizzee's on the mic and Southern bounce/g-funk during Bun B and Pimp C's verses. The tail end of the album has its share of fellow Brits mopping things up guest-wise-- Lily Allen dominates the grating music-hall pseudo-ska "Wanna Be", while the Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner turns in a decent performance warbling the chorus of "Temptation"-- but they don't set the tenor like the album's club-rap front half does.
The other major change in Dizzee's music-- some might say concession-- is his lyrical approach, which does less to cloak his rudimentary rhymes with busy pachinko-machine production and double-time verses. This is hardly a fault; like the circa-87 incarnations of Schoolly D or KRS-One, Dizzee's strength lies in the ability to wring ferocity out of uncluttered, straightforward verses. He shines when he gets philosophical about the police's role in the community on "Excuse Me Please", recounting the sickness and unease that came when robbing a couple on "Sirens", and seething with frustrated disappointment over the duplicity of an ex-friend (a maybe/maybe-not allusion to former Roll Deep mentor Wiley) on "Pussyole", but even the more well-worn hip hop subjects-- paranoia, phonies, how to survive the music industry-- flow viciously in a manner that's just about as good as anybody alive when it comes to completing the sound of a production. It works in a way that can't properly be evoked by just quoting lyrics; transcribing Dizzee's verses would be like printing the guitar tabs for "Theme From Shaft", reducing a point-blank gut-punch of a sound to its deceptively simple base elements. You could try, of course, and that'd make a track like "Suck My Dick" look like imbecilic bullshit -- "I don't give a shit who likes it/ I don't give a shit who don't/ Don't tell me to change my fuckin' attitude because I won't" -- but you'd miss the exaggerated schoolyard nyeah-nyeah inflections, the Lemmy-bassline cadence, and the sense of adolescent mischievousness that keeps it from becoming a self-serious, tiresome fuck-you tirade. You'd also miss the fact that those lines are accompanied by a bar of "Yankee Doodle Dandy"-- he could be catering to American sensibilities on this album, but he's not caving into them.
