5. Dizzee RascalBoy In Da Corner
I grew up in Highgate, North London, which is very quiet and suburban, so I had no concept of the life Dizzee was living, and the surroundings he was living in, that are detailed on Boy In Da Corner when it was first released. It was eye-opening as a 14-year old to hear about the other side of a city that I had always lived in, but didn’t have any contact with. I’d never been to Hackney, or Bow, and it wasn’t till I was a bit older that I started to realise that there was more to the city than the enclave that I lived in. I used to open some of my sets with ‘Sittin’ Here’, and it’s bleak to think that, over a decade on, the lyrics are still as poignant as ever. Not a huge amount has changed in London.
Aside from that social commentary, I loved the production; the rawness, the playfulness; how the call and response parts play with different voices and characters, even though it’s the same author throughout. The vocal is also mixed super loud, too, so you can really feel him throwing himself out the speakers. The fact that he made the instrumentals himself I find astonishing, considering his seeming distancing from the LP in recent years. I can maybe understand why he doesn’t want to be "that guy who made that record ten years ago", and maybe it reminds him of a terrible time in his life, too, but I don’t know why you’d want to ignore the importance of your work – your masterpiece, arguably – given that time has been so good to it. I don’t hate anything I’ve written before – there may be tracks I think haven’t dated well, or I’m sick of hearing – but I’d never be all: ‘Don’t talk to me about it’.
