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Voices London: 10.03.06 Scroobius Pip, the saviour of hip-hop
Written by Richmond - Hunter
Here are a few musings of mine on one of my favorite current artists, Scroobius Pip.
The last decade has been a rather hollow one for Hip-Hop. The more popular the music gets the dumber the lyrics seem to become and the less the artists seem to try. Now don’t get me wrong, that is not to say that mainstream hip-hop hasn’t had some great moments over the past few years, but it has become far too easy for some of the least talented song writers in the world to make a few million over night. A rap song needs three things, in my opinion, to be considered great: good backing music, a rapper with a good “flow” and good intelligent lyrics. Now over the last few years the third, and arguably the most important, of these has managed to sink out of sight and out of mind, replaced with a healthy dosage of “guns, bitches and bling”. Rap has forgotten its routes, it has forgotten about spoken word poetry which did not always sound fantastic but at least had meaning ( check out “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”-Gil Scott Heron), now some artists manage to at times hit all three targets (Eminem- “Stan”) others barely hit one (ahem…Soulja Boy). It is truly a sad state of affairs when a genre which fought against violent and suppression now stands for violence, sex and drugs, even when trying to sound sentimental they fail miserably: “I never woulda thought that I’d see you outta control; Even though my penis was deep down in your hole; You should know between us we was like mates to soul; Nothing could intervene us, especially no hoes”.
So what is the solution to this ever deteriorating genre of music, what if I told the answer would come from a guy with a big beard from Essex. I bring you “Scroobius Pip”, the man who has the potential to shape the next decade of rap music, if he gets enough support. Now I stumbled across this man by accident, when using a friend’s iPod, he came up and at first I thought it was just another rapper, but then I began to listen, and within the first few lines of “The Beat That My Heart Skipped”, I was hooked :
“Every now and then I cower and I need to find empowerment
Empowerment is paramount to how I can begin to mount
A plan that I can implement
to make a dent on ignorance
Instead of drunk belligerence
and the dissidence of miscreants…”
It was something I was not expecting, intelligence.
Immediately I went out and bought his first album, Angles. Before I tell you about it though, I’ll give you an idea of who Scroobius Pip is. His real name is David Peter Meads. He began his career not as a rapper, but as a jazz poet, doing small open mic nights around London and also New York. The name he has given himself is an intentional misspelling from an Edward Lear nonsense poem, Scroobious Pip. In the early noughties he came out with his first album “No Commercial Breaks”. This album cannot really be defined as hip-hop or even rap, it is nothing more than slow spoken poetry set to the relaxed jazzy sounds of pianos and trumpets. But then, in 2006, things began to change for his career. He teamed with techno DJ Daniel Stephen, better known as Dan Le Sac. Dan Le Sac gave Scroobius’ music the edge it needed, his fast paced lively beats really make Scroobius Pip the unique artist he is. Its not quite poetry but its not quite rap, its not quite hip-hop and its not quite techno, its all of them and none of them. After touring around London with a number of small gigs they released their first single “Thou Shalt Always Kill”. This is the song which really put the duo on the map, in it Scroobius Pip lists a set of new commandments, and it possesses what is quite possible the greatest line in music history: “Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry”. The tongue and cheek nature of the song, mixed with some deeper truths really set the tone for their music, if anything, they were something quite different. In 2008 their album “Angles” was released.
I will briefly outline my favourite Angles songs, just to give you a sense of what makes this album so good. It opens the already mentioned “The Beat That My Heart Skipped”, the lyrics in this song are masterpiece. The first verse in a way outlines Scroobius Pip’s aim, to “To make a dent on ignorance, instead of drunk belligerence”. The music is simply brilliant, if the words were in another language I would listen to this song repeatedly just to hear the hard hitting techno beats. A little later Scroobius Pip raps about, the stand up comedian, Tommy Cooper’s death. This is different to anything one would expect to hear in mainstream music nowadays, it is a glorious tribute to a brilliant comedian. He immediately jumps from this to a song about the deteriation of hip-hop, brilliantly set to a remixed version of Dizzee Rascal’s “Fix Up Look Sharp”. But don’t worry, he lets us know “Don’t get me wrong, im not dissing dizzee rascal/ Im just using his beat as a single exampleit was the first big hit of its kind in the pop charts/ all that last shit with profit in mind, not heart…”. This is lyrically a brilliant track. Pip essentially lays out and destroys all that is wrong with modern hip-hop, from the violence (“yeah, most of these kids could get their guns out and kill me, but how many have the skill to inspire and thrill me?”) to the supposed divine influence rappers draw inspiration from (“ “my lyrical content is a miracle, godsent”/ my name is scroobius pip and i say f*ck all that nonsense/ their lyrical prognosis is like spirital osmosis in that everything they say evaporates into boasts…”) It is an extremely refreshing song. Two tracks later Pip moves onto what is easily the best track, “A Magician’s Assistant” is a deeply personal message written for a girl planning to commit suicide. Throughout the song he reminds the suicidal girl of all those who care about her, from her sister (“And the only role model she has is little more than words engraved in granite. But as you said before, this just affects you.”) to her parents (“And the second that last bit of life trickles out, and your lungs cease to breath,/ They’ve failed the most important task that they will ever receive./ They failed to give their child a life that’s worth living,/ And that’s a failure as long as they live, of themselves, is unforgiving.”), it is a truly chilling song. Every single song is brilliant in its own right, and it never strays into common ground (gun bitches and bling). One of my favourite tracks is the one which gives its name to the album, “Angles”. In this song Pip gives four different first person accounts of a similar story, which leads eventually to a death and a man’s arrest. It is not until the last verse however that you work out how all the stories interconnect, it is a very clever song, which is always a great listen. Overall the album “Angles” is by far one of the most original albums of its kind.
A side note is that over the last summer holidays I went to see them in an Underage Festival in London, and they were incredible. Never before have I seen a band, which no one in the audience will have heard of, get the entire audience so excited. They had the perfect mix of intelligence and mindless noises that kids can dance to. They also, very humourlessly, did a cover of the Girls Aloud song “Push The Button”. To me Scroobius Pip and Dan Le Sac represent to me all that is good in London music at the moment.