Dizzee Rascal

The debut LP from the highly touted 18-year-old London rapper/producer (and Mercury prize winner) is less straight-up hip-hop and more hyperactive garage rap. Suggested for those with extremely open minds and ears, Rascal's style lies somewhere between the Streets, Ms. Dynamite, and Busta Rhymes. Features the single "I Luv U."

Nineteen-year-old Londoner Dizzee Rascal rhymes like a gangsta from another planet, with
a high, wound-up and desperate voice that sometimes sounds like Eazy-E, Shabba Ranks
and Gary Numan, all stuck inside the same body. He thinks of hip-hop as a medium instead
of a formula, backing his lyrics with jungle and techno drones, and his flow is sharp, harsh
and very British. It's tough to say which part of "Stop Dat" is more brutal to your... More >

The first thing to understand about Dizzee is that his fundamental appeal is musical, and the second is that there's very little music there. Break down a track and often you'll find only an electro beat--at most three or four sparse elements, rarely long on sustain or tune. Yet as someone who mocked the minimal means of U.K. garage and considered the Streets barely music at all, I was captivated by Dizzee's sound the moment I heard the import. His adolescent gulps and yowls are street-Brit with a Jamaican liquidity, as lean, eccentric, and arresting as the beats. The voice also lends a comic, claustrophobic vulnerability to rhymes whose brilliance varies, though their winning youthfulness does not. Whether he can grow as a lyricist as he struggles to comprehend his success is the old conundrum. The smarts he's got. The right advice will be hard to come by. (Grade - A-)