Prometheus 6   

It'll be interesting to see what white folks say about this rapper

Streets Smarts
By CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

Published: October 19, 2003

Warsaw is full of white people. Obviously, that statement applies to the capital of Poland, but the Warsaw I'm referring to is a club in Brooklyn. It's a Thursday night, and I'm standing alongside 800 Caucasian hipsters in a Greenpoint rock venue, waiting to see the Streets. The Streets is technically a group, but it's really a group of one: Mike Skinner, a 24-year-old from Britain who looks as if he's 15. Do not feel depressed if you've never heard of him; he is not famous. Except that he is, if you happen to be the kind of person who searches for potential pop geniuses. In certain circles, in certain clubs and pretty much anywhere in London, Skinner is one of those ''voice of a generation'' types; as the writer-rapper-producer for the Streets, he has experienced the kind of meteoric ascension (at least among critics) that changes a messenger into his own self-styled medium.

His debut record, ''Original Pirate Material,'' sold slightly more than 100,000 copies in the United States, but it has been dubbed the first transcendent hip-hop album ever to emerge from England -- which is kind of like being dubbed the sexiest female at a hobbit convention. But Skinner, whose new mini-album, ''All Got Our Runnins,'' went on sale online this week, represents a British youth movement everyone else has ignored. The Streets' lyrics speak of the geezer lifestyle -- the mundane, day-to-day pursuits of antitrendy, blue-collar males in England's lower middle class.

…''Not a lot of people rap about playing Nintendo, but everybody I know plays Nintendo,'' Skinner says. ''That was sort of the point of my record: I'm like everybody else, or at least like everyone else I know. I'm not crazy, and none of the people I know are crazy. It's just that I can talk about Nintendo and drugs and watching the telly because I won't get fired for doing so. That's why people buy into my music, I think. What I talk about is what real people do.''