The Kano LP -vs- The Roll Deep LP

SMorlighem

Well-known member
Got the Roll Deep album, not Kano's, but Fiddy's, praise her, will feed me.
I really like it, growing, but it could have been better with a couple of tracks less and the addition of the fantastic 'Me' (built on a beautiful sinosample) who was on the 'Rollin' deeper Prototype. DVD stuff's silly (hate that XXX video) apart of the interviews bits. I sent many questions to Target & Riko yesterday about it (review/interview soon), looking forward to their answers!
 
Kano's lp is misguided, wannabe hiphop crapola. Aside from "Mic Fight" its weak. In At the Deep End murks Home Sweet Home, now all Roll Deep need is a proper push from Relentless rather than this 'soft' release crap... Anyone seen the video for "The Avenue" ?
 

DJL

i'm joking
Heard The Avenue on Radio 1 for the first time today on Scott Mills show. Apparently it was his record of the week last week he was saying
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
kanos album gets a good review in the NME although they say diplo produced remember me, not reload it. its a good album, not a grime one though. both albums are good in their own right - kano's as a bit of everything urban, roll deeps' as a R&B-hip-hop set, but neither are grime. lethal b's might be the best actual 'grime' LP of the lot....
 

Clubberlang

Well-known member
Roll Deep is 50% good/50% absolute cack. Kano's recorded starts out decent enough and then completely fizzles into pure boring-ness before getting revived by a 3(?) year old bonus track.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
people seem to like that moody track near the end of the kano LP where hes introspective and talking about the perils of the industry etc - i seem to think of it as being pasionate but a bit rap-introspection by numbers though. maybe i am soulless though, haha.
 

boomnoise

♫
degrimification

are we starting to think that grime really doesn't lend itself to albums? i like elements of k-a's and rd's records but i'm not going to say it’s grime. also i'm not going to say it's not commercial but does this mean that grime can't exist outside of the dub-pirate-12''-mixtape format? grime mcs as artists - if it can't happen then what does that say about artistic/consumer boundaries?

these records aren't grime for us it appears but they could very well be grime for other people, grime lite maybe but it may lead on to them exploring the sound and becoming fans of what we love.

bizzle's album is also not entirely impressive but remains truer to what most people hold up as the grime sound.

all this is leading me to believe that what i like about grime is the smaller moments - the freestyles, the occasionally mind blowing singles, the pirates, the disposable - things you hear which aren't formatted and controlled by the parenthesis of an album.

Grime isn’t about shiting units. That’s not grimey surely?

i dunno...?
 

greeneyes

Bit Mangler
Grime albums can work. Is Boy In Da Corner a bad album?

Perhaps people are expecting everyone to be extremely talented and able to deliver a good album's worth of material straight off the bat? Expecting that of an entire genre (new or otherwise) is not really fair.

I'm looking forward to hearing Plasticman's album (will it feature any mc's? or just instrumentals?), goodz, ears, wiley's next album, JME etc etc. I think there are a lot of folks capable of delivering. Just gotta stay true to themselves and not second guess their audience. I insist that a great grime album will sell more than an "okay" hip hop/r n b/grime-lite album. If artists do what they're good at, and they're genuinely good at what they do, then they'll sell - no doubt in my mind.
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
I just wonder why a lot of these artists don't seem to believe in the music they are doing.

Tinchy Strider's album should be big.
 
D

droid

Guest
I think Kano's album wins out.

It is, after all, considerably shorter... ;)



Whens the Lethal B LP being released?
 

hint

party record with a siren
Pearsall said:
I just wonder why a lot of these artists don't seem to believe in the music they are doing.


they do, but I think what's causing many of these issues is lack of experience. I can't claim to know the precise details of each deal, but I'm wondering if perhaps it's the case that labels are signing these talented artists and thinking that they should be left alone to deliver whatever they want because any interference might dilute the "it's urban! it's exciting!" nature of it all.

I think the opposite is true - what's needed is some guidance through "production", in the traditional sense of the word, and experienced a+r.

I read somewhere that the roll deep LP was made by "getting whoever was in the studio at the time" to rhyme over a beat once it was finished... that's not really gonna bring out the best in a crew, I don't think. would the album have been stronger if there was someone in the background saying "you can do better than that!" or saying "give that beat to X and Y - they'll kill it!"?

Like I say - I don't know the details, but from what's been said it seems that roll deep have made the album they wanted to make... which suggests that there wasn't much outside influence at all. The fact that Diplo has a beat on the Kano LP suggests to me that there was more to the production of his LP than "leave him to it".
 
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Clubberlang

Well-known member
Yeah all these albums suffer from different problems. I don't think the Roll Deep albums was label interference or even lack of belief necessarilly in what "they do" just a misguided notion of what might translate into success and money. And while I think Wiley's instincts for what is successful in the grime scene may be quite impeccable, his commercial instincts are uh pretty terrible (his reaction to "POW"'s success is telling.) The Kano album just strikes me as a case of an MC who probably always veered pretty close to trad UKHH making a record which is a lot more in that vein than his earlier grimier singles. And Lethal B's albums problem is that a whole album of Lethal B is a bit much for most people.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
having previously been a strong advocate of the 'grime artists must make full on grime albums' (i didnt even like just a rascal on BIDC cos it was too close to normal-at-the-time hip hop production or fix up look sharp cos it was too much like normal old school hip hop), i now am starting to wonder what the big fuss is, in regard to kanos album anyway - he does hip hop tracks, yes, but he does them really well (mostly). and the beats arent typical or imitative - theyve actually got quite innovative production. apart from all that, im sure no one would have a problem if kano did an old school UKG-style song or a proper old scholl jungle track either, both of which are parts of what make up grime, yet they have a problem when he does a hip hop track, when hip hop is a part of grime's makeup as well. i dont get it.

i know a lot of grime fans just dont want grime and uk/british hip hop to ever be seen as conflating (i dont really want them to either) but alot of this snobbery comes from people who seem to simply hate all british hip hop on principle. back in the more fire crew and so solid days, that might have made sense, as the music was totally unlike hip hop, the emceeing was a lot less hip-hop sounding as well in terms of voices and flows, but now many grime beats have quite a lot in common with 'normal' hip hop, despite the obvious idiosyncracies and differences. despite tracks like underground, murkle man and sidewinder, alot of grime stuff just doesnt feel that fast despite being at 130 bpm, it feels a lot closer to hip hop now the speed seems to have gone. obviously, you can still tell the difference between when kano does a grime track and a more clearly hip hop track, but a lot of whats on home sweet home is almost like in between the two, resting slightly more obviously on the hip hop side of things, not that unlike roll deep's let it out IMO. i think kode 9 called that track sinogrimehop!
 

Badmarsh

Well-known member
British accents on hiphop doesn't work for me. The lyrics maybe good, but it doesnt do it. Slick Rick was good in his comical style.

I did however rate - tricky and the massive attack peeps with their style of lazy bristolian rapping.

Anyone heard of Wunda from SLK? now he is such a good studio mc...currently been working with Ils...obviously Deekline and also his SLK crew. Wunda's waiting to happen trust me.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
it generally doesnt work for me either, but there are exceptions like london posse, some skinnyman, rodney p, mad dog aka bionic on that tricky juxtapose album, its not all shit. yeah, when its more 'normal' hip hop with a british MC, youre more inclined to compare it to US hip hop but i get a sense people in grime arent thinking that grime MCs are on a totally different standard to hip hop MCs, especially now when theyre trying to be 'artists' rather than mere MCs (not sure this is a good thing as i dont think thats their main strengths) and 'say something' (even if its just gun talk) rather than concentrate on tricksy flows. on that ghetto and avalanche song pride, someone pops up in the middle to say that he doesnt really rate many MCs here cos they 'just chat rubbish' and he still prefers american MCs.
 
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