Original Pirate Material Guardian’s Album of the Decade, Wrong But OK
Fact: Every music publication that doesn’t name Radiohead’s Kid A as the album of the decade is only doing so for the shock value (Paste, would love to give you Illinois, I just can’t), but I have to give some blogkudos to the Guardian for their #1 choice of The Streets’ Original Pirate Material.
Even though it’s yet another overall nonsensical, Brit-centric list from the UK, if there’s one British album I can accept as a shock value stand in, it’s this one (let’s face it, the Guardian wasn’t about to pick Wilco or Arcade Fire over a Brit). Based on the criteria that the album “could not conceivably have been made in any other 10-year period, and that it should be impossible to imagine how that decade might have sounded without it,” I’d say…well, I’d still say Kid A fits that bill better than Pirate Material (which, like many other albums on many of these lists, likely wouldn’t exist without 2000’s Kid A).
I’ll never forget how I felt the first time I heard the rising synths of opener, “Turn the Page,” as an ostensibly thick, Brummie English accent spit rhymes like, “You can’t do half, my crew laughs at your rhubarb and custard verses.” It was indeed produced using only his bare wit, and the results were a genre defining record that put UK garage on the proverbial map. Though most favor the album’s follow-up, 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free, nothing will ever replace those first few moments for me. It shattered what the possibilities for hip hop and indie music in general had been up until that point. I had never heard anything like it. It was like discovering life on Mars.
Original Pirate Material is a masterpiece. Its a bold, admirable choice for Album of the Decade. But, it’s still wrong.
Posted: November 29th, 2009 under Poprok Rants.
Tags: Album of the Decade, Kid A, Original Pirate Material, The Streets