John Bush (All Music Guide)

When Streets tracks first appeared in DJ sets and on garage mix albums circa 2000, they made for an interesting change of pace; instead of hyper-speed ragga chatting or candy-coated divas (or both), listeners heard banging tracks hosted by a strangely conversational bloke with a mock cockney accent and a half-singing, half-rapping delivery. It was Mike Skinner, producer and MC, the half-clued-up, half-clueless voice behind club hits "Has It Come to This?" and "Let's Push Things Forward." Facing an entire full-length of Streets tracks hardly sounded like a pleasant prospect, but Skinner's debut, Original Pirate Material, is an excellent listen — and almost as good as the heavy-handed hype would make you think. Unlike most garage LPs, it's certainly not a substitute for a night out; it's more a statement on modern-day British youth, complete with all the references to Playstations, Indian takeaway, and copious amounts of cannabis you'd expect. Skinner also has a refreshing way of writing songs, not tracks, that immediately distinguishes him from most in the garage scene. True, describing his delivery as rapping would be giving an undeserved compliment (you surely wouldn't hear any American rappers dropping bombs like this line: "I wholeheartedly agree with your viewpoint"). And a few songs, like "Geezers Need Excitement," don't wear their Wu-Tang Clan influences very well, while "It's Too Late" piles on the melodrama with the ins and outs of a relationship. Still, nearly every other song here succeeds wildly, first place (after the hits) going to "The Irony of It All," on which Skinner and a stereotypical British lout go back and forth "debating" the merits of weed and lager, respectively (Skinner's meek, agreeable commentary increasingly, and hilariously, causes "Terry" to go off the edge). The production is also excellent; "Let's Push Things Forward" is all lurching ragga flow, with a one-note organ line and drunken trumpets barely pushing the chorus forward. "Sharp Darts" and "Too Much Brandy" have short, brutal tech lines driving them, and really don't need any more for maximum impact. Though club-phobic listeners may find it difficult placing Skinner as just the latest dot along a line connecting quintessentially British musicians/humorists/social critics Nöel Coward, the Kinks, Ian Dury, the Jam, the Specials, and Happy Mondays, Original Pirate Material is a rare garage album: that is, one with a shelf life beyond six months.

Louis Pattison (Amazon.com)

In a thrilling UK Garage scene, blighted only by a reliance on drippy soul cliché and tiresome braggadocio, The Streets' eminently quotable Mike Skinner may just be the voice to take it to the next level with Original Pirate Material. This debut is a staggeringly eloquent and fearlessly honest snapshot of gritty street-level existence, as experienced by an ordinary bloke. At first listen, the Birmingham-born Skinner's cheeky cockney affectations grate slightly. But for every line that makes you squirm, there are 20 that drop your jaw. "Has It Come to This?" is "A day in the life of a geezer," a seductive encapsulation of London lifestyle, presented raw as a bootleg, but bulging with sharp wit and feverish detail. "Stay Positive" weaves a fearful tale of heroin addiction, while "The Irony of It All" makes a beguiling case for legalization, presenting a fictional exchange between a beered-up, self-righteous lager lout and a fey student weed enthusiast. Original Pirate Material is a milestone, the real voice of British youth set down on record. Don't miss it.

Lydia Vanderloo (Barnes & Noble)

It's too easy to call Mike Skinner, a.k.a. the Streets, the British Eminem, given that both are working-class, hip-hop-bred blokes with a boy-next-door face and an electrifying delivery. But where Em spews venom to settle personal scores, the 22-year-old Skinner is too busy chronicling the youth culture of Blair's Britain. Skinner's songs are peppered with visceral day-in-the-life details chronicling beer and drug consumption, video game addictions, pub brawls, iffy relationships, and life on the dole -- minus the potty mouth that makes Eminem so abrasive to women, gays, and generally sensible folks. It's a bland council-flat existence where music represents escape and salvation. Skinner's lyrical flow may borrow from Yankee rappers, but his Birmingham-by-way-of-South London accent, his deadpan verbosity, and his 2-step garage beats are distinctly British. Americans had a taste of the garage style on Craig David's soul hit Born to Do It, but Skinner's homemade beats are raw as sushi and potent as wasabi. His songs are theatrical, but there's little role-playing -- outside of the hilarious "The Irony of It All," a sparring match between a lager-fueled Joe and a pothead college student, both played by Skinner. More representative is the mock soul "Has It Come to This?," in which he builds tension by pitting an easy-on-the-ears music bed -- a soul sample, a slinky keyboard, electronic beats -- against his drug-addled but eerily lucid flow, a breathless tale that reports, almost journalistically, on a geezer's typical day. Equally jarring and compelling is "Let's Push Things Forward," a horn-sprinkled tune that evokes the Specials' politically charged ska hit "Ghost Town" with lyrics that turn on a dime from biting to wasted: "This ain't your typical garage joint/I make points which hold significance/That ain't a bag, it's a shipment/This ain't a track, it's a movement...I make bangers, not anthems/Leave that to the Artful Dodger." He's part underground CNN, part amped-up knob-twiddler, and Mike Skinner's debut -- already nominated for Britain's Mercury Prize -- is a dance music event: smart, compelling, yes, banging -- and not to be missed.

James Poletti (Dotmusic)

Garage has had a funny old couple of years, whilst its helium R&B pop sound laced with skippy beats has rushed up and down the Top 10 and spawned interesting new and uniquely British pop hybrids like Craig David and Mis-Teeq, things have been cementing on the 'underground'.

South London's pirate radio waves are crackling with energy as they disseminate new strains of dub, hip-hop, techno and house all mashed together and united under the irresistible syncopations of 2 Step. And, although it's largely still a 'London thing', there are interesting new takes on the music's most fertile possibilities filtering through from around the world, especially America.

Against this backdrop arrives newcomer, 21-year-old Mike Skinner, from Birmingham not Clapham North, with a 'Garage album'. Unlike So Solid's significant first step into 'Garage album' territory, it's not overlong, doesn't take its lyrical cues from a simplified reading of US hip-hop braggadocio and, arguably, isn't even really 'Garage' at all.

By his own confession, Skinner spent too long in studios aping the Wu-Tang Clan - you can hear it on 'Geezers Need Excitement' - and not getting anywhere. Then, presumably, in a moment of inspiration it occurred to him that not only should his music speak of his own experiences as a young lad in England but that it should become a veritable 'Carry On Up The Dog Star' of parochial reference. References to the world of games consoles and spliffs, all-night garages and the passing of the summers of love, hi-rise flats and heroin.

Predictably, quarters within the London Garage community have bulked at the idea of a Brummie - Skinner was brought up in Birmingham but now lives in London - appropriating their music. This is where the ugly spectre of 'authenticity' awakes from its slumbers. Like the folkies turning against Dylan for plugging his guitar in, the Garage heads have trouble with Skinner's vulture-like appropriation of every musical language at his disposal. And the mockney Jamie Oliver tones with which he delivers his not-nearly-as-pathologically-obsessed-with-'haters'-as-we've-come-to-expect verses.

But Garage, the UK's most innovative and exciting contribution to emerging music, ought really to be the last place you'd expect to find artists bogged down by the spurious ideology of 'authenticity'. Unlike rock, which frequently stumbles at this hurdle, it's not confined by a retrospective self-image. Rather, it's the very definition of the musical hybrid with roots reaching back through such disparate musical cultures as US house, Jamaican sound systems, hip-hop, drum n' bass and Detroit techno.

You have the suspicion, however, that Skinner isn't comfortable with the idea of his music as pure 'artifice' and may yet blow it in the rush to prove that, no, really...he IS a' geezer'.

What 'Original Pirate Material' makes abundantly clear though, is that - whilst Skinner may not be at the very cutting edge of Garage's club soundtrack (check Zed Bias' bowel-churning remix of 'Has It Come To This?' for some of that) - he's a man blessed with an astonishing aptitude for pop and a mainline into the Zeitgeist. As well as being quite probably the only genuinely humorous Garage release this makes apparent a new path for British pop to tread. Let's push things forward.

Jesse Fahnestock (Ink Blot Magazine)

Mike Skinner is here to tell you about his life: by his own admission boring, sub-urban, and grey. His arrythmic, spoken-word cadence never wavers from these themes, but never fails to rise above, either. If a poet’s job is to find transcendence in the familiar, you’d be pressed to find a more able bard in music today.
If you’re under 35 and you’ve spent more than a month in the U.K. or Ireland in the last 15 years, the debut album from The Streets will probably produce a few smiles of recognition. If you’ve spent significant time in the Isles since the arrival of Acid House in 1988, this record will touch your heart and make you miss your friends. If you happen to be English and under 40, well, I hope you already own this. Someone’s made a record about your life, mate. You should really check it out.

And if you’re none of the above? American, college-aged, and into Built to Spill? Well, maybe Original Pirate Material isn’t for you. But you’re missing out. The truth is that American youth culture hasn’t produced this kind of universal document in more than 10 years (De La? Nirvana?), and it’s worth making the effort to understand what’s happened here. Awkward, unprofessional, at times an embarassing listen -- this is nothing less than a triumph of the common, that rare album that manages to connect an intensely personal vision with a universal set of experiences. It just might be the album you remember 2002 by.

That The Streets’ debut album got heard at all is enough to renew your faith in pop music’s much-lamented underground promotional railroad (indie labels/club play/non-commercial radio), proof that the death of the alternative might have been prematurely pronounced. The Streets were birthed into the public consciousness by Britain’s garage/2-step scene, but the skippy, R&B-garnish on debut single "Has it Come to This?" didn’t even begin to circumscribe Skinner’s vision, despite the ubiquity of its "You’re listening to the Streets ... Original pirate material ... A day in the life of a geezer" catchphrases.

Original Pirate Material is only a garage record in the way that Paul’s Boutique is a hip-hop record or Bringing It All Back Home is a folk record or the Mona Lisa is an oil painting. Skinner’s tapped into a medium, but he never lets it overwhelm the message or obscure the bigger picture in his head. And so "Let’s Push Things Forward" scorns the vacuity of the garrrrige overground, twisting its root sounds (Jamaican skank, rude bass) into an awkward anthem while Skinner makes his intentions clear. And he’s nothing if not determined: some of the music here is positively refusnik, and at times suffers for its individuality. (Compared to Royksopp’s beautiful, euphoric remix interpretation of the album’s best lyric, the version of "Weak Become Heroes" included here sounds like Skinner mumbling over a cassette deck with dying batteries.)

In the end, the occasional clunker of a non-tune or cringeworthy lyrical mug feels like part of the charm. Skinner offers no pretense to professionalism, no evident desire to do more than what made sense in his headphones and with his mates down the boozer. Perhaps it’s as simple as writing what you know, yet somehow the spirit of The Streets suggests there’s a lot more to it than that.

John Robinson (New Musical Express)

Their features may remain the same, but over the years the streets - the unfriendly thoroughfares which are the touchstone for 'authentic urban music' in Britain - have had many different voices.

In the 1980s, Paul Weller sang about their burned out phone booths and ripped up concrete, while Terry Hall and The Specials made eerie serenades to their night-time threat. Twenty years later, we can witness their new sound. They sound a bit like the Phil Daniels bit in Blur's 'Parklife', only they've got a Birmingham accent.

And why not? As UK garage takes on more and more of the lifestyle accessories of the US hop-hop scene, Mike Skinner, the 21-year-old who's the man behind The Streets represents a brilliant break with cliché. You won't find him sipping on Kristal, emerging from a limousine, and the 'haters' don't get a look in. His drink is lager, or brandy, he recorded most of this debut album in his mum's house, and his songs depict an often breadline existence. And as such, he's one of the most original British pop voices for years.

What we're dealing with here is an album that owes a lot to garage, but also quite a lot to the all-night garage, too. By turns dark, funny and heartbreaking, the songs on 'Original Pirate Material' are snapshots of ordinary life as a young midlands resident, set to innovative two-step production: tales of love, going out, being skint, getting drunk (there's a lot of this - sometimes it's a surprise Skinner has called himself The Streets and not The Coach and Horses), and eating chips. It's Streets by name, and streets by nature, and it's great.

The single 'Has It Come To This?' may have given you the idea already, but there's an incredible strength of character to The Streets. It's small wonder that Mike Skinner presently finds himself feeling the love of the people (the single reached number 18), but not of garage's more established crews - he sounds nothing like them, and he's making the isolation sound splendid.

There's the voice, of course, upfront in the mix as if this were a spoken-word record, but what it's saying is better still. The heartbreaking 'It's Too Late' is a musical highpoint and tearful updating of Massive Attack, but includes the line: 'We first met through a shared view/She loved me, and I did too'. Elsewhere there's the heavy hip-hop of 'Sharp Darts', and The Specials-like 'Same Old Thing', casting an eye over the late night takeaway scene to further smash the urban mould. As he says on 'Let's Push Things Forward', 'this ain't your archetypal street sound', and it's an admirable mission statement.

Because the sound of the streets is too often like an episode of 'The Bill' - hard hitting and 'real', certainly but without any of the stupidity, joy and occasional moments of beauty that you'll find in here. As in records, as in life - you're simply much poorer if you never get a chance to experience it.

Rob Mitchum (Pitchfork Media, August 23, 2002)

Hey, did you hear? Hip-hop is a world phenomenon now! Yes, spend some time poking around your favorite music magazine's website and I'm sure you'll find a heavy handful of hip-hop-gone-global thinkpieces. Read profiles of angstful teenagers rapping about life in Israeli-occupied Palestine, Cuban kids protesting the oppressive state police in rhyme, even Greenland b-boys composing bouncy anthems about caribou and snow.

So it should come as no surprise that the British, notorious for chewing on our music before spitting it back over the Atlantic in a shiny, new form, have also turned their sun-starved faces to the arena of hip-hop. There's just one small problem: simply put, British accents just don't sound particularly right in the context of syncopated rap-speech. To put my tweed linguistics jacket on, the American tendency to cheat on pronunciation fits in perfectly with the wordplay of hip-hop, while the stubborn British habit of perfectly enunciating every syllable makes things sound rather, well, formal. Or to put my Degrassi Jr. High pop culture jacket on, British rap can't help sounding like the dope flow of the immortal Murray Head on "One Night in Bangkok."

Which is why the first time you put on Original Pirate Material, you might find it awfully hysterical-- especially if the name had you assuming it was going to be another Strokesian garage act. The giggles will eventually give way to a bit of discomfort at the slightly awkward delivery-- the words here are jammed into measures like an overstuffed couch. You'll wince at a chorus like, "Geezers need excitement/ If their lives don't provide it, then they incite violence/ Common sense, simple common sense," bursting at the seams of its tempo. Then, about 48 hours later, you'll realize it still hasn't left your head.

One-man MC/DJ package Mike Skinner has an obvious talent for forging damn sharp hip-pop hooks that supercede his inherent verbal handicap. Unashamedly revealing a taste for 80s soft rock, the smooth-sung chorus and reverbed Rhodes of "Has It Come to This" is highly reminiscent of fantastically hair-styled pop giants Hall & Oates-- and believe it or not, I don't mean that as a putdown. "It's Too Late," meanwhile, features a sugared melancholy duet with a dreamy British lass between the verses, and tracks fortified with more canned orchestra than a late-period Flaming Lips album.

All of which would leave things a bit flaky, if it wasn't for Skinner's flair for nervous, metallic beats (The Streets' percussion is inventive enough for the album to be erroneously labeled as 'electronica' in the critic's bible All Music Guide). Whether changing speeds or dropping out unexpectedly beneath the ominous strings of "Same Old Thing," trampolining playfully in "Don't Mug Yourself," or rolling along completely oblivious to the piano loop rhythm on "Weak Become Heroes," they're catchy and inventive enough to make one forget the accent for a bit. It's not all successful (the slow-reggae bounce of "Let's Push Things Forward" is, ironically, pretty backward and tired), but it usually is-- and even when it's not, it's at least trying to be.

Which leaves us with the lyrics, tales of English street life provided entirely by the very proper-sounding Skinner. Now, if the phrase "English street life" makes you bristle, hold on a sec-- anyone who's ever read an Irvine Welsh novel (half-credit if you've seen Trainspotting) should know that life for the British working class is hardly Buckingham Palace. So while the lingo takes some getting used to ('geezas' instead of 'niggaz,' 'birds' not 'bitches,' etc.), it'd be incorrect to write off The Streets as either poseur or gimmick, and in a genre where unique lyrical perspective is especially important, the UK vibe is an intriguing element.

Plus, let's face it, Skinner's race and nationality will probably earn The Streets a spot on the "safe hip-hop for indie rockers list" this year, possessing, as it does, that certain unplaceable, familiar aura that appeals to mild hip-hop-ophobes such as, well, myself. As such, I'm not real sure where it would fall along the critical spectrum according to a genre expert (paging Sam Chennault, Sam Chennault to the OR, please), but Original Pirate Material seems to be remarkably solid. And given the fact that it does, eventually, manage to overcome the horrific-sounding concept of British hip-hop, it seems pretty reasonable to give it a recommendation. Bloody good show, I say.

Steve Lowe (Q Magazine, March 2002)

Ever since the days of bad young brother Derek B, British urban music has been bedevilled by The Voice Thing. America invented the stuff, so how can anyone burdened with, say, a Leicester accent hope for authenticity? With vocal content coming a distant second to sonic innovation, the truth of what makes modern Britain tick usually has to be read between the lines. This helps explain the initially off-putting presence of The Streets, aka Mike Skinner, a 21-year-old rhymer apparently unconcerned that his voice reeks of Birmingham not the Bronx.

Ramming 14 bedroom-recorded tracks into 50 minutes, this debut wittily and wisely documents young lives spent in piss-poor pubs, estate bedrooms and kebab shops; the kinds of locales usually referred to as "the margins" ? as if everybody actually lived in Hampstead or something. Above garage/hip-hop beats, deeply inexpensive gothic stabs ? imagine the Wu Tang Clan shopping at BHS ? mock-heroically undercut the kind of escapades in which weapons of choice are pelted chips rather than gats. Favoured disses are "div" and "twat".

It could easily, but somehow never does, degenerate into the kind of "street poet" blather TV news editors think spices up election coverage. The odd portentous lapse and minor clunker aside (the awful Who Got The Funk? prompts the answer: not him), the rate of killer lines is remarkably high. The Irony Of It All contrasts a console-cuddling stoner with a vicious drunk. Stay Positive offers sanguine advice on smack. The apocalyptic Turn The Page, meanwhile, suggests a Grange Hill pupil overtaken by the spirit of William Blake.

Closer to the handheld realism of The Jam's Saturday's Kids or The Specials' Nike Klub than to anything from earlier dance culture, Skinner's vital new voice does raise tricky questions. He might purport to deal in pirate material, but he actually relates to real pirate station gabblers like Gil Scott-Heron relates to the Teletubbies. With these starkly observant vignettes, he's effectively detaching himself from the "garage-heads" he's also representing. So how will the locked-on generation take to their new spokesman?

Gavin Edwards (Rolling Stone, issue 908, October 31, 2002)

The Streets now have a name, and it's twenty-three-year-old musical mastermind Mike Skinner. He's audacious enough to title a track on his first album "Let's Push Things Forward" -- and inventive enough to deliver. The relentlessly smart Original Pirate Material blends two-step garage beats with conversational rapping, low-key in effect but bold in content: "We first met through a shared view/She loved me and I did, too." Skinner is from Birmingham, England, which means that some of his monologues sound like Ozzy Osbourne, only with better beats. The rhythms are spare but groovy; Skinner enhances them with melancholy keyboards and orchestral samples.
The United Kingdom has produced very few rappers of note (Slick Rick and Monie Love are among the exceptions). But Skinner's raps are not only fluid and clever, they're pervaded with Britishness; guys are "geezers," girls are "birds" and weak rhymes are "rhubarb and custard verses." That sense of place goes beyond vocabulary: Original Pirate Material evokes the gray British skies and details the mundane world of English youth -- broke and wasting time on the PlayStation. Skinner has said that the name the Streets was not meant to evoke the mean streets of tough urban life but rather, empty, anonymous concrete.

On "The Irony of It All," Skinner stages an argument as good as Eminem's "Guilty Conscience," playing both Terry, a drunken lout, and Tim, a mellow engineering student who likes to smoke weed. They debate criminality and provoke each other; on the evidence of this excellent debut, few people can challenge Skinner right now except himself.

Tim Sheridan (Vibe Magazine, November 6, 2002)

It's been a while since an album seemed to capture the groove of a generation, both musically and lyrically. In England, it was back in the '70s when the Sex Pistols unleashed Never Mind The Bollocks. That album still smolders with the disillusionment and anger of the children of Thatcher. Now a new soundtrack to life in Britain has been cut, and it can be found on the Streets' debut album. The album brings together elements of punk, electronica, and garage in a heady, hip, and rather remarkable whole.

Throughout the disc, from the powerhouse opener "Turn The Page" to the catchy and amusing "Let's Push Things Forward", and the savage "Don't Mug Yourself," producer/MC Mike Skinner shares his insights and keen lyric sensibility, as well as his eclectic musical style. And it's through these remarkably colors threads that Skinner paints a vivid living mural populated with stoners, dealers, lost kids and their stories. But enough talk, now you can think and dance at the same time.