"That was the turning point in my life," explains Skinner, a 23-year-old English rapper/producer known as the Streets. For his debut, Original Pirate Material, the hip-hop- obsessed Skinner abandoned initial attempts to reimagine his hometown of Birmingham as Wu-Tang Clan's Staten Island, New York. Instead, he moved to Brixton and took inspiration from the U.K. garage scene, deploying fruity cockney slang over propulsive bedroom beats. Skinner writes about the life he knows: fast food, lager louts, sneaker snobbery, and lots of drugs. The album (short-listed for the U.K.'s prestigious Mercury Music Prize) is a blast of oxygen from the hard-partying British inner city.
"It's fine if Americans hear my accent and think 'Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins'--a quaint English guy who's really funny," says the man inevitably dubbed "the British Eminem." "It doesn't matter where you're from. Everyone can identify with someone who's trying to shag girls and have a good time--if he's doing it honestly."
