Streets Smart

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As generations of rebel musicians have learned, becoming the voice of stoned, lazy, disengaged youth requires a lot of hard work. Take Mike Skinner, the latest Voice of a Generation, British division. Known as The Streets when he's making music, Skinner, 24, is remarkably industrious. He started work on his second album as soon as he finished the first: Original Pirate Material, an effortless mix of U.K. garage, hip-hop and dance beats that burst Skinner out of his bedroom two years ago, sold more than a million copies worldwide, made the U.S. Top 30 and moved Rolling Stone to declare "British hip-hop" no longer an oxymoron. With so much anticipation for his follow up, A Grand Don't Come for Free, out this week, Skinner has been spending his time courting the world's press — for up to 18 hours at a stretch. Early morning phoners with Australia, afternoon drinks with TIME, back on the phone to the southern hemisphere at midnight — and he can't zone out during any of it. "In some jobs I've done," he says wistfully, "you get that dip in the morning when you can kind of switch off, but you can't switch off doing interviews and being asked questions."

So why does all the world want a piece of this skinny kid from Brixton by way of Birmingham? His homegrown sound expands beyond garage, but most riveting are his lyrics; he's a switchblade-sharp social commentator for British kids numbed by strong lager, joints and junk food. Skinner is unfazed by the attention; as he sees off an El País reporter and moves tables for a change of scene in his local south London pub, he explains that this album has been in the bag for ages. "It's like doing your homework on the night you're given it. It's a beautiful thing." After a moment's reflection, he admits: "I never managed it at school."

I'm not working class. I'm just a young bloke who lives in a normal world.

The world of A Grand is a familiar one, populated by geezers: track-suited young men smoking skunk and watching telly, wandering from pub to kebab shop, filled with an anger as aimless as it is insistent. Yet Skinner's audience stretches far beyond those lads. American kids have taken him in like some exotic distant cousin, and one academic in Britain's Guardian even likened him to Dostoevsky and Pepys, while pondering that "the narrative is constructed round Christ's parable of the lost piece of silver." Skinner's reaction: "I don't read the Guardian." The gap between Skinner and his higher-brow fans is telling; indeed, it's almost the point. Somehow Skinner wrings the consciousness of Everyman out of his own idiosyncrasies. His relaxed, chatty raps are littered with arcane references to specific British teenage slang and culture, yet the first album sold 130,000 copies on the Continent. He may represent "the streets," but he's not standing on a class soapbox. His neighborhood was a place where, as he puts it, "the sons and daughters of rich business people mix with sons and daughters of the people on the local estate, and they all spend most of their teens smoking weed and trying to find love or sex." He adds simply: "I'm not working class. I'm just a young bloke who lives in a normal world."

He sees none of this as contradiction. "I've got nothing in common with Snoop Doggy Dog but he portrays a really exciting life," Skinner argues. "Even though you don't identify with him you find it fascinating." Unlike Snoop's work, A Grand is a, well, concept album — even if Skinner balks at the term: "I get these images of '70s Spinal Tap pretentiousness by artists that are usually up their own arse. There is none of that here."

Maybe not, but it's a wonderfully crafted, continuous narrative, set to garage loops, keyboard orchestration and even a guitar. A tale emerges of missing money, football betting, the trials of returning a rented DVD, arguing with the girlfriend, holiday infidelity, mistrusting mates, self pity and, best of all, a proper can't-give-it-away ending. "I really like the idea of songs that talk to each other," Skinner explains. "I felt like I wanted to make an album that would feel incomplete unless you had the whole thing." The album is sort of a stoned soap opera. On Blinded by the Light we swim in Skinner's stream of consciousness — in a club, on his own, taking his first ecstasy pill of the night: "Right, I'm going to plan/ I wish the bouncers would go away/ Borrow water off this man/ Here goes nothing, O.K./ And I'm thinking, 'That's proper rank'/ Tastes like hairspray". The nervy excitement of a first date in Could Well Be In is portrayed with a tenderness that softens the lack of couth: "I saw this thing on ITV the other week/ It said if she plays with her hair then she's probably keen/ She's playing with her hair well regularly, so I reckon I could well be in."

To some that might seem like adolescent blather, but like Eminem in the U.S., Skinner draws the listener into the dark, angry, occasionally almost sweet thoughts of a British lad. And thanks to the way he tells it, that's a place people all around the world want to be.