Rocky Fontaine Best in the City / 15 votes More

Time The Lightswitch / 3528 votes More

Keelay and Zaire The Times / 24 votes More

Kidd Russell Paradise / 44 votes More

Intricate Machines Breathe / 37 votes More

88-Keys: Divine Circumvention

by Jason Newman

Mickey Factz

by Jason Parham

Jason Tyler: Running the Show

by Jen Boyles

Johnny Dangerous: If Peaches and Mickey Avalon mated

by Jen Boyles

Dizzee Rascal & UGK: The Ghetto's International :: Dizzee Rascal partners with Bun B to shoulder the unbearable heaviness of Houston's Third Ward

By Brandon Perkins   Photography by Paddy @ Dirtesstank

07/31/07 :: URB 148

Bare-chested in zero degrees celsius Romania and bundled up in 90 degrees Houston really aren’t the extremes that a simple sentence might imply. A bullet-ridden stone wall outside low-income housing of Eastern Europe isn’t that different from a few young men on an East Texas stoop unshaken by a white Caddy’s ominous and loud presence where it definitely shouldn’t be...and neither setting is that far from the English ghetto that birthed Dylan Mills, aka Dizzee Rascal.

“Same shit, different toilet, innit?” Dizzee says of the disparate Romanian and Texan ’hoods that set the scenes for the first two videos from his third record, Maths and English (XL Recordings), an LP that will only be released digitally here in the States. “I don’t know a lot of places like [Houston’s Los Ward] in England, but there are. I’m from the poorest part in London, but this is extreme poverty. We got stuff like this over there, but it’s on a bigger scale here. We have government benefits, and if you go to a hospital, you can get help no matter who you are, but here, if you ain’t got insurance...it’s ridiculous, the attitude towards the poor.”

Standing in the row houses of Los Ward, a small segment of the much larger and infamous Third Ward, it’s easy to canonize the struggle and especially the defense of the ’hood through the pursuit of art. Unending obstacles are obviously omnipresent and when the abandoned, shattered-windowed dwellings are no different from those similarly decayed homes that might house families nearing double-digits, nothing seems easy. There is absolutely no reason the Los Ward—where Dizzee is shooting the video for “Where Da G’s” with UGK—should be this fucked up. Dizzee’s manager can only compare it to the shanties from City of God. Completely cut off by lanes and lanes of highways on every side, muted colors encase factory-built houses, vacant or not, and their institutional drabness blends with mud that, according to Bun B, isn’t always mud. “Don’t step where the fl ies are,” he says, knowing full well that all knowledge ain’t basic. But Bun B is a hip-hop legend, a Texas icon, one half of the revered UGK and an inspiration to every southern artist who has ever made a lick. . .and Dizzee Rascal, on his own video set, is still from England. And even if the ghetto’s international, the Underground Kingz are a long way from the Queen Mum.

“I talk here [in America] and people think I’m from another planet,” Dizzee says from a Houston hotel on the eve of the shoot. “They have no clue what I’m saying, and then over a beat, which is out of order from what they’re used to hearing anyway, it’s a bit much. I’m not Amy Winehouse or Joss Stone. It’s a lot easier to get them, just to fathom it.”

By all accounts, anyone stumped by the MC’s unfathomability is missing out, especially when it comes to Maths & English, simultaneously his most accessible and adventurous album to date. After going “full cycle” by opening up for such acts as Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the 21-year-old has embraced a wider range of music by shedding some of its challenging nature without losing the challenge.

The British press has hailed “Sirens,” the album’s lead single, as the country’s answer to “99 Problems.” With its fi rst set of bars staked in familiar on-the-run posturing and ending with two verses of disturbingly detailed storytelling over breakneck drums and hard-rock guitar stabs, it ain’t hard to tell. But its chaotic paranoia is just as easily akin to Ghostface Killah’s “Run,” dripping with an anxious dark side rather than Jay’s calm and cool demeanor. And when all hell breaks loose and Dizzee channels Korn’s “Here to Stay,” well, necks don’t just break; they disintegrate. At the very least, it’s oceans away from the drum-machine stomps of “Fix Up, Look Sharp” and at the very most, it’s the best British rap song ever to surface. And then there is its Romanian music video.