Music Box | The Streets

Mike Newmark Assistant Arts Editor

The Streets
The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living
[Vice]
1.5 out of 5 stars

The Streets’ Mike Skinner is a lyricist at heart, and most people who take to his music understand that. The critical and financial success of his second album, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, didn’t have to do with his delivery, which was stilted, or his music, which was silly. Grand was a lower-class odyssey fraught with bitter tears and broken TVs, domestic arguments and love lost. Through it all, Skinner proved himself a deft storyteller, capable of startling insight and making the minutia of his life seem utterly compelling.

Two years later, he still overanalyzes and still views the world through pessimistic glasses. There is, however, one crucial difference: Skinner is a rich man now, suddenly inundated with the fame and fortune that Grand brought him. Most musicians in this situation would run out to buy a new Ferarri, or perhaps a set of gold teeth, but Skinner hasn’t got the slightest clue about what to do with his mounds of success.

That could have yielded fascinating results, but on The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, Skinner either slips into apathy or spews bile from atop his soapbox. Much of his wisdom is absent; he’s gone from sighing, “It’s hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them,” to bleating, “I’m going to show you: a) how to con someone using their own greed, b) that you won’t feel bad ’cause they’re trying to con you anyway, and c) taking their money!” Fame has turned Skinner into a Molotov cocktail of hostility, triteness and paranoia (“You think I’m f----ing mad, don’t ya?”), paired with a bombastic delivery and grating music that would make even the staunchest Streets fan flinch.

The album begins promisingly with its confrontational opener, “Prangin’ Out,” before careening off the tracks. “Prangin’ Out” finds a post-tour Skinner in a poignant downward spiral of coke, alcohol, indiscriminate sex, and splitting headaches. In a sense, Skinner is in the same frustrated place he was at the beginning of Grand, running frantically to return a DVD on time. Afterwards, however, Skinner launches into the ugliest song in the Streets’ whole catalogue: a battle-of-the-sexes anthem moronically entitled “War of the Sexes.” Over big, stupid skronk, Skinner vainly attempts to appeal to both sexes simultaneously, calling women “lambs” while taunting the men, “You’re not playing hard-to-get, you’re playing at not getting a hard-on yet.”

When Skinner isn’t whining about the spoils of fame (“How am I supposed to be able to do a line in front of complete strangers when they’ve all got cameras?”), he’s hardly inspired: “Never Went to Church” and “All Goes Out the Window” are both musically cheap and lyrically dead. But perhaps the most offensive line on the entire disc is in “Memento Mori,” where Skinner sings, “It’s Latin and it says we must all die/But I tried it for a while and it’s a load of boring shite.” Never has Mike Skinner sounded so ignorant, and I can’t help wondering what the same person who once found himself near death would have to say about such a flippant comment.

We’d all like to believe that money doesn’t change people, but most of us know better than that, and Skinner has been so overtaken by success that he can’t elicit our sympathy or respect. More troublesome is that Skinner shares our sentiments; nobody can enjoy his fortune—not even him—and that’s no fun.