Matthew Kelly1001 Albums You Must Die Before You Hear
#112: Dizzee Rascal – The Fifth (2013)
Dizzee Rascal has made some acclaimed albums but The Fifth isn’t one of them, writes MATT KELLY, who rues just how low the rapper had to go on this sorry project.
If I ask you to name a hip-hop Hindenburg, what comes to mind first? Nastradamus? Crown Royal? Back On My Bullshit? The Big Day? Whatever you name, I’m pretty sure it’ll be American. Just as our view of great hip hop records and artists is overwhelmingly US-centric, so too does our idea of the worst rap records revolve around the States. Here comes the UK’s Dizzee Rascal to prove you don’t need to be American to tank your reputation with a disastrous disc of stinkers that left me feeling like I was owed a letter of apology.
Let me be clear: Dizzee isn’t an awful rapper. His debut Boy In Da Corner is widely considered a classic and he has made striking work such as the video for ‘Sirens’. The problem with The Fifth is that it is a sellout album, the album brazen in its desire for club hits.
It’s essentially a Flo Rida record, and I like some Flo Rida. ‘Club Can’t Handle Me’ is a classic, but for this kind of music to work, you need great choruses that are written and produced to a tee. However, The Fifth has some absolutely nightmarish choruses that kill the songs stone dead. The flat, droning autotune that delivers the hook for ‘Spend Some Money’ sounds like a mistake, while Jessie J’s nauseatingly commercial, insipid chorus on ‘We Go Hard’ will have any fan of the grime scene Rascal emerged from reaching for the sick bucket.
And it’s low-hanging fruit but a track called ‘Something Really Bad’ featuring Will I Am may just take the cake. Synthesizers genuinely reminiscent of farting are a problem throughout the track – but that chorus, oh my fucking god. Try-hard edgy bad girl spoken vocals, a shitty snare sound and an incredibly clueless EDM breakdown that sounds like a Lonely Island parody over which Will tells us to “Get freaky” – I blushed on their behalf while listening to this.
There are plenty of other shockers too. Superman’s obnoxious “bitch I’m Superman” sample and hard EDM beat over which Rascal sounds out of place gets things off to a bad start but ‘I Don’t Need A Reason’ is even worse, the track constructed out of an incredibly annoying chipmunk vocal loop that Crazy Frog would tell to shut the fuck up.
The songwriting is just so weak as seen on the tepid, impossible-to-remember Robbie Williams featuring ‘Going Crazy’. The disasters keep coming with ‘Arse Like That’ as Rascal shouts “Your bum is dumb, your arse is retarded” and tells you to “Grind your bum-bum” before another over-excited EDM post-chorus inclusive of spanking sounds.
While the production is the chief culprit here, Rascal is not without blame, spending most of the album inhabiting a lyrically regressive space of chattering on about how much money he wastes and how he “needs girls to keep his thingy erect” and how your bottom makes him want to jack off – I wish I was kidding. It’s the same thing song after song and it’s a pity he’s wasting his at-times impressive flows on such rubbish. Unfinished trash like ‘Bassline Junkie’ where Rascal yelps over what sounds like a music software preset see him sinking to his lowest creative point.
It’s true that if you dig through to the back end of the album you can find some good tracks like the louchely menacing, well-produced Bun B collaboration ‘H Town’ or the introspective ‘Bang Bang’, but they aren’t worth the mountain of garbage you have to climb to get there. Deeply embarrassing.
