The Streets

The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living

Vice/Atlantic

BUY IT AT    

Fame doesn't come for free, the Streets' Mike Skinner might say. On his third album, the English rhymester stays in quasi-autobiographical mode, this time taking the piss out of the whole "rock-and-roll cliché" (his words). But The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living isn't another celebrity whinefest. Where brash 2002 debut Original Pirate Material and narrative 2004 masterpiece A Grand Don't Come for Free exalted ordinary life, Skinner's latest sends up his current extraordinary lifestyle, with the usual deft wordplay and banging garage beats. The rapper who once made an entire album about losing a grand now blows several on "tour support," celebrates the joys of driving a Ferrari ("Memento Mori") and makes hotel-trashing an art form ("Hotel Expressionism"). First single "When You Wasn't Famous" boasts about the trials and tribulations of sleeping with a crack-smoking pop starlet over a calypso-tinged beat primed for a pickup bar. "I'm drying my eyes/and a fucking nosebleed," Skinner exclaims on the coke-addled, organ funk opener, "Pranging Out." Only rip-off tutorial "Can't Con an Honest John" falls flat, while ballads "Never Went to Church" and "All Goes Out the Window" reassert Skinner's nice-guy credentials. Hilarious closers "Two Nations" and "Fake Street Hats" remind those put off by Skinner's outrageous new persona that this geezer's in on the joke.

-- Marc Hogan