Who Needs Actions When You Got Words
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As eureka moments go, Ben Drew’s was so obvious it seems perverse that he didn’t think of it before. Five years ago Drew was getting nowhere as an R&B singer. How strange that a teenage Eminem fan from the East End should have set his sights on the most mainstream of all the urban subgenres. With no shortage of local drama, not to mention a father who fled the family home when Drew was 6, it wasn’t as though he was bereft of inspiration.
Finally, he wisely adopted Ernest Hemingway’s maxim — that if you write one thing, write the truest thing you know — and started rapping over the sound of his own acoustic guitar.
His timing couldn’t have been better, either. In a musical climate established by pop diarists such as Mike Skinner and Arctic Monkeys, the 22- year-old’s articulate soliloquising shouldn’t struggle to find a loving home or two. As anyone who remembers Shut Up And Dance’s Autobiography of a Crackhead will know, there’s nothing like the strum of two well-chosen minor chords to make you sit up and listen to a well-told story.
Oddly enough, echoes of that very song resound through Mama, an apparently real-life paean to his mother’s relationship with a crack user. While his R&B past manifests itself in the Hall & Oates-stealing chorus, he’s relentless when it comes to raining lyrical missiles on his subject: “If I was him I’d stick my veins in the mains/ Run a lukewarm bath till my arteries drained.”
As often as not, a lack of decent male role models can plant seeds of unrest in a boy’s psyche. In Plan B’s case, it seems to have given the rapper something to define himself against. In I Don’t Hate You he dismantles the father who left him. Apparently a born-again Christian, Drew’s father would use their fortnightly days together to read passages from the Bible, using chocolates as an incentive to pray:
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“Every time you put something in your mouth you had to pray to Jesus/ Why the f*** do you think I never used to eat Maltesers?” Even when the stories carry a news-report familiarity about them, Plan B brings a directorial eye to the narrative. Tough Love details with chilling clarity the build-up to an “honour killing”, while in the memoir of bullying, No More Eatin’, the rapper chronicles the transition from abused to abuser in unflinching detail, Drew’s bug-eyed refrain haemorrhaging pure hurt as the song rises to a climax.
But it’s Sick 2 Def that exhibits the full extent of his lyrical facility, taking to its logical absurd conclusion the middle- England view that rappers use music to incite murder.Slipping into the guise of rap star as moral monster, the song embarks on a lyrical twist that deserves to wrong-foot millions of listeners as marvellously as Eminem’s Stan did.
Whether or not it’ll get the chance is contingent on a bigger question. Is there a waiting audience for a rapper who accompanies himself on guitar? Like all the most thrilling musical phenomena, no amount of market research would have come up with a credible blueprint for Plan B. And yet, once you’ve heard him, you’ll wonder why no-one did it sooner.
PETE PAPHIDES