Dizzee Rascal - Raskit

The Guardian 80

(Dirtee Stank/Island)
Returning to a pop world in which the music he pioneered is huge, Dizzee has gone back to basics with a stripped-down album that shows off his lyrical skills

In July 2008, Dizzee Rascal released the single Dance Wiv Me. It was both the biggest hit of his career to date and the sound of a man exasperatedly throwing in the towel, abandoning grime in a craven bid for commercial success. Who could blame him? His records had sold respectably, but not in a way that reflected the level of excitement caused by 2003’s Boy in Da Corner, the debut album that brought London’s grime scene into the mainstream’s consciousness. From now on, Dizzee Rascal would make music for lads’ fortnights in Shagaluf, the kind of records that play in provincial city centre bars while patrons tuck into the two-for-one Jägerbombs.

And so would a lot of his peers. One by one, grime MCs from Tinchy Stryder to Skepta took the same pop-rap route. If they’d all been as successful as him, perhaps they’d still be at it now, but in 2014, while Dizzee Rascal was still promoting an album that featured collaborations with Jessie J and Robbie Williams, Skepta put out his pop-repudiating, back-to-basics track That’s Not Me – one of a handful of singles that marked the unexpected commercial renaissance of the music Dizzee Rascal had pioneered.

Related: Dizzee Rascal: ‘I’m the one person who can say, Grime? Nah, I seen it, sorry!’

Pitchfork 70

With the grime revival in full swing, one of the genre’s elder statesmen returns with an album that’s torn between his UK roots and his affinity for American hip-hop.

The Guardian 60

(Dirtee Stank)

While Dizzee Rascal was busy infiltrating the mainstream with chart-friendly fusions, grime came back. Raskit – his sixth album – is the veteran MC’s back-to-basics response, some of it predictable but much of it riveting. “I was on the mic when you were in playschool,” he sneers on Ghost. A few tracks hark back to the genre’s early days, but Make It Last has little nostalgia for the shootings and back-stabbings. Tracks like Everything Must Go are very much in the present; Dizzee is scathing on the gentrification of London. Standout track Space, meanwhile, provides a masterful collision of echoey production and dense, rhythmic wordplay.