Boy In Da Corner

Corner's gutter low ends, amphetamine drum programming, and Dizzee's cockney slang-spitting place this record among rap's paradigmatic moments.

The best rapper this country's ever produced, period.... Next to Dizzee Rascal everybody looks pale, uninteresting and irrelevant. [Sep 2003, p.98]

Brilliantly original. [Aug 2003, p.106]

The most original and exciting artist to emerge from dance music in a decade.

Most of Boy in Da Corner's most compelling moments come from this uneasy interaction between irrational youth and ultra-rational mechanized society.

Dizzee's despairing wail, focused anger, and cutting sonics places him on the front lines in the battle against a stultifying Britain, just as Pete Townshend, Johnny Rotten, and Morrissey have been in the past.

It's as gripping as N.W.A.'s groundbreaking Straight Outta Compton.

His adolescent gulps and yowls are street-Brit with a Jamaican liquidity, as lean, eccentric, and arresting as the beats.

The flow is straight-up alien: chilled-out and frantic at the same time, slightly breathless. [Feb 2004, p.95]

It all makes for a bleak spread, but Rascal rises up as a singular musical presence too brimming and perceptive to let the coarse world around him pass by untouched.

One of the most assured debut albums of the last five years.

If Boy In Da Corner marks the beginning of distinctly British hip-hop, the genre's standards are already impressively high.

Boy in da Corner defies genre in a defiant manner, refusing to be defined, refusing, even, to be dismissed.

Startling, tirelessly powerful, and full of unlimited dimensions.

When Dizzee thinks very deeply--worrying about growing up, about those around him who won't grow up, about dying before he grows up--he sounds like, what else can we call it, the real thing.

A dance syncretism made of menacing beats skittering from dark dancehall to mashed-up jungle, super-warped bass frequencies, stark anti-hooks, and a voice that is the most authentic to emerge in years. [18 Jan 2004]

One of the most refreshing hip-hop records in quite some time.

His hard-edged, dance-inflected debut makes East London sound like the new Dirty South. [Jan 2004, p.108]

He hasn’t made a great album, but even Tupac never managed that; the bombed-out landscape of Boy In Da Corner burns instead with all the anger, confusion and messed-up desperation of youth.

On a level of pure listening enjoyment, Boy In Da Corner isn't quite an Original Pirate Material; but it does succeed in establishing that Dizzee Rascal deserves a place right at the forefront of the UK Urban movement.

Adventurous listeners are in for a treat.

Delivering his lyrics in a breathless barrage, 'Boy In Da Corner' packs the energy flash of London MCing into its grooves and for that alone it deserves attention.

If you want a vision of the future of hip-hop and techno, get this record.

One of the strangest, bumpiest musical journeys we're likely to experience on record this year. [16 Jan 2004, p.68]

[A] strikingly stark and innovative debut. [Sep 2003, p.102]

Not much here is too likely to blow up on the airwaves... it's too dirty, too ugly, too hard, and too Real.