The Streets might be a great illustration that hip hop is not necessarily rap and vice-versa. Mike Skinner's music barely even fits into "rap," really, with a kind of drawl-ish delivery only coincidentally seems to sync with the beat. But it's in his relaxed delivery that his detailed narrative finds their heart. Few have captured the kind of middle class ennui present here, where returning a DVD and calling your mother can be such an inconvenience that, well, a song results from it. It's a concept album, but it's one of the rare ones where not a song is wasted on moving the plot forward. The beauty of the concept is its simplicity (guy loses money, must get it back). It recalls silent comedies by Chaplin in the sense that the plot is just window-dressing for a bunch of tangential skits that, maybe, don't add up to a complete sum but on their own are great entertainments.
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