Tag: plan b
(via ill Manors – Official Trailer – YouTube)
I did a double bill of this with Red Tails at my local cinema. This is probably the grimmest film I’ve ever seen. I kind of want to see it again, but I’d probably have to like… win the lottery and for there to be a significant increase in the amount of world peace before I could handle that kind of a downer of a film.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Why Plan B’s Ill Manors is the greatest British protest song in years
Why Plan B’s Ill Manors is the greatest British protest song in years
I pretty much almost tumbld the entire article, but it’s worth it. I’m not really a fan of rap or hip hop (mostly because what I do hear is American and… I don’t relate to it at all).
I wasn’t fussed about Plan B’s last album, The Defamation of Strickland Banks. This though? This is exciting. This has a message closer to home. This is something to think about.
Ill Manors says if you stereotype people as socially worthless then they will grow into those stereotypes. “Think you know how life on a council estate is from everything you’ve ever read about it or heard?” he asks. You expect a rebuttal, but instead: “Well it’s all true, so stay where you’re safest there’s no need to step foot out the ‘burbs.” Drew writes best about being cornered – even his hit album is about a soul singer in jail – and here, playing a non-famous version of himself, he’s cornered by prejudices he finds easier to confirm than overcome. Every rapid-fire verse accelerates with increasing desperation towards the same illicitly exciting chorus: “Oi! I said oi! What you looking at, you little rich boy?” The mingling of despair and defensive pride recalls A Design for Life’s chorus: “We don’t talk about love, we only want to get drunk.”
It’s partly about the riots, and the government is in the background, but mostly it’s about the psychology of class. You’d have to go back to the mid-90s, with Common People and A Design for Life (both of which were, in part, reactions to the perceived proto-chav mockery of Blur’s Parklife), to find equivalently complex treatments of class in mainstream British pop.
Jamie Reed tweeted that Ill Manors “really does remind of What’s Going On”, but it’s different in two crucial respects. Marvin Gaye was, by 1971, an established soul star observing the Vietnam war and inner-city deprivation from a distance; Drew still sounds like the product of a turbulent environment in north-east London. And Gaye’s response to turmoil was transcendent, healing beauty; Ill Manors, which resembles hip-hop produced by the Prodigy, reflects the raging unease of its subject matter. It has more in common with Public Enemy or the Clash: music that addresses a riot and sounds like a riot. “As an artist who’s trying to convey a message I need to get under people’s skin,” he told Mistajam. “The song needs to have that visceral energy … just like those horrible pictures we see on cigarette packets that are designed to shock us into being aware of our actions.” (It’s based, incidentally, on Peter Fox’s 2008 German hit Alles Neu, which in turn samples Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony).
Plan B – ill Manors [OFFICIAL VIDEO] (by planbuk)
Oi!
I said,
OI!
What you lookin’ at, you little rich boy?
We’re poor round here,
Run home and lock your door,
Don’t come round here no more.
You could get robbed for real
Because my manor’s ill.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)