Newport State Of Mind

We are, dear friends, drifting into the arena of the unwell:

… For the 18th week running, UK rap group the GLC hold the number one position on the US billboard chart with another smash hit, ‘Your Mother’s Got A Penis’ … 

How to explain Goldie Lookin Chain Greatest Hits?  You could simply say ‘a comedy rap act from Newport in South Wales’ but that’s kind of like describing Donald Trump as ‘US president’ – you miss all the nuance and essential crapness that makes it such a inherently ridiculous should-never-have-happened concept.

Let’s start with Newport: run-down post-industrial town, intrinsically a bit crap but always had good gigs* and in the 90’s one of the most acclaimed small gig venues in the world, TJ’s – home to all manner of hardcore punk and metal gigs and where Kurt proposed to Courtney.  Rough-assed place on a drinking evening, sort of place that has a M*A*S*H style field hospital pitched in the main drag on a Saturday night and needs it.

GLC: (short for Goldie Lookin Chain, by the way) Basically 8 guys lounging around smoking way too much dope, listening to beats and, umm, that’s it really.  The main dudes being Maggot, Eggsy, Mystikal, Billy Webb and, the awesomely-monikered, Adam Hussain (this was 2004).  Their music is a wry celebration of bottom-of-the-barrel culture; culture as in bacterial, obvs.

The lingo: There’s an extensive glossary courtesy of the GLC’s excellent site** (note Saxon-inspired one in there).  Here are the essentials you need to enjoy this LP.

Bra - friend
Draw - a herbal remedy
Leisurewear - cheap sporting clothing, preferably nylon-based
Safe - greeting/measure of quality
Safe As Fuck - really good
You Knows It - to understand the GLC

You may now be ready to play.

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Each and every song on Greatest Hits^ is about smoking draw (Soap Bar), scoring draw (21 Ounces), selling draw (The Maggot), smoking so much draw you think you’re a robot (Half Man Half Machine), oh and there’s the one about your mate’s mum’s unorthodox landing gear (Your Mother’s Got A Penis).  It is all very serious, Wales’ answer to What’s Going On.

It is all very funny and cleverly stupid, to boot.  Okay so the GLC occasionally hurtle into areas that are too graphic for my delicate rural sensibilities on occasion but most of it I can take and even the most off-colour moments tend to be less so than a lot of serious hip-hop of the same vintage.  More to the point there is some real wit and musical knowledge at work here, the sampling is excellent and unusual.

One of my very favourite examples is the #3 hit single ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do’ which as well as being a really good tune and a sly pop at the hysteria over lyrics and politicians scapegoating music for society’s ills, never fails to amuse.

Guns don't kill people rappers do
Ask any politician and they'll tell you its true
Its a fact music makes you violent
Like Michael Jackson telling little Timmy to be silent

Another favourite is the what-we-did-before-draw lure of ‘Roller Disco’, which is a great track and the only one in the 1537 that mentions ‘skating around backwards to Axel F’, which I’ve certainly done – maybe it’s a Welsh thing; big shout out to Carmarthen leisure centre, safe as fuck, you knows it.

Anthem time: it has to be ‘Your Mother’s Got A Penis’, obviously.  It’s kinda vile and funny simultaneously and when I switch my brain off, hilarious.  Favourite part? probably all the ‘Come on Wembley!‘ shouts during the chorus.  Should be the Welsh national anthem.

‘Soap Bar’s appropriation of the tune of ‘Spirit In The Sky’ to hymn low quality herbal resin is another highlight for me, Mr Greenbaum must have been very proud.  Killer line about a self-righteous busybody: ‘I tried to see things from his point of view / But I couldn’t fit my head up his asshole too’.

Also on the hit list ‘The Maggot’ based around ‘You’ve Got To Pick a Pocket Or two’ and a clever Steeleye Span sample, the R&B piss take ‘You Knows I Loves You’ (‘I’ll give you a rose, pull out your chair when we eat /Fuck I can’t in McDonald’s it’s a bolted seat’) and the robo-draw-psychosis of ‘Half Man Half Machine’ is always a good time.

I find ‘Self Suicide’ a touch too much^^ but even so there are some great lines amongst the ones I choose not to repeat about the jump in fame you get when you die, ‘Jesus was nailed up to some wood / 2000 years later and book sales are still good‘!

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I had a little trepidation about whether I would still find the GLC funny in these sensitive times we dwell in today, but I bloody did; funny, smart and cynical in fact, three of my favourite adjectives right there.  The humour is very self-deprecating, they mock the essential daftness of loverman rap and plaster the songs with crap Welsh lowlife details but never punch downwards at all, we aren’t being invited to sneer at any class of folks, or mock anyone outside the group.  Greatest Hits is as essentially good-natured as it is scurrilous and deserves to be thought of a little more often.

Safe as fuck, basically.

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Can it be any coincidence that almost exactly 10 years after Greatest Hits hit the streets Newport was host to the 2014 Nato summit? I think not, Obama was clearly a safe as fuck Newport boy at heart.  True story.

1015 Down.

PS:  Drifting into the arena of the unwell:

PPS: In the allmusic review of Greatest Hits the reviewer bitches about the sheer number of UK references you would have to learn before being able to grok every millimetre of the LP.  Cheeky (censored)! That’s what the non-US world has had to/is still doing all the time to enjoy hip-hop, there are still references I’m picking up from albums I first bought in 1987.  Parochial feckers! Learn a little.

*Nuclear Assault and Jeff Healey being the big ones I remember when I was in school, both of which I missed of course!

**check out the merch page.  I may just have bought a ‘Run GLC’ tee, having chickened out of getting a ‘Daft …’ one.

^so named because it was the best tracks culled from all their previous self-released offerings (favourite name Chains Addiction), plus a few more.

^^like I was looking for tasteful here!