Review Summary: If you’re going to take drugs; sell drugs; shag women: fine. But don’t whine like a bitch about how you had no choice in the matter due to your dysfunctional upbringing.
You can’t argue with that axiomatic album title, but I wonder what the hell did the record company make of such stupidity? The signing of rapper Professor Green represents for them a sizeable chunk of investment. You can hear it in the kaleidoscopic production on this record, the broad musical palette of dubstep come grime come dance-funk-pop hybrid. You can deduce it from the stature of Green’s guest vocalists, from the range of producers, from the airbrushed make-up of the publicity photos. The professor obviously ticks all the right boxes. A self-confessed bad boy, with the neck tattoos, facial scarring and drug dealing past to prove it. And he’s white. That helps.
Maybe I’m being cynical and certainly in his two hit singles
I Need You Tonight and
Just Be Good To Green, there’s a profusion of energy and wit to amply justify the belief shown in him. The interplay with Ed Drewett and Lily Allen is sharp and sassy, as scrunched up synths jerk and chirp in and out of melodies driven by thumping bass lines and dance beats. More than anything, it’s Green’s self-deprecation that is so refreshing, setting him apart from hip hop’s standard braggadocio, with lines like “It should be me that wants to get rid of you/Instead it’s you that doesn’t give a damn!”
However, as the album stutters away from those early singles, it’s apparent that Green doesn’t command the presence to invigorate his own songs, nor does he possess sufficient insight to engage the listener’s attention. Despite the freshness of the production, he seems to flounder once he moves away from the re-working of old songs. Green is at his best when he doesn’t take himself too seriously, when he plays up to his cheeky Jack-the-lad persona, such as when he blithely assures his girl that there “ain’t no man will treat you better” and complains “why you always gotta listen to your friends”. The facade of utter devotion is only ever paper thin and it isn’t long before he is smirking “but catch a whiff of my fingers and you can still smell Susan.”
But it soon gets tiresome as he switches into auto-pilot hip hop mode, boasting about having more sex than George Best (really?), how life on the mean streets of Hackney is like, er, living in a jungle (“it’s wild round here, you don’t wanna live round here”). Nor is it particularly interesting to hear pop stars moan self-pityingly about their career and record company, as he does in
Falling Down. If this all sounds worryingly like a certain white rapper, then the Eminem-esque vocal delivery and pseudo posing of
Do For You confirms it. If you’re going to take drugs, sell drugs, shag women. Fine. But don’t whine like a bitch about how you had no choice in the matter due to your dysfunctional upbringing.
The nadir of the album is reached with the mawkish sentimentality of closing song
Goodnight, a nauseatingly overblown tribute to his grandmother (“see, nanny ain’t here to say goodnight no more”). He chooses to express his grief like a fifteen year old aping a Jamaican gangster: “I swear down blood, I’m runnin on empty, my life is nuttin to be envied”. The song lurches ludicrously from a piano led ballad to full out orchestration over which Green raps sententiously “I’ve been having trouble sleepin... my nan (used to) say to me, night night, god bless, see you in the mornin”. I mean, for f*ck’s sake!
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