Dizzee Rascal - Raskit (2017)

Raskit is the sixth studio album by English rapper Dizzee Rascal. It was released on 21 July 2017 by Dirtee Stank Recordings and Island Records. It is his first studio album in four years since The Fifth (2013). It was produced entirely by Dizzee Rascal alongside notable producers such as Cardo, Donae'o, Salva, Teddy Samba, The Arcade, The HeavyTrackerz and Valentino Khan, among others.

Raskit received generally favorable reviews from critics upon release. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 78, based on 10 reviews. Ben Cardew of Pitchfork stated that Raskit converges grime with hip hop and "retains The Fifth's deliberately divided identity, with beats that fall between grime’s crude electronic minimalism and trap’s skittering intricacy". Jordan Bassett of NME labelled Raskit a "brilliant return to grime" for Dizzee Rascal and "hasn’t sounded this vital in years". Andy Cowan of Mojo stated: "If 2013’s The Fifth was a rare, guest-heavy misstep that polished off rough edges to brazenly target a transatlantic audience, Raskit junks its predecessor’s egregious schmaltz for marauding bass and spartan trap backings."

"In 2008, with exquisite timing, Dizzee Rascal released the Calvin Harris/Chrome collaboration “Dance Wiv Me” and confirmed, some five years after Dizzee's classically bleak debut, Boy in Da Corner, that the mainstream British public was ready to embrace the electro bounce of pop grime. But Dizzee’s acute temporal nous didn’t last. By 2013, when he released The Fifth, his firebrand talent had drifted into blandly transatlantic commercial rap. British audiences were bemused by the presence of figures like will.i.am; American listeners were unimpressed. When Skepta unleashed the thrillingly skeletal grime banger “That’s Not Me” to global acclaim about eight months later, Dizzee’s creative choices on The Fifth seemed particularly inopportune.

The early hype had it that Dizzee’s sixth studio album, Raskit—a misty-eyed reference to a moniker Dizzee employed on his early recordings—would see the East London MC return to his grime roots. This proves to be somewhat wishful thinking: True, Raskit is largely free of The Fifth’s blatant pop choruses, “special” guests, and tired commercial production. But it retains that album’s deliberately divided identity, with beats that fall between grime’s crude electronic minimalism and trap’s skittering intricacy. Dizzee has long been inspired by American hip-hop. In 2016, he told Complex that “I Luv U” was “me doing Three 6 Mafia,” and there is something refreshing about his insistence on avoiding the low-hanging fruit of the grime revival. But doing so means that Raskit needs to be special indeed if it is to avoid stumbling in between the twin demands of grime and rap audiences, neither of whom are exactly ill-served for trunk-rattling beats in the summer of 2017.

At times Raskit succeeds. There are no obvious hits, but Dizzee is on head-spinning verbal form throughout, his frenetic flow and condensed rhyme schemes combining with the swagger that marks many of his best tunes. Fans of UK slang will be in for a treat, too, thanks to lines like “Driving me crackers/You bloody spackers/Should get off my knackers” (on “Space”), while references to old beefs with Wiley and Megaman leaves plenty for students of grime history to chew on.

Considerably more interesting, though, are the moments when Dizzee surveys the inequalities of modern Britain, providing some of his most profoundly moving lyrics since the street-level laments of Boy in Da Corner. The reflective “Slow Your Roll” is a particular highlight, as Dizzee reflects on the gentrification tearing the soul out of modern London over mournful, filtered chords: “Foreign investment raising the stock up/So the rent got propped up/And it kept getting topped up/So the heart got ripped out and rinsed out.” His brilliant (if slightly exhausting) lyrical craftsmanship is let down only by the occasional leering crudity of lines like, “I should have had her in the back seat of the Jag” (from "Way I Am”).

But the production, which comes largely from American artists such as Valentino Khan, Salva, and Cardo, struggles to match his verbal inventiveness. There are moments of musical brilliance, like the monolithic synth stabs on "Wot U Gonna Do?,” the finely tuned sample cut-ups on “The Other Side,” and the haunting shapes on “Ghost,” which expands Raskit’s rather limited sonic palette by sampling the Israeli Marine Corp Brass Band. Elsewhere, on the meandering “Space” or the grime throwback “Sick a Dis” (produced by the English singer Donae’o), the production does just enough to provide Dizzee with a base to launch his thrilling verbal tirades.

But these moments are weighed perilously against a number of tracks where the overly slick specter of The Fifth raises its coiffured head. “Bop N’ Keep It Dippin’” and “Man of the Hour” are weak G-Funk retreads, while “She Knows What She Wants” starts with a horrible Auto-Tuned hook that sounds even worse given Dizzee’s gripes about the pitch-correction tool Melodyne on “The Other Side.” These poor production choices are particularly painful from an artist who has, in the past, shown both wild production chops (notably on Boy in Da Corner) and the ability to cherry-pick other producers’ best beats (such as Youngstar on “Stand Up Tall” or Armand Van Helden on “Bonkers”).

Of course, if Dizzee wanted to show his affinity with American hip-hop in 2017, then releasing an album so severely need of an edit is a note-perfect move. But grime at its best is defined by its steely economy, which makes Raskit’s rambling length and diluted focus frustrating. As a platform for Dizzee's flashy lyrical dexterity, Raskit does more than enough to shift the bitter aftertaste of The Fifth. With more of the laser-eyed focus that marked Boy in Da Corner, it could have been a triumph." ~ Ben Cardew


Track List:
01. Focus
02. Wot U Gonna Do?
03. Space
04. I Aint Even Gonna Lie
05. The Other Side
06. Make It Last
07. Ghost
08. Business Man
09. Bop N Keep It Dippin
10. She Knows What She Wants
11. Dummy (16 For The Juice)
12. Everything Must Go
13. Slow Your Roll
14. Sick A Dis
15. Way I Am
16. Man Of The Hour