Original Pirate Material
The Streets and Hip-hop Transatlantic Exchange

Original Pirate Material represents an important historical moment: when UK MCs found a market to listen to them.

Justin A. Williams (Author)

9781009517096, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 December 2024

80 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 1.2 cm, 0.27 kg

'How, in the West, have our understandings of 'the secular' and 'religion' been built on entirely modern notions of belief and disbelief, natural and supernatural? This is the question at the core of Peter Harrison's brilliant and fascinating exploration of religion and science as they have come to be conceptualised, usually in opposition to each other, in the modern West. Some New World is a really important work, drawing on a wide range of thinkers and ideas, that will significantly shape future scholarly discussions.' Jane Shaw, Principal of Harris Manchester College, Professor of the History of Religion, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University of Oxford, and author of Miracles in Enlightenment England (2006)

With his debut album Original Pirate Material (2002), Mike Skinner, who recorded under the name The Streets, combined the world of UK dance music with US hip-hop. Original Pirate Material is the result of the so-called 'bedroom producer', hybridizing previous forms into something novel. This Element explores a number of themes in this album: white masculinity, the everyday, technology, sampling, hybridity, the Black Atlantic, and US-UK transatlantic relations. It examines the exoticism of Englishness from a US perspective as well as within the wider context of Anglo-American cross influence in post-WWII popular music. Twenty years since the album's release, this Element provides an investigation of the album's content and reception, as an important case study of (postcolonial) hybridity and (English, male) identity.

Introduction
1. Pirate radio and the turn of the 21st century
2. Big England: the sounds of the black Atlantic
3. Transatlantic relations: analysing the special relationship musically
4. Sample robbery
5. Technology and production
6. Everyday Laddism
7. Genre: UK garage and US Hip-hop
8. Little England meets big England: hybridity as originality
9. Mainstreaming British popular music in the 21st century
10. The afterlife of OPM and the streets
Conclusion
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6]