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. OPM 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.

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

Book Information
ISBN 9781009162623
Author Justin A. Williams
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 130g