The Streets finally have indie cred here. Painfully hip fashionable stores (the kind that stock Vice magazine amongst the Vintage) play Mike Skinner's music beside Adam Ant and "Jean Genie" era David Bowie, which always struck me as silly - there is nothing glamorous or artificial in his music. He is the perfect British novelist, someone who plumbs the banality and pathos of middle England.The single makes me cry. I have heard people say that it tells the world that boys shouldn't cry, and i think that this is a dangerous misreading. He is begging, of course, but he has to be beg - there is nothing left, she is going to go, and the desperation is palpable. The drying of eyes is not machismo bravado, but an honest recognition of the futility of the situation.I cannot think of an American hip hopper (fuck that - I cannot think of an American musician) that engages in this kind of emotional vulnerability, you could argue Marshall Mathers, but he is blessed with a multiplicity of personae, there is only one the Streets, and his life is so indivisible from the life of both Mike Skinner and all of the lads that he represents. (Lad as romantic hero, instead of hooligan - a new trope?)The best thing though is the honest use of cliches. The dialogue has a verisimilitude - who hasn't had there mates use the line, there is plenty of fish in the sea, as an attempt to clear the debris of a broken relationship, or don't cry - because there is nothing to cry about. Or how that muteness comes, and all you can say is I can't say a word, or that calling for the chimera of trust.Even the sung intervals, while not technically brilliant, are revelatory - the mark of good singing I think is finding what your limits are, and what the song requires and using that in tandem (which is why Courtney Love is a Great Singer and why Mariah Carey is a Poor Singer). Mr Skinner's aching, broken, soft pleading is exactly what is needed here, the cradle of melancholy and dust is sadder then any of the lachrymose ballads that the American Idol crowd brings.Aside from the singing? The introduction of strings as signifier of romantic ballad is a good notice of genre, so that there is no real time wasted with superfluous introductions, and then it almost becomes a capella, the drums and guitars providing a skeleton, nothing over the top, nothing in excess, just what needs to be said, and what is said is said very well.

for square table, via nyplm.
now if only i could get paid for this shit.