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Plan A: Boom bap drums, scientific battle raps, funky trumpets.
Time for Plan B, I think:
The fact of the matter is that whether you consider Plan B hip hop or not, you cannot ignore the sheer visceral force of his album, the musicianship in his delivery (he sings his own hooks and writes complex chord structures: shock, horror:). And he’s quite confrontational, swearing, snarling, taking on characters and delivering stories about the sickness of society.
Intrigued?
Well, read what he had to say to Nikesh the week before his album dropped.
Please introduce yourself.
This is Plan B. Just wanting to tell you about my album, “Who Needs Actions When You Got Words”, which dropped June 26th.
Boy, my music is hip hop. Other people call it folk. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. I’m telling stories. Musically, I like to be more live. I like to use live instruments. My message is the same kinda message that films and books try to portray, which is giving messages out through telling stories. Some of my songs are me telling stories, some are just me rapping consciously. A lot of it is story- based.
Basically, I was sick of running into kids with a certain attitude to life. Their parents hadn’t brought them up correctly. I was sick of how they didn’t value anything. That song was me being angry, and writing a song that was an impression of all these little bastards you meet put into one person. I had to make this kid your worst nightmare. One character was a little cunt, who represented the mentality of kids in general. So that’s why I done it. Some people might call me a scaremonger, saying this is how every single kid in the world thinks. But I’m not, it’s just a song. It does portray the way a lot of kids do think. If you go to a comedy show and see someone do an impression, they are going to make it theatrical, and they’re going to overdo it. I was doing an impression of someone, and I overdone it, to make a point.
Of course. And there is hope for kids. But only if they’re educated. If their parents aren’t going to educate them, if their parents ain’t going to make them go school, if they’re gonna be out on the street fucking about, the only education they’re going to have is from hip hop music. So, my point in writing that song is that if I use the word ‘cunt’, if I swear, if I rap about doing nasty shit, they’re going to want to listen to it. Because that’s what excites them. The more they listen to it, the more they understand it, that I’m taking the piss out of them. They ain’t going to listen to shit like Black Eyed Peas and think, ‘yeah man. I don’t want to be a little rudeboy no more.’ They don’t respect that shit. They respect people like Tupac, DMX, 50 Cent, people like that. I tried to come from the angle where I was talking about the shit that Tupac talks about. But I was talking about it from a perspective of morality and reality. If you get shot 9 times, you’re going to die. You ain’t special, you ain’t a soldier. That’s where I’m coming from.
It’s lazy. He’s a politician, he’s got to be seen to be doing something. He’s gotta seen to be changing things. It’s easy for him to start this whole thing up. He’s blaming someone. It’s easy for him to point the finger. You don’t sort things out by blaming someone. You sort them out by talking to them. That’s what I try to do with my music. I try to raise issues. What he’s saying is, ‘we should censor hip hop, we should gag it.’ If you stop rappers from talking about what goes on in their environment, then it doesn’t exist. Which is bullshit. Even if we stop rapping about what goes on in our environment, the environment is still going to be there. So, at the end of the day, this fucking prick is pointing his finger at hip hop and saying it’s their fault. The laziest fucking thing he could have done was point his finger at Westwood, when most of what he plays is crunk. I don’t know about you but most of the kids in the city ain’t really feeling that shit, it ain’t got no content and the only people who do listen to it is white England, middle England. He’s a conservative MP, and all he does give a fuck about is white middle-class kids who think they’re clever and above everyone else. Then why are they so thick that they think someone can listen to a fucking Westwood show and go pick up a knife and go stab someone. So it’s like, the whole argument is bullshit and I’m getting tired of it.
Yeah, he’s one of the dickheads who would try to ban my album. Let him do it. I’ll have a Question Time showdown with that cunt any day, man. They probably wouldn’t show it though because I say cunt and fuck and wank every other word.
Boy, I knew that if I had to come out there, I had to do it my way. We all think along the same lines. But there’s only a handful of people who make UK hip hop who I respect. The reason I think there’s only a handful is because there’s only a handful of people doing something original. I think there’s always a sense of morality, a sense of staying true and being honest. I think Klashnekoff and Skinnyman are people who do that really well.
It wasn’t a Prodigy sample. They lifted it from something else. So I had to pay someone in America a percentage of the track. It wasn’t too bad. Radiohead: they don’t let anyone sample their shit. Which kinda fucked me up. I had to replay it. I was a little bit bitter about that, cos they were my heroes growing up. And I thought they didn’t have the decency to listen to the track and tell me honestly what they thought. Just give me a proper reason and fair enough. Man just ignored me. That was a bit hurtful. Fuck it, I’m a grown man, I got over it, did a new version, put it on the album. People will hear the other version man.
She can deal with the truth, my mum. She can’t be angry with me for telling the truth. I’m sure it is hard for her with that song hitting the radio and everyone knowing her business. When I wrote that song, I had lost a lot of respect for me, that’s why I wrote that. But it’s the past now and she ain’t with that guy no more. I’ve forgiven her and all that shit. The song’s just come out though, so it must be hard for her to have to go through all that shit that’s been sorted now. But I wrote it, and it was an expression of how I felt at the time. I’m not the kind of person to write a song and not let anyone hear it. It’s out now as a single. Hopefully, in a couple of months I can go on to talk about something else.
Everyone gets depressed. I went through it during school and after school. All the kids with older brothers and sisters had that safety zone. They were popular at school and didn’t really go through hard shit, so they didn’t go through depression. What they find is that they leave school and hit the real world and they don’t have that safety zone anymore. They’re all on their own and that’s when they get depressed. That’s the worst time to get depression. You got all this shit around you and you can easily fall victim to crack or heroin. Luckily I was doin' drink and drugs from a young age. When I hit depression, I latched on to drink and drugs but I was young so I managed to get out of it. I don’t do drugs anymore. I don’t even smoke weed. I just drink a little bit and I smoke a lot of cigarettes. Depression happens and you try to get rid of it by using substances. It’s better for that to happen when you’re younger than when you’re in your twenties. 3-4 of my mates are now smackheads, whereas I’ve learnt my lesson from drugs. I’m not dissing drugs, I think it’s alright to do them. Just in moderation.
I cottoned on to that early on. It’s psychology bruv. I’ve seen how many things people have done to try get kids to learn. And they’ve failed. I’ve come to the realisation that the best way I ever learnt was through fear. My mum never wrapped up in cotton wool and protected me from the evils of life. It was all open for me to see. She put me straight about things. I knew the bleak reality of everything. After watching Larry Clark’s film ”Kids”, I was deterred from sex. I always thought about what I was doing. After watching that film, I was scared and stuff, so I always made sure I wore a condom. If it was up to me, that film would be shown in schools as sex education. Them anti-smoking adverts with all the shit coming out of the arteries - that’s the angle I’m coming from. I am trying to scare people into making them think and make them feel. I want them to feel sick. Because the stuff I’m talking about is sick.
I think the laziest one is The Streets. Me and him conceptually like to be different in the way we want to write our songs. Of course I’ve been influenced by Eminem in the past. He’s been a big influence. But there’s been other artists as well. It is lazy. I do sing my own hooks, I do play guitar and I write my own music. I write about my own personal shit, and I rhyme with a British accent and British slang. Boy, I could take offence to someone saying I’m ripping off Eminem and not bringing anything fresh to the table. I’d be offended by that. But if they’re talking about US/UK comparisons and they’re saying I’m the British Eminem, then so be it.
I want to big up one of my producers, Sam. Chantelle Phillipe. I want to big up Anne Stacy, Paul Epworth. Anyone who did work on the album. Thank you for helping me get this out. Here’s to the future, let’s see what it holds.
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© ukhh.com 2006
Plan B Interview
Every few years an act comes along that divides the UK hip hop audience, makes them sit up and question the parameters of the comfort zone of UK hip hop that they live in. Two years ago, it was the Streets, last year it was Dizzee Rascal (and grime). This year, the man contending for contentious in this little scene of ours is Plan B. The reason he’s caused so much consternation is probably the two page spreads in NME, the appearances on grime Run the Road compilations, the plaudits he affords to his influences like Eminem (we were all influenced by Doom I’m sure… that’s like more credible, isn’t it?).
Yeah, definitely man. I got it how I wanted it. There’s a couple of tracks I couldn’t use because of samples. I couldn’t get the clearance. I said everything I wanted to say. I got it out of my system. That’s kinda the point of making songs. Get rid of your demons. I feel like I did it.
I thought the film was wicked man. I thought the director was coming from the same place I was. We never met each other. He hadn’t heard my song and made the film, and vice versa. It was two people thinking along the exact same lines. What pisses me off is when these critics say what a great film ‘Kidulthood’ was but then slag my song off, saying they were offended by it. The film and my song do the exact same thing. The only reason my song offends people is that it’s music. I think it’s lazy for people to get it twisted about things like that, when there’s no difference.
They can question it all they like. These dickheads are spending all this time on forums typing up these shit opinions. No one gives a fuck about them. They ain’t nothing. That’s probably the best thing they’re ever going to do in their life. They’re spending all their energy trying to bring me down when they should be doing something positive themselves. Yeah, fucking Eminem paved the way for bare white rappers. And I’m sure when Eminem come out, everyone compared him to Vanilla Ice. He had all this shit for being a white guy. The fact that he went through that made it easier for white rappers to come out and not go through that white/black thing. It’s lazy. If motherfuckers can’t see I’m doing something original with my shit, then so be it man. Them fuckers just sit there with their Eminem albums and their Eminem shrines wanking over pictures of him. Let them do it. I want to move on. I want to take my inspiration from people like Eminem, people like Necro, like Tracy Chapman, Nirvana and I want to make new music and innovate. Anyway fuck em.
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