A Grand Don’t Come For Free
Concept albums are difficult to make. Or at least, it is difficult to make a good concept album, since sticking to a consistent idea or narrative throughout a group of songs often proves easier in theory than practice. The form became particularly popular among rock bands in the late 60s and 70s, using their projects to tell fantastical and immersive tales, such as The Who’s Tommy and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. However, not all concept albums from this period proved as critically successful and beloved. Take, for example, Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, which revolved around Hindu texts which the members of Yes had never actually read, or Lou Reed’s infamous Metal Machine Music, which still splits fan opinion to this day. Others, too, ventured into the somewhat pretentious concept-for-the-sake-of-concept side of the form, which led to the disintegration of public perception of concept albums as a whole, or what The Guardian labels: “...the point when the record-buying public ceased believing that the concept album was a pinnacle of artistic endeavour and decided it was short-hand for a particularly gassy kind of self-importance.” In 2004, decades after the significant decline of the concept album’s golden age, The Streets released A Grand Don’t Come for Free, a brilliantly innovative rap opera which reinvented the form, remaining ground-breaking and hyper-relevant to this day by telling a realist story that looks inwards as much as it does out.
The Streets is the passion project of British musician Mike Skinner, who gained recognition in the early 2000s as a prominent voice in the UK rap and garage scene. Skinner’s idiosyncratic lyrical niche lay in narrating a bleak and tedious “mundane British suburban existence”, or the lives of what he labelled England’s ‘Barratt class’, a stark contrast to the content of most garage music at the time, which often explored the festishisation of wealth and luxury. The Streets’ debut album, 2002’s Original Pirate Material, gained critical acclaim for its vivid lyrical portrayal of this mundane existence, highlighted by alcohol, laddish culture, and boredom. But, it is Skinner’s 2004 sophomore rap opera A Grand Don’t Come for Free which solidified his position as one of the most unique storytelling voices of our time.
A Grand is a concept album exceedingly different from any other of its kind. The album’s first-person narrative follows Skinner, the protagonist, and the sequence of events which unfold after he loses the £1,000 which he had stashed away at home. Over the course of the album, he falls in love with a woman named Simone, but the relationship eventually sours and turns turbulent, ultimately falling apart. Unlike many other renowned concept albums of the 60’s and 70’s, A Grand is a simple story, a tale which is not nightmarish or dreamlike, but immersive precisely for its grounded and down-to-earth relatability. Though the project might be described as merely a simple realist story, It’s the way that Skinner tells this story, with sincerity and a keen eye for the daily conflicts among human relations and within ourselves, that renders it such a fulfilling listen.
The first track, ‘It Was Supposed to Be Easy’, follows a miserable day in the life of our protagonist – nothing he does, however small or trivial, seems to go his way. To top it all off, when he returns home, he finds the ‘grand’ which he had stored away for a rainy day has gone missing, with his TV broken too. He turns to reactionary self-hatred and blame: ‘Today I achieved absolutely nowt / In just being out of the house, I’ve lost out / If I wanted to end up with more now / I should have just stayed in bed like I know how’. The song serves as an excellent introduction into our lead character’s personality and psyche. As listeners, we immediately empathise with his situation.
A key event in the album’s narrative occurs in the second song, ‘Could Well Be In’, in which Skinner starts dating a girl named Simone who works at JD Sports with his friend Dan. There’s a tender innocence in this track, with its wide-eyed softness, and Skinner expressing insecurities which anyone would rightly feel at the start of any relationship. His nerves allow aspects of his continuous self-reprimanding trait to seep through his attempts of portraying cool confidence: ‘I felt like my hair looked a bit cheap / I wished I’d had it cut back last week’.
The date is successful. Skinner and Simone officially get together and she becomes an important character in the story. This song shows a vulnerable and insecure side of masculinity; behind the rowdy lad antics and façade which are an integral part of British machismo and which are addressed throughout other songs on the album. Of course, in the dating world, there are expectations of heterosexual men: as Ellen Lamont writes in her books The Mating Game: “Dating norms and scripts continue to presume that men initiate sexual and romantic overtures, and women react.” These expectations can lead to a feeling of pressure and elevated insecurities among many men behind a confident front, which is the case with Skinner in this song.
In many ways, A Grand can be seen as a transparent reflection of masculinity, subtly exploring the theme of male mental health by taking a look behind the curtain of ‘manliness’ into the stories and emotional states which are present not only in the life of our protagonist, but in many other men too.
Several previous Streets songs had been upbeat representations of British lad culture (‘Don’t Mug Yourself’ exemplifies this), a front which revolves around rowdiness and alcohol, with humour often executed directly at the expense of others. There is still a significant amount of laddish banter and lairy-ness in A Grand, but always in the service of the story at hand, and always paired with a contrasting analysis of the emotional consequences that group-based performative male identity can have.
Take, for example, the song ‘Fit But You Know It’, which follows Skinner on a holiday with his mates. They get drunk and he tries to flirt with a girl at a takeaway shop, illuminating his unfaithfulness to Simone, who is back at home. The song itself is filled with the infectious wit of earlier Streets tracks, often in that very laddish, ‘cheeky-chappy’ manner: ‘See, I reckon you’re about an eight or a nine / Maybe even nine and a half in four beers’ time’. But the song is not a lively embrace of this misogynistic culture, neither is it an overtly stern condemnation of it. It is simply the portrayal of a very real side of the behavioural expectations within British masculinity, which often have a multitude of consequences for all involved. In the context of the album, Skinner’s antics on this holiday do not go overlooked.
In ‘Such a Twat’, we listen in to a phone call between Skinner and a friend, in which our protagonist demonstrates guilt, remorse and self-hatred (a recurring theme) over his unfaithfulness during the holiday. On one hand, Skinner recognises his errors, he is ‘the twat’ in this case. But on the other, he continuously slips into a cycle of deception and hidden truths, through his firmness to not let Simone find out about what happened: ‘This is where that dodgy shit stops / She’s just gotta not find out’. With this approach, the song contains a multi-faceted view into the self-perpetuating culture of masculine ego and identity. It must be noted however, that though some studies have reported that men are more likely to be unfaithful than women in relationships, the toxic and dishonest attitude present in this song occurs among women too, and is part of a wider issue that extends beyond conventional masculinity.
A large element of British lad culture is, unsurprisingly, heavy drinking. There is a negative depiction of such uncontrolled intoxication throughout the album, exemplified all the way through to the bonus track ‘Soaked By the Ale’. Binge drinking is a prominent issue in Britain, alcohol misuse is the biggest risk factor for death, ill-health and disability among 15 to 49-year-olds in the UK. The ‘Binge Britain’ epidemic is also heavily linked to the expectations of British masculinity. Not only as a means of acquiring social capital, but as an escapism from the grey, somewhat depressing reality that exists for many among those represented in The Streets’ catalogue, a phenomenon: “...where restless young men seek mind expansion in the face of the repetitive bleakness they see around them.” This ‘mind expansion’ is also sought by the protagonist through drugs in ‘Blinded By the Lights’ and ‘Wouldn’t Have it Any Other Way’, as well as gambling in ‘Not Addicted’. These pursuits slowly corrode perhaps the one lasting form of happiness Skinner could acquire – a loving relationship.
Nevertheless, Skinner’s commentary on masculinity throughout this album is not preachy or holier-than-thou. For one, the relationship is not simply doomed due to Skinner’s actions. Simone is far from an ideal partner herself throughout A Grand, as can be seen by her mutual unfaithfulness or by her somewhat irrational anger on ‘Get Out of My House’: in this song, she kicks Skinner out of the house because he was getting pills for his epilepsy instead of helping her through a particularly bad hangover. Secondly, the album is not delivering an overtly prophetic message against toxic masculinity, it is simply recognising the reality for many British men around laddish culture and the negative implications that ensue from such a reality.
‘Lad culture’ is the term used to refer to a British male subculture which, with its links to the Britpop movement, emerged in the 1990s. In many ways the movement, a British counterpart to American ‘bro’ culture, was a reactionary response to feminism and the perceived ‘feminisation of men’, thus placing value instead on traits seen as stereotypically masculine, such as drinking, violence and sexism. The culture is still very much alive today, enshrining and exaggerating traditional tropes of manhood.
One of the most demoralising expectations of this toxic form of masculinity is that a man shouldn’t speak about his feelings. This anti-emotionality is an attitude perpetuated by lad culture, an attitude which “only exacerbates the stigmatisation of male depression”, and which has thus been one of the contributors to the male suicide epidemic that has grown in the UK. It is striking, then, that for a project that is in so many ways traditionally lad-ish, A Grand sees Skinner repeatedly disclosing his emotions, his turmoil, reaching out for a connection with friends and with an understanding listener in a conversational musical context – a complete thematic subversion of how the listener could experience the songs at face value.
The protagonist’s vulnerability emerges in its entirety in ‘Dry Your Eyes’. Simone finally breaks things off with Skinner, and all traces of his laddish bravado and confidence are stripped back, revealing a fragile emotional core, left exposed in all of us during a painful heartbreak. Distraught, in disbelief, denial, angry, deeply upset, he rejects any notion of concealing emotions on this beautiful and soft-spoken number: ‘Everything’s just gone / I’ve got nothing / Absolutely nothing’. The song is melancholic and somewhat cathartic, as Skinner finally comes to a degree of acceptance about what has happened. Perhaps, the main reason for this is conveyed in the chorus, a friend of Skinner’s consoling him, comforting him in the knowledge that though his relationship with Simone is over: ‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea’. The refrain of ‘Dry your eyes, mate’ is simple yet so powerful, because masculinity so often denies us the opportunity to open up to our friends, who will thereby not be given the chance to care for us.
Such a message is also particularly important in the heartbroken context of the track, since men tend to handle separation far worse than women, as evidenced by the fact that divorced men are 8 times more likely to commit suicide than divorced women.
The last track on the album, ‘Empty Cans’, provides two alternative endings to our narrative over its 8-minute duration. With some of Skinner’s most poignant and introspective lyrics, it is a fitting closer to an album that explores such a vivid and truthful human perspective.
The world which Skinner paints throughout A Grand is not a highly conceptual fantasy utopia or dystopian hellscape reminiscent of the worlds found throughout many other concept albums. The album does not present a grandiose statement or esoteric theory to be dissected for its meaning. It presents a world which is grounded and instantly recognisable, particularly to young British men, a world that is: "...at once punishing and boring, with occasional faint glimmers of promise.” The characters featured throughout the project are real, tangible people. The story is a well-told tale of quotidian life and its many failings, disappointments, mistakes, and … occasional glories.
A Grand Don’t Come for Free is one of the most accurate portrayals of simply being human: of love, of heartbreak, of trust, of infidelity, of arguments, of mistakes, of good & bad luck and good & bad decisions, of friendship, of drinking, of partying, of shame, of anger, of insecurities and of fragility. In this sense, though it is so intensely ‘British’ on first listen, the tale Skinner weaves throughout the album is in fact overwhelmingly universal. It is a project that shines a light on male emotionality and mental health with honesty and sincerity, but this does not mean only men can enjoy it. Contrarily, the album draws an emotional response from any and every listener, as we find comparisons between Skinner’s story and our own, empathising with the joys and frustrations that come with the volatile and unpredictable nature of everyday life.
By Mateus de Sá