He could be a character from a Dickens novel — the Artful Dodger, perhaps, if that name hadn’t already been taken. For Dizzee Rascal, aka Dylan Mills, an 18-year-old east London Mc, is ducking and diving personified, never mind his nom de plume.

Now, despite being expelled from at least three schools, the teenager is having the last laugh. After recording the song I Luv U at 16, and seeing it become one of last year’s most in-demand club tracks, Mills has signed to XL, home to the White Stripes and Basement Jaxx. On the eve of the release of his debut album, Boy in da Corner (out on July 21), he seems only dimly aware of the avalanche about to hit him.

Today, sitting in his label’s high-tech HQ, the author of lines like, “Queen Elizabeth don’t know me, so how can she control me/When I live street and she lives neat?” is giving a just-about convincing impression of being at home in this glossy world. And of being unfazed by the expectations those around him have for the album — and the scandal-sheet controversy that seems likely to be whipped up by the fact that his songs are unflinching chronicles of life on the streets where he was raised.

“I’m prepared in the sense that I don’t give a shit,” he laughs, when reminded that I Luv U’s subject matter — teenage pregnancy and underage sex — is a tabloid headline waiting to happen. “Yeah, it tackles issues. Are people scared? There are nuclear bombs on the TV, war on the TV. What’s wrong with everyone?” What’s wrong with a lot of people, if not everyone, is that artists like Dizzee Rascal are invariably a shock to the system — both for the mainstream musical establishment and the record-buying public. When the latter embraced the white, Birmingham-born rapper the Streets’ Original Pirate Material last year, significant factors in their response were surprise and bewilderment. So accustomed were we, are we, to music that is streamlined, to messages filtered so as not to offend, that the lingo deployed on OPM seemed like a foreign language.

Inevitably, Boy in da Corner is being bracketed with the Streets. In as much as it has the confidence to speak as it finds, the comparison is valid. But Mills prefers to stress the fact that there is music of all kinds being made in Britain that can get along just fine without the quasi-papal blessing of the mainstream. “It’s here,” he says. “It’s under people’s noses. And resistance to something don’t mean it’s not there no more. It’s like, someone could swing for your face; you could stand there and pretend it’s not there. You might still get caught on the chin.” It isn’t just the language and the subject matter that set Boy in da Corner apart.

Sonically, it’s breathtakingly crude. Not in the sense that it sounds undeveloped — on the contrary, for a debut album, it’s astonishingly assured — but rather because it refuses to dress to impress. The sparsest of backing accompanies most of Mills’s vocals. So uncommon is this approach, and so anaesthetised are we by production sheen, that the resulting music fully deserves that most misused of descriptions: it’s “new”. Too slippery and amorphous to be just garage, UK hip-hop or dancehall, it transcends all of these genres: if music can be said to swagger, Dizzee Rascal’s is strutting like a peacock. “That’s the sound of the street right now,” he argues. “The real street: the raves, the clubs, the underground, people’s bedroom computers. It’s 2003, man. There’s no time to wait around.”

And he rejects the idea that he’s talking a language many won’t comprehend. “It’s in plain English,” he responds. “If people don’t get it, well, a lot of people don’t understand them. And I interact with the world, I’m open-minded; they don’t even acknowledge it, but they’ll understand. They know it’s there, or they’re about to.”

He doesn’t care much for the music business, still less for the word “garage” being used to describe his music. “I plan to be the rudest boy in the industry,” he says on a new track, Vexed, before proclaiming: “I ain’t UK garage, so get used to it.”

Instead, he sees what he does as a natural part of the London rave scene, which gave him his first break as a member of east London’s Roll Deep Crew. The progress since has been, forgive the pun, dizzy. A mere 1,000 white-label copies of I Luv U tore out of the shops; within months, Mills was supporting Jay-Z at Wembley; a bidding war erupted; now many people are, understandably, calling Boy in da Corner the album of the year.

Which is a long, long way from truanting in Bow. And, as he says, if it hadn’t been for a music teacher called Mr Smith, things might have been very different. “He was a great man,” Mills recalls. “He did some great things for me. He was the one that paid me attention.” And if he hadn’t? “A lot of them teachers saw one side of me, the angry side. But it was just them hearing my name, and my name got branded. There’s people that can get all the grades they want, go to university, get a top-paid job. And there’s people that build up from scratch, make a career for themselves. Which one seems like life to you?” The branding worked out in the end. Bunking off, head in the clouds, he became Dizzee. And as for where he might have ended up — “Maybe I would have become a street-sweeper, a drug-dealer; or grown up to be an accountant, someone who worked in an office or a bank” — well, school labelled him Rascal, and music turned that to his advantage.

He’s got that run-before-you-can-walk mix of cockiness and little chinks of vulnerability. I ask him how he’ll cope if he breaks through to success. “When I break through,” he corrects. But if he seems sure of himself, he has every reason to be, with an album as visceral and thrilling as Boy in da Corner to his name.

As he puts it: “There’s a lot worse music than what I make, I know that.” False modesty, surely? For we’ll be lucky to find any better this year.

www.xl-recordings.com
Dizzee’s new home

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