Released 24.08.09, Acuphen Entertainment LLP



A-Stout, a three-man Hip Hop crew settled in London, are here to save urban music, apparently – although from what is not entirely clear. Perhaps it needs saving from the growing threat posed by conurbation music – a dreaded ‘gateway’ genre which will allow horrid wigga oiks from the suburbs to colonise the hood spitting feeble rhymes about Marks and Sparks’ rocket and baby red chard salad. Perhaps not.

If urban music (loathsome term) does need saving, then it needs saving from itself, and it’s extremely unlikely that A-Stout’s turgid ‘Drinks’ is going spark a full-on renascence, mired as it is in exactly the kind of boorish, misogynistic willy waving that Hip Hop should have grown out of a good decade ago.

The song, such as it is, is entirely concerned with getting comprehensively blotto and aggressively hitting on various ‘shorties’  and ‘chicks’– or women, as I am reliably informed they are actually called. What makes ‘Drinks’ so desperately, pathetically sad – beside the lumpen, woefully dated beats – is the way this scenario is delivered with heroic gusto, as if A-Stout were a troop of Viking warrior-men storming the gates of Valhalla, and not in fact Lynx-stinking goits dribbling down their Topman shirts in Yates’.  

And there’s the rub: this is the suburban young man’s dream – a hopelessly naff Daily Sport version of a big night out. Meanwhile, in urban centres around the world, artists such as Flying Lotus, Cocknbullkid and Rustie continue to quietly take the bare bones of Hip Hop and twist it into new, strange and utterly thrilling shapes. And we can all drink to that.

www.a-stout.com

Posted In Single Reviews, Aug 16 2009. Words - Richard