A startling rapper equipped to both dazzle and devastate, Dizzee Rascal would be hard to account for in hip-hop terms even if he weren't from England. At his most gregarious, Rascal trades in a nominally familiar language of boasts and barbs, taunting lesser lyricists and angling to "make paper" as a way to escape the streets he surveys from above. For that, he's hip-hop through and through. Slink down into a typical Rascal track, though, and he's busy lashing out against himself, chewing over doubt and unease with introspective fangs that draw blood when they're not chattering. Lots of rappers turn on themselves here and there, but few make the habit as visceral, cathartic, and integral.
Then there's Rascal's English context, which helps explain why his moody screeds sometimes scan as less than literal. His fast, hectic vocal delivery owes as much to dancehall reggae and mussed-up jungle as it does to hip-hop, which is another way of saying that it's hard to follow his words without surrendering to their word-sound waver. In the title track to Showtime, Rascal's rousing second album, he recounts his own history with a flurry of words—"run-down," "East London," "turntables," "bored," "drama," "who wouldn't"—that churn around their meaning without ever settling into it. The mad-dash effect makes for thrilling listening, but it also befits an album on which Rascal tangles with his newfound fame in England and notoriety everywhere else.
A fattened-up answer to 2003's Boy In Da Corner, Showtime finds Rascal brooding over matters great and small without sounding overly ponderous or somber. In "Stand Up Tall," he raps proud and defiant over a busy dance track full of clacking drum machines and electronic springs. One song later, in "Graftin'," Rascal sounds numb when despairing over the way "the world on the street don't ever seem new." That switch in mood, from song to song and verse to verse, plays out all over Showtime.
Beat-wise, the album skews closer to grainy hip-hop than to the English grime that Rascal helped sketch out. A heavy dose of bassline murmurs makes for a moody middle, but by the time it hints at an end in the emotive "Imagine," Showtime sounds like a stirring call for a rapper who's almost too painfully human to play the game.