The Streets: "Fit But You Know It" Video

Video description: When "Has It Come To This", the first vinyl offering from The Streets, started to make it's way onto the airwaves in the Summer of 2000, Mike Skinner was a 22 year old rap obsessed kid from Birmingham in the English Midlands who'd spent the past 15 years working toward that moment. Since hearing his brother?s Run DMC and Beastie Boys records at the age of 7, Skinner had been determinedly making and producing his own music, listening and learning from the American pioneers of that genre, honing his own craft in studios in his hometown and in various bands and crews of friends from Birmingham. His early offerings were self-confessedly US influenced. "I was just trying to sound like the music I liked at the time, I just wanted to be Redman or Ice Cube, but I was a white kid from Birmingham. I was sending my stuff out to people but it wasn't anything new so no-one was interested." One of the turning points in Skinners development was the onset of UK Garage, the first identifiably British strand of rap music. "That was a really exciting time. Things were happening in England that had their own following and their own sound and it seemed to make it easier for me and my friends to relate to it. The beats were exciting and sounded new and what people were rapping about didn't seem so distant." This helped to focus Skinner towards a sound and style of his own. Mixing his hip-hop influences with UK Garage sounds, Skinner realized that if there was something lacking in UK hip-hop it was someone who talked about British culture. "I wanted to make something honest and entertaining about the things I knew. As far as I was concerned no-one else was doing that and if I could do that, and do it well, maybe that would be what set me apart" Skinner?s first move was to relocate to London. ("It seemed like more was happening there, I had more chance of getting people's attention."). He decided on the name The Streets because it "sounded good" and pressed up 200 white label vinyl copies of his first offering "Has It Come To This." Locked On, a London based garage label picked up on the track and signed Skinner up. In October 2001, "Has It Come To This" hit the UK Top 20 after months of exposure in clubs, and on pirate and eventually mainstream radio. People were undoubtedly excited about what they were hearing. Yet as most UK Garage-related artists were struggling to get beyond token hit singles and UK hip-hop had still not produced a truly credible success in it's own right, the usual skepticism followed. But didn't last long. The Streets' debut album "Original Pirate Material" was released in the UK in March 2002 and later in the US in October 2003. The reception for the record was phenomenal across the board. The press reaction was unanimous, proclaiming the album as a generational classic, radio played the singles and nearly a million worldwide sales later, it's firmly established as one of the most important and innovative albums of recent times. Over the past two years, Skinner has toured the world with his band, avoided a plethora of award ceremonies (nominated for Brit awards, The Mercury Prize, The Shortlist Award and winning an Ivor Novello songwriting award for Best Contemporary Song) and found critical acclaim not only in the UK, but in Europe, South East Asia and most notably in the US where he became the first UK rapper to make any serious impact. So what next? In May 2004 we'll find out when his hugely anticipated second album "A Grand Don't Come For Free" hits the shelves. Recorded (like Original Pirate Material) in his bedroom studio ("but with better microphones"), the album is a collection of songs linked together by a plots and subplots that whilst still reflecting the typical life of normal young Britain. ?A Grand? shifts the overall focus from the society overviews of "Original Pirate Material" to the more personal, everyday twists of relationships, friendship and just getting by. We won't tell you how good it is. You can find that out for yourselves. For Skinner, it's all in a days work. "I just have to keep making music that sounds fresh and entertains. That's what I want to do. I'm obsessed with that. I'm starting on the next one now..."

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Your take

The Download.com Video team presents highlights from some of our favorite user-submitted videos. In this installment, we've got Birmingham-based UK hip hop, a meditative music video from Virginia, and some LA neo-new wave. To watch each individual video, follow the links below.

1.) Dirty Star: "Negarita Aura"

2.) Phil Snapp: "Relax This Dream"

3.) Pom Pom Diary: "Thursday"

Hippo Dance

A hippo and his friend vie for the spotlight in this fun and beautifully crafted short from the Georgiou Brothers.

Arab Strap: "Dream Sequence"

Diving into the private worlds of Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton on first reflection may appear an easy task- put on the record and all is revealed: tales of love gone wrong; true life confessions from the bottom of the glass. This is not even half of it. Moffat and Middleton have over six years crafted some of the most stark yet beautiful of music - thier muse has served them well. Arab Strap are true troubadours telling the tale as they live it. Together they have created some of the most stark and observant music of the past ten years.

"Awesome: I F**kin' Shot That" trailer

A formally innovative feature film experience, the Beastie Boys handed out 50 cameras to audience members at their sold-out performance in New York's famed Madison Square Garden in October 2004. These 50 different passionate perspectives shot from the point-of-view of the audience take the viewer deep inside the world of a live Beastie Boys show, prismatically and kinetically capturing the experience of a live musical performance like no film has ever done. The film stars Mike D (Michael Diamond), Adam Horovitz (Adrock), and Nathaniel Hornblower (Adam Yauch/MCA), who also directed.

Panic Cell: "Thousand Words"

The brief, brief from the band for this song was "lapdancers" which became a man obsessed with a lap dancer. Just so long as it involved the band and a lapdancing club. So we came up with the idea of a man so consumed with rage that it ultimately becomes his salvation..and er..some lapdancers. The shoot began in a nite club in Margate, Kent, co-owned by one of the bands brothers, however the nitemare began a few hours earlier, when at 4pm our lead actress had to pull out leaving us four hours to find a replacement who would be prepared to come to Margate and pole dance in front of a bunch of strangers all night for free. Further more our first A.D was on a shoot and over running. Many frantic calls and emails later the planets aligned and we found Joceline, an actress and model, who as luck would have it lived moments away from the studio where our first A.D had just wrapped. So off we all convoyed down to the coast. We arrived at the nite club at 11 to start shooting at midnight only to find out that it closed at 2am. The sunrise was at 4am so this left us two hours to shoot. We threw half the storyboard in the sea. The club cleared an area upstairs so we could shoot close ups of the dancers, meanwhile our extras got stuck into the free bar. Unfortunately our extras idea of smart dress wasn't quite the same as ours, so we wrangled the four guys who did wear suits into the front of every shot. The bar was cleared by 2.30am and we were done by 5am following some sneeky lighting miracles to cheat the threat of impending daylight that was creeping through the windows. More information is available at www.visualabuse.com

Love Trio in Dub feat. U-Roy: "Lovers Rock"

Hearing a compilation containing a track by U-Roy, the legendary Jamaican dub master in Sweden when he was 13 years old, Ilhan Ersahin, in what was one of his first record purchases was transformed by his experience, realizing in that moment that music would be his calling. With the accusation of a tenor saxophone and a latter ticket to gotham, his fate was sealed. A nine year apprenticeship at downtown Gotham's then?famous Sweet Basil led to association with outstanding denizens of the jazz world and weekly workshops with the like?minded. These nine years were to culminate in a shift to the Lower East Side and Nublu. The genie was now out of the bottle. From this long gestation, Love Trio was born. Among those making the trek east with Ersahin were bassist Jesse Murphy, a young California native who would become bassist with Brazilian Girls, and drummer Kenny Wollesen of Tom Waits renown. The music the trio would make would seek to defy genre. It would be, as Ersahin would insist - just music - his music: "It's the city - its also where we live. I live here, and on the road, and there is the night life mixed with studio life; in a way also DJ life gotten to our compositions because every where we play there always electronics and DJs. In the culture now, it is really a part of everything. I am just trying to live in the moment, in what is now." Borrowing from the dub and rock steady beats of his earliest influences in programming the various keyboards and electronica added to his oeuvre as well as the jazz legacy of his apprenticeship and the sonorities of his ancestral Turkey, the result of the varying styles as an approach to the music the trio would make has been broadening of the possibilities of his composition and trio's improvisation. Working often with guest artists among whom have been the aforementioned U-Roy, trumpet legend Eddie Henderson, vocalist Marla Turner and DJ Logic as on their seminal, eponymous recording, Love Trio, the music arrived at suggest a hypnotic journey through a spare yet muscular landscape that might best be described as a quest in a minor mode - the ethereal quest for the fabled Nublu. A land far away from Tin Pan Alley.

Kudu: "Playing House"

Kudu tap into Siouxsie circa 82, dark Chicago house circa 86, deep 70s funk, and, consciously or not, UK jungle tekno circa 91. They are real deal, and their music is so primal that they could just as validly be classed a rock act as a jazz or dance act. On stage Kudu are dark and raw and desperate, but their pop potential has always been apparent to anyone with ears for song craft and eyes for charisma. Bar Star, the first single from the upcoming full-length from Nublu Records entitled Death of the Party, confirms this perception. In addition to the aforesaid ingredients, Kudu on record have a sense of fun lifted from Deee-Lite, ESG, church in rural Georgia and parades in New Orleans. Kudu plans to tour extensively surrounding the release of the record, and they have already received press from the likes of XLR8R, URB, Pitchfork, and the acclaimed music writer Simon Reynolds. Remixes of Bar Star are as diverse as Kudu?s influences. In Flagranti, the head of Codek Records, turns Bar Star into a disco track that echoes Prince and the Time?perfect for a Miami Dancefloor. Freddie Mas, of Tigersushi fame, twists the track into an AC/DC-like cock-rock funk anthem. This is the twelve inch of the year from the band of the year.

Turn LPs into digital media files - Getting started

Do not toss all that precious vinyl into the rubbish bin just yet. We will show you how to turn those old records into digital music files.

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