Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip: 'The Logic Of Chance'

There is a reason it is difficult to have revolutions in capitalist countries; people’s needs and wants are channelled into consumer behaviours and can hence be safely contained.

People recognise a need for genuine political change, but those who are empowered are also comfortable and content, becoming reluctant to do anything. Those who would benefit from change are devoid of the power to affect it and tend, anyway, to live in other countries with weaker governmental systems.

So in the UK, our political interests tend to be the realm of either geeky cranks (seriously committed Socialists, the far right or nerdy mainstream party wonks), or the grumbling but fundamentall lazy bourgeoisie. Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip would like to believe they belong to the former group, but they are firmly in the latter. Their brand of protest music has going for it at least the fact that it is a distinctly modern type; reluctant to speak in terms of ideology or to express anger, they create wish-lists of acceptable demands that are dressed up to sound radical but wouldn’t sound odd coming from the pages of The Daily Mail.

The first thing to be said about this album (which takes its place in a growing tradition of Sac/Pip political music) is that it is a crass kind of hip hop; basic beats laid over with the embarrassingly over-verbose lyrics of the well mannered Scroobius Pip (David Meads). If your history teacher tried to write politically concerned verse for an album of ‘funky sounds’ laid down by your music teacher, it would sound like this.

A massive crime against music takes place in the first song, Sick Tonight, in which Pip makes an early bid for liberal atheist credo by stealing a Patti Smith lyric, presumably under the assumption that none of his listeners will have heard 'Horses'. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but he sure as hell didn’t die for mine” he raps, but gives no interesting explanation for his predictable anti-Christian position.

In Great Britain knife crime is his target, and he iterates the quest for an end to this plague. I suppose we are supposed to be shaken from some kind of dogmatic slumber here, but it’s hardly a controversial call. Halfway through, Pip resorts to reading (with a cringe inducing “right-on” tone) a piece of dull prose to get his message across, and although his statistic about a 120% increase in knife crime is diverting, he has to fudge the intention of a government report that said violent crime was “stable” in order to give his childish anger at authority some rationalisation.

This should give you an idea of what this entire record is about. 'Get Better' could have been commissioned by a government department, it is an uninspiring shopping list of changes that people might make to improve society, and is actually located in a decidedly Conservative view of the ways in which societies change. It screams of ‘common sense’ and being reasonable, just as does The Daily Mail, who Pip tries to distance himself from at the beginning. There is plenty of this fare; 'Stake A Claim' is a listless call to participate in “this democracy” and stop “bitching and moaning”. Is that not precisely what is happening in this kind of lazy protest music?

The songs without politics only serve to affirm how little this tiresome duo have to offer musically or lyrically, but their consistency will doubtless appeal to converts.



Released on 15th March 2010 by Sunday Best.

Written by Huw Green.