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Track List
01) Konnichiwa
02) Lyrics
03) Corn on the Curb
04) Crime Riddim
05) It Ain't Safe
06) Ladies Hit Squad
07) Numbers
08) Man (Gang)
09) Shutdown
10) That's Not Me
11) Detox
12) Text Me Back
01) Konnichiwa
02) Lyrics
03) Corn on the Curb
04) Crime Riddim
05) It Ain't Safe
06) Ladies Hit Squad
07) Numbers
08) Man (Gang)
09) Shutdown
10) That's Not Me
11) Detox
12) Text Me Back
3:16
2:36
5:01
4:36
3:43
4:39
3:18
3:34
3:08
3:05
2:47
4:24
Data Complete
60%
Total Rating
60%Total Rating
(3 users)
Back Cover
CD Art
3D Case
3D Thumb
3D Flat
3D Face
3D Spine
First Released
2016
Grime
---
Urban/R&B
---
Medium
Album
0 copies
Album Description
Available in:
Konnichiwa is the fourth studio album by British grime artist Skepta. The title is the greeting "hello" in the Japanese language. After numerous delays, it was released on 6 May 2016 by Boy Better Know. The album was launched with a party in Tokyo on 5 May 2016 arranged and broadcast globally by live streaming platform Boiler Room, featuring Skepta performing the whole album live with supporting performances from Japanese artists Kohh, Dutch Montana, Loota, and DJ Riki.
The album was supported by four singles, including the top 40 entries "That's Not Me", "Shutdown" and "Man". Konnichiwa features guest appearances from Jme, Boy Better Know, D Double E, Novelist, Wiley, Chip, Pharrell Williams, ASAP Nast Young Lord. The album has peaked at number 2 on the UK Albums Chart. The album has also charted in Australia, Belgium, Netherlands, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and United States.
Konnichiwa received acclaim from critics, who praised its role and success in the resurgence of grime music and its cultural identity. Additionally, it was included in numerous end-of-year lists for best albums of 2016 by many publications, including NME, The Guardian and Apple Music, who named the album as the best of 2016. Konnichiwa also received numerous accolades, such as winning the 2016 Mercury Prize.
Background
In 2012, Skepta released two singles planned in promotion for his forthcoming fourth album – "Hold On" and "Make Peace Not War". Both were Top 40 charting singles in the UK but were a departure from Skepta's usual sound. Skepta's fourth album was intended to be released in the fourth quarter of 2011, entitled The Honeymoon, but was delayed till 2012. After a disappointing response from the first two singles Skepta decided to release a purchasable mixtape, titled Blacklisted. It was released on 2 December 2012 along with music videos to support the release prior to the release. The Honeymoon project was ultimately scrapped and replaced by the working title Konnichiwa, while also parting ways with his label 3 Beat and seeking the production and release of the album independently.
Konnichiwa was originally announced in early 2013, yet suffered from numerous delays and reworking. It was initially supported by the single "Lay Her Down" featuring Kano, along with a release date of late 2013. However, after announcing near-completion the single and release was scrapped and Skepta took another approach to the album campaign. It was announced by Skepta to be released in 2014, stating that he completed nine songs and required six more to be finished. In November 2014, Skepta stated that Konnichiwa was to be released in March 2015, however this release date was delayed once again. In April 2016, Skepta restarted the album campaign by announcing the finalised release date.
Conception and recording
Pharrell Williams worked with Skepta on the album.
In an interview with BBC Radio 1Xtra's DJ Semtex, Skepta talked about the emotions behind recording his album to his relationship with Canadian rapper Drake, he revealed that he didn't know how the rapper found out about him, "I can’t tell how he heard of me. I will never know, but I’ll put my money on him finding me online and searching for my music because that's what he's like – he's a music lover. For me, it was a blessing that he was co-signing me and bigging me up, because I’m still gonna do what I’m gonna do anyway," he continued. "I’m just blessed to have them man supporting. My album came out on the 6th when I was in Toronto and it's like home. The way they’ve got me out there is mad."
Skepta explained that he considered his album to be like "a movie", "Konnichiwa is a classic, The album delayed for kick drums. To put it out was a definite happy point." He also talked about dealing with his critics in the grime scene, "I'm out for revenge, fam, I come into this ting pure-hearted and loving music, and people take me for an idiot, you get what I'm saying? So when I spit now people are gonna hear a madman, they're gonna hear a monster, they're gonna hear someone who's out for revenge - and I'm out for revenge". Skepta stated that music would "represent the country" (Britain).
Konnichiwa was executively produced by Skepta himself, who produced all but three songs on the album. During the production stages Skepta used mostly an old-school toolkit, drum and bass sounds and the odd twinkling piano riff or brass volley. Speaking about his choice to produce the album and use the latter tools Skepta stated “I want anybody from around the world to be able to listen to the album and know it comes from London.” One producer who Skepta did work with was singer Pharrell. Skepta described their studio time and their musical relationship like working with "someone I’ve known all my life, and we’re both there to make the sickest track that we can.”
Release and promotion
Skepta at the Festival Internacional de Benicàssim 2016
After numerous delays, it was released on 6 May 2016 by Boy Better Know. The album was launched with a party in Tokyo on 5 May 2016 arranged and broadcast globally by live streaming platform Boiler Room, featuring Skepta performing the whole album live with supporting performances from Japanese artists Kohh, Dutch Montana, Loota, and DJ Riki.
Skepta began his "Banned From America" two-part, 14-show tour on April 16, 2017 at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which will cover cities throughout the United States and Europe. The tour was named as such in reference to Skepta's forced cancellation of his 2016 "No Fear" American tour in support of Konnichiwa, when his application for a visa to enter the United States was denied.
User Album Review
It features five singles – two of them silver-certified hits – guest appearances from A$AP Mob’s Young Lord and A$AP Nast and a collaboration with Pharrell Williams, but the most telling track on Skepta’s fourth album might well be one that contains no music at all. As a tense bit of old-fashioned grime called Corn on the Curb unexpectedly ends – Skepta apparently forgetting the lyrics midway through a line, the sparse musical backing grinding to a halt – it’s replaced by the sound of a phone call between Skepta and fellow rapper Chip. The former sounds despondent, which comes as something of a surprise.
After all, Skepta is credited as an architect of grime’s astonishing commercial resurgence in the UK, helping shift it from a genre so underground that its artists could apparently only gain wider recognition if they gave up making it altogether and threw in their lot with straightforward pop music, to its current exalted position where grime MCs are stars, capable of gatecrashing the charts without the aid of the mainstream music industry: “No label, no PR, no publisher, no manager, no PA, no stylist,” as the Twitter bio of Skepta’s brother JME proudly boasts. At the time of writing, Konnichiwa is battling it out with Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool to unseat Beyoncé from the top of the album charts, while its author is potentially teetering on the brink of even bigger things overseas: Drake, for one, appears to be intent on furthering his career in the US, curiously announcing that he’s signing to Skepta’s indie label Boy Better Know, showing off his recently inked tattoo of the label’s initials and posting a photo of himself waving a copy of Konnichiwa at the camera on Instagram.
All this appears to have brought its share of problems for Skepta. “Mad pressures from every angle,” he disconsolately mutters on the phone to Chip. “I’m too ambitious to be with the mandem on the road but I can’t be up there with them people, either – I’m too black. I feel like I’m in limbo.”
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Chip is having none of it. “You’re going mad, fam,” he reassures him. “We ain’t seen nothing like this before.” But the sense of an artist poised between two worlds haunts Konnichiwa. At one extreme, there are songs that clearly look towards the US market – traditionally resistant to UK rappers – not least the R&B-based Ladies Hit Squad, which debuted on Drake’s OVO Sound Radio Show, and the Pharrell-produced Numbers. At the other, there is a great deal of musical and lyrical underlining of Skepta’s commitment to the grime scene, a lot of it placed at the start of the album: the opening tracks are a thrillingly unreconstructed splurge of choppy rhythms, low-rent electronics and pummelling bass.
Lyrics opens with the sound of Wiley pleading for calm during what seems to have been an extremely lively night at Watford’s Destiny nightclub in 2001. The same rapper’s 2004 single Pies forms the basis of That’s Not Me, while his verse on Corn on the Curb goes back even further into the history of UK bass music, mentioning drum’n’bass MCs Skibadee, Bassman and Trigga. The lyrics are packed with reflections on grime’s early days – the look of old videos, quotations from Dizzee Rascal lyrics, reminiscences about appearances at raves – and assurances that, at root, nothing has changed: “Boy better know a man went to the Brits on a train,” he says on title track. “Man shut down Wireless and then I walked home in the rain.”
Even his most virulent braggadocio is underscored by a very winning, very British kind of bathos
You can understand why Skepta feels duty-bound to reassure the world he’s not planning on jumping on any passing bandwagons: before the career rethink heralded by his soul-searching 2012 mixtape Blacklisted and cemented by his back-to-basics 2014 single That’s Not Me, Skepta spent four years gamely releasing pop-rap singles of varying degrees of cheesiness, with varying degrees of success. But on the basis of Konnichiwa, any uneasiness he feels about his current artistic position is unfounded: for a man apparently in limbo – and for all the complaints about his workload he relates on Text Me Back – he carries himself with a real confidence throughout. The straightforward grime tracks are uniformly great: they reach twin pinnacles on Crime Riddim’s constantly shifting, claustrophobic backdrop of clanks and martial horn blasts, and Man, shot through with a wailing, shivering guitar sample. Moreover, he never sounds cowed in the presence of his US counterparts. Listening to Numbers, it seems that Pharrell might be trying hard to fit in with Skepta’s artistic vision rather than vice-versa: his music is sparse and menacing, and he gamely joins in with the lyrical jabs at major labels, tactfully forgetting that he’s signed to that legendary bastion of redoubtable indie ethics, Sony.
For all that the album self-evidently has one eye fixed on the States, you never get the sense of an artist subjugating his own personality to succeed abroad. It’s not just that the lyrics throughout are dextrous and sharp and funny, although they are. It’s that even his most virulent braggadocio is underscored by a very winning, very British kind of bathos. Held in custody on Crime Riddim, he becomes concerned by his desire to “spend a penny”; among the list of menaces detailed on Corn on the Curb lurks the threat to “shower man down like Fireman Sam”; and while enumerating his many bad-boy credentials, he brags that he sometimes smokes in no-smoking areas.
What Americans will make of it is an intriguing question: for all of Drake’s cheerleading, Azealia Banks’ recent outbursts on Twitter have underlined the kind of resistance grime faces in the US. Over here, it’s another story entirely, the ongoing plot of which Konnichiwa is clearly going to do nothing to alter. “I’ll bet I make you respect me when you see the mandem selling out Wembley,” Skepta snaps at one point. Given his current trajectory, you wouldn’t bet against that happening.
SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/12/skepta-konnichiwa-review-boy-better-know-album-of-the-week
External Album Reviews
None...
User Comments
Available in:
Konnichiwa is the fourth studio album by British grime artist Skepta. The title is the greeting "hello" in the Japanese language. After numerous delays, it was released on 6 May 2016 by Boy Better Know. The album was launched with a party in Tokyo on 5 May 2016 arranged and broadcast globally by live streaming platform Boiler Room, featuring Skepta performing the whole album live with supporting performances from Japanese artists Kohh, Dutch Montana, Loota, and DJ Riki.
The album was supported by four singles, including the top 40 entries "That's Not Me", "Shutdown" and "Man". Konnichiwa features guest appearances from Jme, Boy Better Know, D Double E, Novelist, Wiley, Chip, Pharrell Williams, ASAP Nast Young Lord. The album has peaked at number 2 on the UK Albums Chart. The album has also charted in Australia, Belgium, Netherlands, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and United States.
Konnichiwa received acclaim from critics, who praised its role and success in the resurgence of grime music and its cultural identity. Additionally, it was included in numerous end-of-year lists for best albums of 2016 by many publications, including NME, The Guardian and Apple Music, who named the album as the best of 2016. Konnichiwa also received numerous accolades, such as winning the 2016 Mercury Prize.
Background
In 2012, Skepta released two singles planned in promotion for his forthcoming fourth album – "Hold On" and "Make Peace Not War". Both were Top 40 charting singles in the UK but were a departure from Skepta's usual sound. Skepta's fourth album was intended to be released in the fourth quarter of 2011, entitled The Honeymoon, but was delayed till 2012. After a disappointing response from the first two singles Skepta decided to release a purchasable mixtape, titled Blacklisted. It was released on 2 December 2012 along with music videos to support the release prior to the release. The Honeymoon project was ultimately scrapped and replaced by the working title Konnichiwa, while also parting ways with his label 3 Beat and seeking the production and release of the album independently.
Konnichiwa was originally announced in early 2013, yet suffered from numerous delays and reworking. It was initially supported by the single "Lay Her Down" featuring Kano, along with a release date of late 2013. However, after announcing near-completion the single and release was scrapped and Skepta took another approach to the album campaign. It was announced by Skepta to be released in 2014, stating that he completed nine songs and required six more to be finished. In November 2014, Skepta stated that Konnichiwa was to be released in March 2015, however this release date was delayed once again. In April 2016, Skepta restarted the album campaign by announcing the finalised release date.
Conception and recording
Pharrell Williams worked with Skepta on the album.
In an interview with BBC Radio 1Xtra's DJ Semtex, Skepta talked about the emotions behind recording his album to his relationship with Canadian rapper Drake, he revealed that he didn't know how the rapper found out about him, "I can’t tell how he heard of me. I will never know, but I’ll put my money on him finding me online and searching for my music because that's what he's like – he's a music lover. For me, it was a blessing that he was co-signing me and bigging me up, because I’m still gonna do what I’m gonna do anyway," he continued. "I’m just blessed to have them man supporting. My album came out on the 6th when I was in Toronto and it's like home. The way they’ve got me out there is mad."
Skepta explained that he considered his album to be like "a movie", "Konnichiwa is a classic, The album delayed for kick drums. To put it out was a definite happy point." He also talked about dealing with his critics in the grime scene, "I'm out for revenge, fam, I come into this ting pure-hearted and loving music, and people take me for an idiot, you get what I'm saying? So when I spit now people are gonna hear a madman, they're gonna hear a monster, they're gonna hear someone who's out for revenge - and I'm out for revenge". Skepta stated that music would "represent the country" (Britain).
Konnichiwa was executively produced by Skepta himself, who produced all but three songs on the album. During the production stages Skepta used mostly an old-school toolkit, drum and bass sounds and the odd twinkling piano riff or brass volley. Speaking about his choice to produce the album and use the latter tools Skepta stated “I want anybody from around the world to be able to listen to the album and know it comes from London.” One producer who Skepta did work with was singer Pharrell. Skepta described their studio time and their musical relationship like working with "someone I’ve known all my life, and we’re both there to make the sickest track that we can.”
Release and promotion
Skepta at the Festival Internacional de Benicàssim 2016
After numerous delays, it was released on 6 May 2016 by Boy Better Know. The album was launched with a party in Tokyo on 5 May 2016 arranged and broadcast globally by live streaming platform Boiler Room, featuring Skepta performing the whole album live with supporting performances from Japanese artists Kohh, Dutch Montana, Loota, and DJ Riki.
Skepta began his "Banned From America" two-part, 14-show tour on April 16, 2017 at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which will cover cities throughout the United States and Europe. The tour was named as such in reference to Skepta's forced cancellation of his 2016 "No Fear" American tour in support of Konnichiwa, when his application for a visa to enter the United States was denied.
User Album Review
It features five singles – two of them silver-certified hits – guest appearances from A$AP Mob’s Young Lord and A$AP Nast and a collaboration with Pharrell Williams, but the most telling track on Skepta’s fourth album might well be one that contains no music at all. As a tense bit of old-fashioned grime called Corn on the Curb unexpectedly ends – Skepta apparently forgetting the lyrics midway through a line, the sparse musical backing grinding to a halt – it’s replaced by the sound of a phone call between Skepta and fellow rapper Chip. The former sounds despondent, which comes as something of a surprise.
After all, Skepta is credited as an architect of grime’s astonishing commercial resurgence in the UK, helping shift it from a genre so underground that its artists could apparently only gain wider recognition if they gave up making it altogether and threw in their lot with straightforward pop music, to its current exalted position where grime MCs are stars, capable of gatecrashing the charts without the aid of the mainstream music industry: “No label, no PR, no publisher, no manager, no PA, no stylist,” as the Twitter bio of Skepta’s brother JME proudly boasts. At the time of writing, Konnichiwa is battling it out with Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool to unseat Beyoncé from the top of the album charts, while its author is potentially teetering on the brink of even bigger things overseas: Drake, for one, appears to be intent on furthering his career in the US, curiously announcing that he’s signing to Skepta’s indie label Boy Better Know, showing off his recently inked tattoo of the label’s initials and posting a photo of himself waving a copy of Konnichiwa at the camera on Instagram.
All this appears to have brought its share of problems for Skepta. “Mad pressures from every angle,” he disconsolately mutters on the phone to Chip. “I’m too ambitious to be with the mandem on the road but I can’t be up there with them people, either – I’m too black. I feel like I’m in limbo.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Chip is having none of it. “You’re going mad, fam,” he reassures him. “We ain’t seen nothing like this before.” But the sense of an artist poised between two worlds haunts Konnichiwa. At one extreme, there are songs that clearly look towards the US market – traditionally resistant to UK rappers – not least the R&B-based Ladies Hit Squad, which debuted on Drake’s OVO Sound Radio Show, and the Pharrell-produced Numbers. At the other, there is a great deal of musical and lyrical underlining of Skepta’s commitment to the grime scene, a lot of it placed at the start of the album: the opening tracks are a thrillingly unreconstructed splurge of choppy rhythms, low-rent electronics and pummelling bass.
Lyrics opens with the sound of Wiley pleading for calm during what seems to have been an extremely lively night at Watford’s Destiny nightclub in 2001. The same rapper’s 2004 single Pies forms the basis of That’s Not Me, while his verse on Corn on the Curb goes back even further into the history of UK bass music, mentioning drum’n’bass MCs Skibadee, Bassman and Trigga. The lyrics are packed with reflections on grime’s early days – the look of old videos, quotations from Dizzee Rascal lyrics, reminiscences about appearances at raves – and assurances that, at root, nothing has changed: “Boy better know a man went to the Brits on a train,” he says on title track. “Man shut down Wireless and then I walked home in the rain.”
Even his most virulent braggadocio is underscored by a very winning, very British kind of bathos
You can understand why Skepta feels duty-bound to reassure the world he’s not planning on jumping on any passing bandwagons: before the career rethink heralded by his soul-searching 2012 mixtape Blacklisted and cemented by his back-to-basics 2014 single That’s Not Me, Skepta spent four years gamely releasing pop-rap singles of varying degrees of cheesiness, with varying degrees of success. But on the basis of Konnichiwa, any uneasiness he feels about his current artistic position is unfounded: for a man apparently in limbo – and for all the complaints about his workload he relates on Text Me Back – he carries himself with a real confidence throughout. The straightforward grime tracks are uniformly great: they reach twin pinnacles on Crime Riddim’s constantly shifting, claustrophobic backdrop of clanks and martial horn blasts, and Man, shot through with a wailing, shivering guitar sample. Moreover, he never sounds cowed in the presence of his US counterparts. Listening to Numbers, it seems that Pharrell might be trying hard to fit in with Skepta’s artistic vision rather than vice-versa: his music is sparse and menacing, and he gamely joins in with the lyrical jabs at major labels, tactfully forgetting that he’s signed to that legendary bastion of redoubtable indie ethics, Sony.
For all that the album self-evidently has one eye fixed on the States, you never get the sense of an artist subjugating his own personality to succeed abroad. It’s not just that the lyrics throughout are dextrous and sharp and funny, although they are. It’s that even his most virulent braggadocio is underscored by a very winning, very British kind of bathos. Held in custody on Crime Riddim, he becomes concerned by his desire to “spend a penny”; among the list of menaces detailed on Corn on the Curb lurks the threat to “shower man down like Fireman Sam”; and while enumerating his many bad-boy credentials, he brags that he sometimes smokes in no-smoking areas.
What Americans will make of it is an intriguing question: for all of Drake’s cheerleading, Azealia Banks’ recent outbursts on Twitter have underlined the kind of resistance grime faces in the US. Over here, it’s another story entirely, the ongoing plot of which Konnichiwa is clearly going to do nothing to alter. “I’ll bet I make you respect me when you see the mandem selling out Wembley,” Skepta snaps at one point. Given his current trajectory, you wouldn’t bet against that happening.
SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/12/skepta-konnichiwa-review-boy-better-know-album-of-the-week
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