The Ruby Kid – Maps EP

When I reviewed The Ruby Kid’s last effort, I remarked how: “It is intelligent AND heartfelt. It is of ‘the streets’ AND threatens to go beyond them. It commiserates in my troubles AND makes me glad to be alive.” Well, the same goes for his Maps EP, though it’s a very different beast to Winter In The City. That should be welcomed of course, as change is the only constant and all that.

Whereas WITC was recorded with a band – the Black Jacobins – Maps features a more conventional relationship between the emcee and his producer, Dan Angell. Daniel Randall (the Kid’s real name) is perhaps less verbose/more straight-talking, throws fewer obscure references at the listener/is more accessible, and is much more reflective/less polemical than previously. ‘Reflective’ is often a byword for being self-absorbed, being a navel-gazer, and – worst of all – being ’emo’. But that could never be the case with The Ruby Kid, because he couldn’t look inwards at himself without looking outwards at the wider world. That’s the beauty of dialectical materialism, folks.

In some ways, it’s ironic that The Ruby Kid has toned down his propagandising, right at the time when the class struggle is hotting up. But that’s not to say there’s no politics here; there’s much more than you’ll hear on almost any release this year. Opener All Hands On Deck begins with a sample from Matewan (a 1980s film about a miner rebellion in the US), before controversially but commonsensibly declaring that “We should live inside the palaces we lifted bricks to build”, and urging “grand scale larceny/Expropriate the rich”. Similarly, the wonderfully named Growing Up Is A Euphemism For Knowing Your Place is an anti-wage slavery anthem which features tour mate Al Baker, and the delightful lines “I’ll work if I have to/But never with an ethic”.

The Ruby Kid is repping those “on that next gen proletarian tip”

Other tracks – The Key, Hoxton Bounce – tackle the contradictions and paradoxes of the rap ‘scene’. In the latter, Randall critiques the oh-so-edginess of North London posers (“Within the beating heart of every new idea you’re drawn to/Is the remnants of a better one someone else had before you”). This hipper-than-thou-osity can’t last much longer though, because “Battle lines get drawn” and “You will need to pick a side in that”.

London features heavily on Maps, and Randall has probably spent a lot of time looking at them since his move to the capital a year ago. Like Hoxton Bounce and the title track, The Imagined Village also powerfully evokes the sense of a young man trying to find his place in the world, both geographically and socially.

Ends-Means is perhaps the standout track for me. An explosion of ideas around how we go about our “Charlie Darwin business” and survive in this world, it matches skillful delivery with some seriously scuzzy beats. Of course you know what the Kid’s talking about when he says: “To say that it can’t buy you love is mostly true enough/And having it won’t make you happy/But it’s tragic if you lack the stuff”.

All in all, this is a superb album from a modest but extremely accomplished twenty-three year old poet. Maybe this isn’t going to be the soundtrack to the struggles kicking off during this winter of such massive discontent, but it is definitely a great accompaniment. By repping those “on that next gen proletarian tip”, The Ruby Kid will surely win many new fans with this material, in these times. To quote a work I’m sure he’d approve of, “true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.” Word.

The Ruby Kid can be followed on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. His official website is here. The Maps EP launch party is on Saturday 11th December, at Ryan’s Bar, 181 Church Street, Stoke Newington, London. N16 0UL

Winter In The City EP

The Ruby Kid

I first encountered Daniel Randall – AKA The Ruby Kid – just after dawn in a Kent field last summer. I had my back to a line of police. They’d just invaded the edge of our protest camp – again – and they weren’t about to move, but then we weren’t going anywhere either. So the call went up for performers to keep us all entertained. This might all sound a bit weird, but I can’t really think of a better introduction to this young rapper, who faced cops as he spat about “starting modern slave revolts like Spartacus“. This six track EP follows his first release, 2008’s La Manif.

Art Versus Industry kicks things off with a lyrical description of the conflict between the profit impulse of corporations and the artistic drive to create authentic stuff. The Ruby Kid describes the failings of most commercial rap (“… how many different ways can you say ‘I’m good and you suck?’/How many different ways can you say that you’re popular with women?/How much can you embellish the obscene opulence with which you’re living?”). He then dissects the media’s obsession with meaningless labels and pigeonholing artists (“So I’m an Aesop Rock wannabe/Then I’m like Mike Skinner/Then although I rap I’m more like a folk protest singer/But I rock fake bling/So I get labelled as a chav/I’m all and none of this and a whole lot more on top of that”)

The title track deconstructs a snowbound day in Randall’s life, full of unironic social realism (“Wandered purposeless past boarded-up working men’s clubs/And fluffy St George’s cross dice in the window of some guy’s truck”) plus philosophical excitement at the joy that cold weather brings him (“The dialectic of frost and mist existed/Led to synthesis/And set opposites in conflict with rhyme to reconcile all the differences.”)

A La Recherche invokes Marcel Proust as Randall describes a weekend back in Nottingham, the city where he grew up, before moving to Sheffield. Over jazzy horns and piano, he references Jean-Paul Sartre and Hollyoaks in the space of a few seconds, and laments “…for a time before I knew what debt was/And working for a wage meant”. However, he bursts that balloon of escapism with a gloriously sharp definition of nostalgia.

East 6^th (Between 2^nd & 3^rd) sees Randall on another journey into the past. This time he’s retracing the footsteps of the early 20^th century New York Jewish migrants he’s descended from, and tries to hear echoes of “thousands of [his] forebears singing strike songs in Yiddish”, whilst looking for the things that inspired artists like Leonard Cohen.

March 25th, 1911 expands on this theme, with an intense, impassioned history lesson about what was – until 11^th September 2001 – the worst workplace disaster ever seen in New York City. Rather less well known than 9/11, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment worker ‘girls’ locked in the sweatshop, while the owners who’d locked them in escaped to the roof. When history is told well, it is vitally relevant to the here and now, and The Ruby Kid makes this very clear (“Cos I wish that I could see you now/Struggle together and we’d find a way through somehow/To all my sisters I know you’re still hurting now/You’ve got to respect the past to make the future ours”). The track then cuts to a moving and evocative performance by a female Randall, as she recites part of labour activist Rose Schneiderman’s post-blaze speech. Certain words – though they are nearly one hundred years old – seem very now (“The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred.”) With the music now gone and The Ruby Kid’s older relative going solo, she proclaims: “I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working class movement.” Extremely powerful stuff.

Finally, Labor’s Giant Step is where The Ruby Kid expands on his manifesto. If we hadn’t worked it out already, he likes “working mics, certain nights and the Minneapolis Teamsters strike”, while “scabs, bosses, most coppers and corporate invertebrates” should “feel nervousness”.

It’s almost embarrassing to be so positive about something I’m reviewing, but I’ve never had the pleasure of describing a work of art as complete as this before. It is intelligent AND heartfelt. It is of ‘the streets’ AND threatens to go beyond them. It commiserates in my troubles AND makes me glad to be alive.

The sheer volume of esoteric references dropped may well put some off – I must confess I’m yet to read Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? – but as we come face to face with global turmoil, many will no doubt be looking for wisdom beyond their television screens. At just twenty-one, maybe The Ruby Kid is coming of age at exactly the right time. This shit’s just getting started.

The Winter In The City EP can be bought for £5, from The Ruby Kid’s MySpace.