"It's Time" - DJ SLADEMAN

Watching this was a very strange experience. Mastered to piercing levels that would make chimpanzees recoil in primal fear, the beat kicks in with a sparse and perfectly tuned break -- along with a great horn sample they proceed to never really do much with. British rappers baffle me as much as they entertain me, and sure enough, all I really caught from the first verse was the fact he's happy to just bite Nas outright, like S. Carter casually "quotes" B. Smalls throughout his post-Doubt catalog.

Which is fine: people know what they like because they like what they know. This is all good business.

The hook / chorus is a pop abortion. I can't put it more charitably than that. For the target audience of London rap hooligans and their birds, though, good business. I'm less certain about the economic effects of all those iPad shots -- they could be iconic but they're just corny. Again, this might be a culture gap thing.

Reks kills it, of course Reks kills it. That is why people pay Reks to kill it on their projects, after all.

The cat who comes on after him suffers by comparison, but I also tend to think he would be unimpressive in any context, even a parking lot cipher. His whole gestalt is a lot like Termanology, but with single syllable rhymes and slightly more predictable "punchlines" & "wordplay." These are terms that get abused a lot and I'm part of the problem. Still, dude is a nothingburger, a food additive to justify that crucial third hook. Good business.