“Please don’t attempt to save my soul,” Plan B broods in the final minutes of Ill Manors. Fed up of trying to mask over the memories of his ‘darker days’, he’s just asked God to allow him to hit rock bottom. That way, he figures, nobody can knock him down.
Over the previous 41 minutes or so, he’s taken us on a harrowing guided tour of what he calls ‘David Cameron’s broken Britain’. We listened intently as a ‘racist cunt’ took a razor blade to a nine-year-old’s face, while the child’s mum was upstairs having sex with a stranger to fund her heroin habit. We witnessed a violent beating and a vomit-peppered stabbing, and watched an Eastern European prostitute breastfeed her baby while getting ‘fucked in a field from behind.’ You can see why, at the end of it all, Benjamin Ballance-Drew is on his knees, mostly because you’re there too, desperately trying to shake those excruciating mental images out of your skull.
When the ride’s this disturbing, it’s tough to think of Ill Manors as an album at all. After all, isn’t an album something you pop on to perk up the dreary trek to work?
Officially, Ill Manors is the soundtrack to Plan B’s directorial debut, the gruesome inner city drama of the same name, but it doesn’t tell exactly the same story – some of the recordings were completed after the release of the film.
I think I’ve amply illustrated that this is astonishingly heavy stuff. Of course, The Defamation Of Strickland Banks contained heavy stuff too, but that particular fable, the story of a shady rape trial that brought about the public ruin of a superstar, was neatly wrapped up in irresistible retro soul hooks and booty-shaking horn breaks. No-one walked away feeling like they’d just been caught up in an uncensored rendering of the Nine O’Clock News, and it sold a million copies.
The material on Ill Manors, on the other hand, is not tidily glossed over, lyrically or sonically. A partial return to the pared-down, obscenity-strewn rap on his 2006 debut Who Needs Actions When You Got Words?, it’s largely built around B’s sharply-delivered urban anecdotes, its ghastly tales spotlighted by orchestral loops and stark hip hop beats.
Scene-setter ‘I Am The Narrator’ samples Camille Saint-Saëns’ ‘Aquarium’, better known as the Disney movement, a contradiction that’s clearly not lost on Plan B as he spits, “bitches sucking cocks for them rocks, yeah, they real low.” Chase & Status cohort Takura Tendayi adds a reggae sway to ‘Drug Dealer’, offset by some swooping strings and chugging beats, while ‘Pity The Plight’ is beefed up with some severe key-tinkling and a verse from rock poet John Cooper Clarke.
Crooning sensation Strickland Banks makes a brief return on ‘Deepest Shame’, while the impassioned spiritual on ‘Lost My Way’ almost obscures the song’s corrosive message with its catchiness… almost.
It’s funny to think that in prettier circumstances, Ill Manors could have afforded its radical creator a Purple Rain moment; a simultaneous number one album, single and film, the ultimate testament of pop culture supremacy.
Given that its ten tracks are laced with words like ‘cunt’, and the fact that its all-seeing narrator makes Eminem look like a panda bear’s pussy, commercial success probably isn’t on the cards for the most vivid and insightful record UK rap has ever produced.
It’s small consolation that those who do hear it will almost certainly be bowled over by its grittiness and potency. Whether they’ll have it in their ears during their morning jog is another matter entirely.
My best guess is that Plan B’s twisted piece of social commentary won’t make many iTunes ‘most-played’ lists, but that’s okay. Repeated listens aren’t really necessary here. A record like Ill Manors stays with you…