How we laughed. Fifteen months ago it was all so funny. Tracksuited Welsh rappers with song titles such as ‘Your Mother’s Got A Penis’. It was like a sketch straight out of Little Britain. The obligatory album was released, GLC lit up the festival circuit, and with their 15 minutes supposedly nearing an end that, we had expected, would be that. Not quite.
In Safe As Fuck the GLC have returned with an album that offers food for thought – they may deserve more credit than the novelty act tag we’d afforded them. Where debut Greatest Hits relied heavily on toilet humour, Safe As Fuck shifts the focus onto the production side. Sure, this is a record filled with songs about shagging, masturbating and getting stoned – but such anecdotes are carried by an ingenious choice of samples. For example, ‘Charmschool’ sees Adam Hussein outlining his pulling tips over the theme tune to Grange Hill, while the Mike Skinner influenced ‘Paranoia’ uses a sample from Christmas favourite ‘Walking In The Air’ to document the experience of walking down the street with a bag full of pills whilst trying to avoid the police.
It’s ‘Hit Song’ though, a pisstake of Eminem, that makes the most sense of GLC. A hip-hop collective for sure, they’re little different to the likes of 50 Cent, G-Unit or Marshall Mathers. Each possesses a novelty value when you boil it down. GLC are simply rapping about their world, a world which doesn’t include guns or the hood. Thus, in its odd way, Safe As Fuck manages to humorously encapsulate everything about modern Britain and chav culture, from hard drinking women (‘Your Missus Is A Nutter’) to the claims culture (‘Bad Boy Limp’).
Not a masterpiece, and by no means a record for everyone, it nonetheless stands up on its own merits. Safe As Fuck is better than we may have expected.