Lady Sovereign's Jigsaw: Keep Grime Grimy

by John McCurdy

Eww...you’ve gotten my grime all clean, Lady Sovereign.

I liked it the way it was: ridiculously disrespectful, horribly dissonant, and refreshingly genuine.

With her second full-length release, British lady rapper Lady Sovereign seems to have relinquished her title as “Biggest Midget in the Game,” though not because she’s grown any in the physical sense, mind you.

No, the reason she can no longer hold that moniker is that she’s not a part of “the game” anymore. Her second full-length release, Jigsaw, is a straight-up pop album (albeit a tolerable one), and not at all true to her London-style rap roots.

See, her first offering, Public Warning, told listeners to, ahem, “screw” themselves if they didn’t like her. Various tracks suggested haters give her “A Little Bit of Shh,” viciously made fun of other popular artists (“Tango”), and glorified attire banned at most clubs (“Hoodie”).

But on Jigsaw, Sovereign seems to have refocused herself; all of a sudden, she’s about marketability and trend-hopping rather than spitting what she really thinks. It’s not that the tracks aren’t enjoyable; it’s just that they aren’t her.

I’ll readily admit that “Pennies,” “Student Union,” and “I Got the Goods” are fun tracks, and that they might indeed have fit on Public Warning, but there, they would have been the softer tunes.

But here, they’re the hardest and closest approximations of grime, which is the genre of which I was sure Lady was a paragon. The rest of the album is well-produced, but you can’t tell me that “Let’s Be Mates,” “Guitar,” or, heaven forbid, the title track “Jigsaw” would have made the cut for a true British hardcore record.

I give her a pass for the sampling of the Cure’s “Close to Me” on “So Human,” as this is something we’ve seen other underground rappers from across the pond do with success.

But no way will I excuse the use of vocoder on “Pennies,” even if it’s minimal and the rest of the piece is solid. That’s just not something the Sov I know would do.

Maybe the change has something to do with her split from Def Jam Records; she’s now publishing under her own label, Midget Records. Still, wouldn’t that hint that Lady Sovereign has departed from the mainstream even more?

Her freshman offering was endearing because of her positively juvenile content and earnest irreverence; I mean, she was referencing the Mortal Kombat video game franchise, accusing a celebrity acquaintance of using too much fake tan, and boasting an entire track called “Random.”

But now she’s dropping pretty nondescript pop tunes, leaving me yearning for the sweaty, dirty...grimy sound of before.