- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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It is an album that can be loved as both an achievement and an experience, a document and a revelation; it is simultaneously a problem to be solved and a spectacle to simply witness.
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Corner's gutter low ends, amphetamine drum programming, and Dizzee's cockney slang-spitting place this record among rap's paradigmatic moments.
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UncutThe best rapper this country's ever produced, period.... Next to Dizzee Rascal everybody looks pale, uninteresting and irrelevant. [Sep 2003, p.98]
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MojoBrilliantly original. [Aug 2003, p.106]
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The most original and exciting artist to emerge from dance music in a decade.
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Most of Boy in Da Corner's most compelling moments come from this uneasy interaction between irrational youth and ultra-rational mechanized society.
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Dizzee's despairing wail, focused anger, and cutting sonics places him on the front lines in the battle against a stultifying Britain, just as Pete Townshend, Johnny Rotten, and Morrissey have been in the past.
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It's as gripping as N.W.A.'s groundbreaking Straight Outta Compton.
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His adolescent gulps and yowls are street-Brit with a Jamaican liquidity, as lean, eccentric, and arresting as the beats.
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SpinThe flow is straight-up alien: chilled-out and frantic at the same time, slightly breathless. [Feb 2004, p.95]
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It all makes for a bleak spread, but Rascal rises up as a singular musical presence too brimming and perceptive to let the coarse world around him pass by untouched.
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One of the most assured debut albums of the last five years.
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If Boy In Da Corner marks the beginning of distinctly British hip-hop, the genre's standards are already impressively high.
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Boy in da Corner defies genre in a defiant manner, refusing to be defined, refusing, even, to be dismissed.
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Startling, tirelessly powerful, and full of unlimited dimensions.
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When Dizzee thinks very deeply--worrying about growing up, about those around him who won't grow up, about dying before he grows up--he sounds like, what else can we call it, the real thing.
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Los Angeles TimesA dance syncretism made of menacing beats skittering from dark dancehall to mashed-up jungle, super-warped bass frequencies, stark anti-hooks, and a voice that is the most authentic to emerge in years. [18 Jan 2004]
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One of the most refreshing hip-hop records in quite some time.
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BlenderHis hard-edged, dance-inflected debut makes East London sound like the new Dirty South. [Jan 2004, p.108]
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He hasn’t made a great album, but even Tupac never managed that; the bombed-out landscape of Boy In Da Corner burns instead with all the anger, confusion and messed-up desperation of youth.
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On a level of pure listening enjoyment, Boy In Da Corner isn't quite an Original Pirate Material; but it does succeed in establishing that Dizzee Rascal deserves a place right at the forefront of the UK Urban movement.
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Adventurous listeners are in for a treat.
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Delivering his lyrics in a breathless barrage, 'Boy In Da Corner' packs the energy flash of London MCing into its grooves and for that alone it deserves attention.
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If you want a vision of the future of hip-hop and techno, get this record.
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Entertainment WeeklyOne of the strangest, bumpiest musical journeys we're likely to experience on record this year. [16 Jan 2004, p.68]
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Q Magazine[A] strikingly stark and innovative debut. [Sep 2003, p.102]
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Not much here is too likely to blow up on the airwaves... it's too dirty, too ugly, too hard, and too Real.
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UrbDizzee's production style is impressive.... His flow is urgent and coherent. [Mar 2004, p.109]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 169 out of 193
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Mixed: 9 out of 193
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Negative: 15 out of 193
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Jan 26, 2012
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GiovanniOAug 17, 2006
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MattPSep 5, 2005May be the most refreshing debut album of the new millenium.