Dizzee Rascal
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Dizzee Rascal

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“The whole thing with this record is that it’s geared towards live audiences,” he explains. “The earlier stuff didn’t have a lot for the crowd to latch onto in terms of hooks and the rest of it, it was just me rapping away, so this time, I really wanted to give people something. I challenged myself to bring those big hooks in and make it work.”

On his newfound musical direction, Dizzee has said that if his last record, Tongue n’ Cheek, represented him dipping a toe into the swimming pool of happiness, then The Fifth is him diving in and going for a swim. I ask him what brought about this new way of thinking and he says, simply, that he’s arrived at a point in life where he appreciates the benefits of happiness and positivity. “I want to see people smiling and jumping around and having the time of their lives at my shows,” he says. “I want music that facilitates that. I want to make people feel good. I want to make classics. I want people to put my music on when they have a celebration. That’s how I want to be remembered.”

The Fifth was made in Los Angeles, and the atmosphere of the city – itself undergoing something of a hip hop resurgence at the moment – contributed greatly to the sound of the album. “I’ve been coming to LA for years,” Dizzee explains, “it’s actually the first place I went when I came to America back in 2003, but I’ve never made music here before this album. It’s always been my favourite American city, even ahead of Miami. This time around, I decided to come out here and do the pop star thing – I worked with some big people in some big studios, and I just had a laugh. It’s funny to be waking up in hotels, every day is sunny, going to the studio all day … There are so many people here. You can go to a studio here and anyone can be next door. You’ll be walking the halls and bump into Tyga or Chris Brown.”

Across a decade-long career Dizzee has always determinedly produced his own material, but when making The Fifth, he decided to try a new approach, entrusting production duties to his various collaborators so he could focus on song writing instead.  Pop heavyweight RedOne contributed, along with R&B star Baptiste, and many more. “The production side of me was still there, because I picked the beats, and I worked on the arrangements,” Dizzee continues. “The way things fit together on the album isn’t necessarily the way they fit together when I was first presented with the beats. When you have to build a beat then write to it, your thought process is different, so I liked that I started out working with smashing pop hooks for this one.”

Dance and hip hop are changing and evolving all the time, and on that front, Dizzee considers it a part of his job to always be on top of the newest sounds and the newest beats. “That’s especially true when it comes to hip hop,” he says. “My heart’s still there, it’s still the core of what I do, so I wake up every morning and look all over the internet for new shit, from the mainstream as well as the underground. I also listen to a lot of club music – it’s not necessarily my main thing, but I hear a lot of it about, and I’m always curious about why and how people respond to different beats. It’s about finding out what stimulates people, and then trying to find a balance, putting that into my own music.”

BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN