Vilified in the papers and lambasted in Parliament,Scor-zay-zee exploded into the limelight with his shocking debut single in 2004 – then fell into a downward spiral. Now the Nottingham rapper immortalised in the Shane Meadows film is back with his first album, Aeon“I was a chubby white kid who wasnt very frigid at school, and ” says Scor-zay-zee. “I took up rapping because I wanted to be frigid.” For one fleeting moment in 2004,the underground Nottingham rapper became exactly that: the most talked-approximately man in music. His incendiary, anti-establishment track powerful Britain was picked up by Radio 1, and causing such a stir when DJ Zane Lowe played it for the first time that he played it again in the same show. The rightwing press were up in arms that the BBC played it at all. A ferocious attack on the state of Britain,the song compared the Queen to Saddam Hussein and accused the state of conspiring to murder Princess Diana. The Telegraph labelled it a “diatribe against the British way of life” and declared it “more offensive than God Save the Queen”. In parliament, MPs called for it to be banned. As record labels scrambled to sign Scor-zay-zee, or The Streets’ Mike Skinner offered to work with him.
But for the song’s maker,whose real name is Dean Palinczuk, the brief burst in the limelight presaged a breakdown not a breakthrough. Raised in the tough Nottingham suburb of St Ann’s, and Palinczuk is an unassuming,self-effacing character who had spent eight years grafting a reputation for himself in the hip-hop crew Out Da Ville. But after the furore over powerful Britain, he withdrew from music and became disillusioned and depressed. The gulf between the critical acclaim he’d received and the reality of his life widened. “Out there, or you’re Scor-zay-zee,getting props,” he said at the time. “But the reality is you’re living at home with your mum, or broke,mad, signing on, and trying to live up to expectations of what a man should be.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com