Spare a thought, if you will, for the black British rapper looking to forge a long-term career in the genre. There must be a way to do it, but the list of precedents doesn’t fill you with hope. From the drum’n’bass pioneers Shut Up & Dance in the early 1990s to Miss Dynamite a decade later, the same problem rears its head time and again. Between the rock of underground respect and the hard place of commercial success, it’s notoriously difficult to find a niche.

After winning the Mercury Prize for his 2003 debut, Boy in da Corner, Dizzee Rascal was bullish about overcoming the award’s famed “curse”. But for a brief period after the release of his second album, Showtime, you couldn’t help but worry. It wasn’t just that his two lines in the rerecorded Do They Know It’s Christmas suited the song as well as a sausage in a synagogue. If his cameo smacked of token-ism, the fortunes of his next single seemed to suffer as a result. Though not available on any album, Off 2 Work barely charted.

Two years on, one suspects that the tally of hits is unlikely to improve when the 21-year-old East Ender’s next single is released. This time around though, it has less to do with the song – a superb piece of unreconstructed hip-hop invective built around a sampled burst of machine funk – than the fact that it answers to the name of Pussy ’Ole.

Still, the rest of Dizzee Rascal’s third album reveals that he can afford to throw away a hit or two. The grimy electro-pop euphoria of Flex sounds as classic yet totally other as Prince’s Kiss did when it first appeared.

Having been asked by Arctic Monkeys to guest on Temptation Greets You Like Your Naughty Friend, the B-side of Brianstorm, Dizzee audaciously samples Alex Turner’s vocal on the Aside for his own Temptation. Away from his band’s cavernous clatter Turner’s voice arrests Dizzee’s scattergun metre with a chorus that lends the song a digitised roots-reggae lilt.

By enlisting the odd Alist turn – Lily Allen sounds great on the Bugsy Malone-inspired Wanna Be – it may, from a distance, seem as if Dizzee Rascal’s appetite for the crossover hasn’t dissipated. But that shouldn’t detract from the proliferation of strange, brave excursions on Maths & English: the distorted power chords and slow, low Rick Rubin-style beats on the autobiographical reportage of Sirens; and the febrile confessional of Paranoid.

On World Outside, he has the tender air of a man turning to look at his younger self from the other end of a telescope – perhaps not so remarkable in itself except for the fact that, Missy Elliot’s On and On notwithstanding, no rapper has ever seen fit to do it over what sounds suspiciously like an ethereal Gary Numan sound check.

In this, the album’s opening track, you learn as much about Dizzee Rascal as you do on everything that follows. His new chum Alex Turner may have found courage in the camaraderie of a band, but Dizzee Rascal seems to need only his instincts. So much, then, for the Curse of the Mercury. What odds on him being the first to win it for a second time?

(XL)

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