Hometown: West London.
The lineup: Twizzle (vocals).
The background: From Giggs to the Gallaghers, we journalists love a bit of rough, and so Twizzle was always going to be featured here, irrespective of his gifts as a wordsmith and musician. Like the aforementioned south London rapper, Twizzle, from White City, has done time, having been locked up, at 16, in a juvenile facility on drug charges. Now 18, he doesn't want to make a song and dance out of it. Well, a song maybe. "I don't do postcode wars," he claims. "It's stupidness. People wanna be bad boys. I've spent a lot of time in Jamaica. That's where the real bad boys are. People younger than 17 that have killed 10 people. I'm not gonna rap about guns."
Hmm. Fighting – or rather, no-fighting – talk. But he doesn't exactly tear up the plans and invent a whole new lexicon or radical strategy for delivering his messages as far as we can tell. On LDN Sign there he is, spitting of his haters "fuck 'em" and encouraging fellow Londoners to announce their rough inner-city credentials in a manner that could perhaps be described as provocative verging on incendiary. Later on the same track he brags about making money and chicks idolising him "like a young Mick Jagger" – highly familiar rap boasts. No guns, though, to be fair. On Can't Be Life he insists his drug days and stints in chokey are behind him, but again, it all feels strikingly familiar, recalling the litany of woe over an old orchestral soul sample like that on Ghostface Killah's brilliant All That I Got Is You, only the soul sample in this instance isn't the Jackson 5's Maybe Tomorrow but Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' I Miss You featuring the recently deceased Teddy Pendergrass. "I'm so fly I could probably kick a cloud," is the best line, but like many UK attempts at gritty, verite rap, there is an unfortunate, inadvertent comic quality to it.
They might share a pair of "z"s, but the difference between Twizzle and someone like Dizzee is vast. Hold on: there isn't anyone like Dizzee. Twizzle, by contrast, sounds utterly ordinary. You hear these so-called street innovators talked up as the next stage in the development of hip-hop/grime and then they open their mouths and it's the usual macho braggadocio or self-pitying dirges set in the same predictable druggy, underclass milieu. And there is no attempt to do interesting things vis a vis flow: Dizzee broke his up as viciously as he did the music, to the point where a track like I Luv You was like a work of splintered, geometric, cubist art. "Girls girls girls, I wanna love every one of them," Twizzle Auto-intones on Skinny Jeans, straight-up urban/pop R&B a la his closest US competitor, Drake (he actually wants to be seen as a latterday Slick Rick – dream on). It might not be fashionable to say this but if a white rocker sang these words he'd be laughed out of the music industry. Why do we accept these double standards? Answers to the usual address.
The buzz: "Twizzle is THE urban artist to look out for in 2010."
The truth: Twizzle is a swizzle.
Most likely to: Lose his tempah when he reads this.
Least likely to: Join a reformed Blue Notes.
What to buy: The single Skydiving is released by Squarepeg on 22 February.
File next to: Tinchy Stryder, Tinie Tempah, Chipmunk, Drake.
Links: myspace.com/twizzlesg
Tomorrow's new band: Holly Miranda.
