In 2008, Professor Green's father committed suicide. Last year, on the closing track of his début album Alive Till I'm Dead, the Hackney MC spoke about the situation, only to face public accusations from his stepmother that he was "cashing in" on his father's death. Now, on 'Read All About It', Pro Green has responded by issuing a 'Cleaning Out My Closet'-style airing of family business, and taken it to the top of the charts. (Professor Green talked to Radio 1 about the background to the record, here.)
'Read All About It' feels to me like the sort of record it'd be easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to, one way or another. On the one hand, it's easy to be impressed by the song's serious and earnest dealings with intense, difficult, and very real issues of the sort not addressed particularly often in chart-topping pop music. On the other, it'd be equally easy to dismiss the song as dull and hectoring - it's certainly not a lot of fun to listen to.
For me, the truth lies somewhere in between. Musically, 'Read All About It' ticks all the rap-power-ballad boxes: soaring strings; massive, martial drums; huge chorus, complete with a wordless, earwormy "oh-oh-OH" coda. The mood is one of intense, chest-beating grandiosity; despite the obvious 'Cleanin' Out My Closet' comparison, the mood is far more akin to Eminem's more recent 'Not Afraid' (Emeli Sandé even sings "I'm not afraid" on the hook). It fits the redemptive model we've already seen Brit rappers take to the top of the charts, in 'Written In The Stars' and, more recently, 'No Regrets'. Except, of course, that unlike those songs, Professor Green actually does have things to say; about his stepmother ("making it harder for me to see my father was the only thing you ever did for me"), his relationship with his father ("last thing I ever said to you was I hated you"), and the strain of living in the public eye ("my life just became yours to read and interpret"). Songs that sound like this usually turn out, on closer inspection, to be fairly empty, full of vague and vacuous cliché, making a lot of noise about nothing particularly coherent. The best thing about 'Read All About It' is that this actually isn't the case, that Professor Green is talking about specific, concrete things, rather than aiming for universality through well-worn platitudes and tropes.
For me, this is close to being a good record - I want to like it more than I do. The music is on such a bombastic autopilot, so constructed out of power-ballad sonic clichés; just a hint of subtlety, something interesting or distinctive going on in the backing track, would have made a world of difference, but it just isn't there. And bombastic grandiosity isn't really the best medium for this song's message. Lyrically, Professor Green is obviously in earnest, and what he is saying in the song is clearly important to him; but if you know the story behind the song before you hear it, there aren't really any lyrics to make you sit up and take notice. In other words, what he's saying is more interesting than how he says it, or any of the specific things he says about it. For a number one record so intensely personal and emotionally raw, there's a surprising lack of bite or disruption about it.
I can't really say that I enjoy 'Read All About It'; but it would be tremendously mean-spirited to actually object to it. The po-faced seriousness of records like 'Written In The Stars' irritates me no end, not because I don't think pop songs should be serious, but because the seriousness of these songs so often seems a matter of style more than substance - they want to sound serious without actually having anything serious to say. On that score, 'Read All About It' is worth a thousand vacuous, faux-inspirational rap-ballads like 'No Regrets'. I don't think it would have taken much - an interesting musical idea, a couple of genuinely gripping or unexpected lines - to make it connect with me a lot more than it did.
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