Plan B - Who Needs Actions When You Got Words? (679 / Pet Cemetery)
3/5
By: Thomas Hannan
"This is my time now, you get me? You f**king c***s..."
Now, whatever you make of that as a statement, you've got to admit, it's a bold opener. And if offended by it, if you find it at all coarse, crude or just plain dull, then stop listening immediately, or prepare to lose all faith in British youth.
Such high regard for youngsters is something that Plan B, or Ben as he was christened, seems himself to have lost a young time ago. This doesn't seem to mean a lack of respect, just that if you believe his tales of the grimier side of the tracks, the word has a very different meaning. Check the opening 'Kids' - 'pick up an AK and spray, that's the mentality of kids these days' comes the chorus, actually one of the less controversial lines after describing a lad carrying out all sorts of repulsive acts to young girls. But it's a comment, not a confession, told after adopting the stance of a kid in the middle of it, doing everything to anyone without a care - the kind of hoodie even all round (suspiciously) nice guy David Cameron would think twice about hugging. Deciding who it is you're listening to, Plan B or his monsters, can sometimes get tricky.
Character songs are everywhere, something 'B uses to exorcise his most disturbing demons behind the convenient exterior of someone not actually having to admit to thinking the thoughts himself. You see, it's not actually him! It's the characters that are raping, murdering, drug dealing... and as such it acts as social commentary instead of the ramblings of a real danger to society! Entirely convincing? To be honest, no - especially as when he drops the façade, it's the real Ben who shines through, who is the genuine character you remember from 'Who Needs Actions...' Only when he's being Ben rather than anyone else is he truly being real.
That's not to say the character songs aren't essential - the opening 'Kids', a disturbing tale of underage liaisons in 'Charmaine' and mournful 'Dead & Buried' paint a vivid picture of the times that spat out Plan B. It's necessary background, but whether its gory detail is there for anything other than tedious shock value is debatable. Behind the mask however lie Ben's best songs - the utterly sublime critique of the street and gripping tale of murder told in reverse that is 'Sick 2 Def' and the remarkably vitriolic 'No More Eatin'' should become signature songs, the moments where only Plan B could be named author - f**k all this 'British Eminem' chat. Incidentally, in these moments, all that can largely be heard is Ben and his guitar.
Great tunes, on occasion, outshine the distinction between the actor and who he's acting- 'No Good', built around a Prodigy chorus from a song of the same name but related here via the medium of a pissed of bloke and his battered six string, coupled with the welcome summation provided in the closing, and title, opus are two of them. But it can also slip in to styles that seem so removed from the sentiment of those most winning, acoustic moments that they don't feel like Plan B at all - 'Mama (Loves A Crackhead)', 'Missing Links' and other moments contained in various songs simply sound like uninspired 1990s pop music, although rapped over in a style that even people breast fed on raw sewage might find difficult to stomach.
It can't keep this up that long, being this offensive and simultaneously interesting. Once he's talked about 'raping a corpse up the anal passage whilst contracting genital warts', stories about the upbringing provided by a fanatically religious father ('I Don't Hate You') don't have the same bite to them, even if you are convinced they come from a much more personal place. As 'A Clockwork Orange' suggested, you can become numb to ultraviolence. So unfathomably relentless is 'Who Needs Actions...' in its tales of woe that you start to opine that things cannot be this bad for everyone the world over. Stop one moment - maybe indeed I am rich and privileged more than I even know it, and don't even qualify to comment. But after all, people do watch 'Frasier', drink Yakult, and listen to Keane in their thousands. Yet for those same very reasons, having a Plan B is more necessary than ever.
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