22 July 2004
I’m just like you. I see some of these Irish chart toppers from back in the day and I too go: really? That actually went to number one? Yes, I remember ‘Dry Your Eyes’ from 2004, but The Streets had until then been a sort of critically-acclaimed indie-garage UK rap act: Mike Skinner’s preceding single that year, the oh-so-’00s sexual politics of ‘Fit But You Know It’, was his first UK top ten hit and stalled at number 11 here. ‘Dry Your Eyes’, though, did indeed top the charts. I initially wondered if it had been boosted that summer on the BBC’s customary weepie montage when England get knocked out of a football tournament, but it seems ‘Unwritten’ by an upcoming number one act filled that cathartic Euro 2004 role. Maybe the recent success of Eminem and Eamon had cleared a market gap for a laddish British take on the white male rapper.
I’m scrabbling around for ancillary factors because ‘Dry Your Eyes’ really doesn’t have much in itself to enthuse me. It’s relentlessly watery and dreary. Skinner is telling the story of a break-up – literally the moment of the break-up, in agonisingly slow Zapruder-film frame-by-frame analysis: “So then I move my hand up from down by my side” “She brings her hand up towards where my hands rested” But at least Skinner is voicing a sensitive young man in touch with his feelings, without the poisonous, aggressive misogyny of Eminem and Eamon, right? Well, the radio edit (as in the video below) leaves out the album version’s verse where Skinner gets angry at the girl, grabs her by the arms, won’t take no for an answer, and starts effing and blinding at her. By now I wouldn’t expect anything else from a ’00s number one.
Top-and-tailing Skinner’s monotonous rhymes are swells of maudlin, lachrymose strings like the climax to Platoon. Yes the heartache, and yes we’ve all been there, but ‘Dry Your Eyes’ is Celine Dion-levels of manipulative schmaltz soundtracking Phil Collins-style male dumpee sourness dressed up as weedy Eamonem white-boy rapping. Aha! Now I see why this got to number one.
