So today I was working from home and I was listening to a new CD - “… and all the pieces matter” (which is music from the TV show The Wire).

Don’t panic! I’m not going to turn into one of those people who nags you incessently about how good The Wire is. To be honest I started watching the first season casually recently when the BBC started showing it every night and wasn’t that impressed. But I stuck with it and when the second season ended I suddenly realised that I’d been organising my life around making sure I was watching. Still, if you haven’t got into it by now, I’m not here to convince you. This post is actually about music.

One thing The Wire definitely has is fantastic music. From the opening, Tom Waits penned, theme “Way Down in the Hole” through to the montages that end each season, the soundtrack is classy (and notable mostly for being part of the action – songs on the radio, jukeboxes, and in Season Two a memorable live appearance by The Nighthawks singing 16 Tons).

But anyway, back to the point – if this post has one.

I’m working away (really – coding a website, real work) and on comes a voice I recognise, but a song I don’t.

“Oh My God” – the song’s called. By Michael Franti and Spearhead.

I’m loving it. But it’s bothering me. I know that name. That voice.

Who the hell is Michael Franti.

Wikipedia, save my soul.

Michael Franti. Formerly of Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – possibly the most pretentiously named band in history. Creator of some horrendously pretentious “music” – their second (and final album) Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales featured William Burroughs reading from his books. WTF? Ah, but their first album. Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury, now there was an album! Talk about memories flooding back. “Satanic Reverses”, “TV, The Drug of the Nation”, the version of “California Uber Alles”, “Music and Politics”, and the title track – I played that album to death.

I like rap music.

I like lots of other music too – rock, pop, classical, folk – I’ll give anything a listen except most jazz and atonal modern orchestral.

But I really like hip hop and rap.

Which, you know, for a fat, white, Irish, 40-year-old bloke sometimes gets me funny looks. But there you go.

I’m old enough to remember Grandmaster Flash and The Sugar Hill Gang,  the first time round, wigged out to Run DMC and The Beastie Boys as a teenager, I spent my time at university listening to NWA & Public Enemy on headphones (because, and I’ve never got over this, I always thought those white boys  bouncing their heads to “Fight the Power” were a bit, y’know, naff – especially when they tried to sound black) and dancing to De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and the rest of the trip-hop bands. To this day, even with my very dodgy knees, the chords to “Magic Number” or “Can I Kick It” make me want to dance… Hell I even own albums by Will Smith (and before you sneer, anyone who doesn’t bounce along to Boom, Shake the Room is clinically dead).

In the early nineties came bands like Cypress Hill, House of Pain (wait, American Irish rap? Hell yeah!), Pete Rock & CL Smooth and Disposable Heroes were on my new portable CD player but as rap wandered off down the gangster route, I let it go. I liked Dre and The Wu Tangs, but Biggie and Tupac and all that shite about bitches, champagne and nine millimeters doesn’t do it for me.

These days, I love Outkast, like bits of Jay Z and Eminem and wish Kanye West would just shut up and make music.

I think the UK scene has got some great talent coming out of it – Dizzee Rascal, Roll Deep, The Streets, Plan B, Sway – and the Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip album was probably my musical highlight of 2008. I nearly choked when I heard Wiley had a UK number one.

I live in hope that I might live to see another DJ Format album – old school but not nostalgic and, like the best British hip-hop, laced with great humour – listen to the two Stealin’ James tracks on their myspace page.