magine you’ve spent your entire life in northern England (let’s say Sheffield, for instance) completely segregated from mainstream pop culture. Then, one day while you’re huffing paint out of grocery bags underneath the bridge, you notice a package wash ashore with a Queens, NYC address on top. You cut it open to reveal an old-school hip hop record collector’s dream, a golden age time capsule full of dirty, hissy Run DMC, Eric B & Rakim and Beasties cassettes. It’s been nearly two decades since these goodies were originally released, but you and your crew are discovering them for the first time in 2003. You jack a few cans of Krylon from the local hardware store and buy that shitty four-track recorder that your k-holed friend continues to push on you. What you record might sound a little something like Council Pop, the second album from Kid Acne.

Before he was rocking mics, graffiti veteran Kid Acne was busy honing his illustration skills, creating work for such prominent British hip hop labels as Big Dada, Warp and Lex. The Kid first caught my ears on the Lex compilation, Lexoleum, with the utterly wrecked “Rap Dracula”, a highlight here as well. Over a destroyed drunken piano beat courtesy of Warp Records’ Req One, Kid Acne whips out some stream-of-consciousness, silly rhymes, as though the art of rapping was invented just yesterday. In thick rural British, Kid Acne’s sound is undeniably unique and compelling: “It’s the ambassador, the rap dracul-ore / The conquistador with the exoskeletor, smacking the back of ya knees wit a spatul-ore” he announces, as if childishly bragging, “Hey, check this out! I can rhyme ambassador with spatula!” the phonemes twisted with an old-school rhyme-maker’s glee. It heralds back to the old freestyle tradition of selecting a single syllable and rapping clear through until you’ve exhausted all the rhyming possibilities (think “Intergalactic”).

The same juvenile braggadocio and cheeky sense of humor that has impressed many in the British press is found tagged all over Council Pop. It’s laid on so thick, in fact, that it would be easy to label him the British Biz Markie. It’s hard to dispute, especially with passages like this one from “9T4 Rugged”: “I’m a lumberjack, with a ten-gallon hat and a massive hunchback / Notre Dame rockers poke your tires with a carpet tack / I was making enough noise swimming in my papa’s nutsack.” The Kid obviously bears at least a passing resemblance to the great comic rappers of yore. But recently this style of rapping has gone the way of the fat laces, retired in favor of tongue-in-cheek bling-blingism or excessively verbose, dare I say, “conscious” flows. And that’s exactly how Kid Acne manages to sound surprisingly fresh—by infusing a little thing called F-U-N into his music. The Invisible Spies crew was too busy beatboxing and tagging overpasses to bother picking up any post-’92 hip hop from across the pond.

Which begs the question, “should Kid Acne just grow up already?” I don’t know, but would you ask the same of the Ramones, or hell, Weird Al? I hope not. It’s that child-like quality that lures you back again and again. But there’s a difference between child-like and childish, and thankfully, Kid Acne avoids the latter, due in most part to Req One’s complementary production. I can’t imagine a better backing for the Kid’s lyrical rants than Req’s playful, simple breaks and sampling aesthetic that channels beatmakers from hip-hop’s golden age (the brief “Hot Up District” cuts a big rock riff loose, reminiscent of one of Jam Master Jay’s classic productions). But after 10 tracks of “I’m the rooster / Make you all wake up!” and “Here is something you can’t understand / I don’t wear Timbaland!” you’ve got a dish requiring a particular, acquired taste.

But all doubts regarding Kid Acne’s authenticity or credibility should be quashed by the album’s best (and most poignant) track, “Juntion 20”. Over a plodding, sparse beat, Kid Acne relates the story of the moment he realized Sheffield was light-years away from the reality depicted in his favorite American rap. A tale he’s told by a friend whose eye was scratched out by an owl while he was trespassing in a local graveyard acts as the catalyst. “I realized that where we’re from there ain’t no street-hustling / Just some old blokes out there sheep-rustling…where we’re from is not the projects/ It’s the ORP, they having teenage sex. The babies have pierced ears and skin heads/ They’re color-blind with thick wrists ‘cause they all inbred.” The imagery is equal parts thoughtful tribute and hilarious satire, predicting more accomplished things from Kid Acne in the near future (no doubt referring to plans to release his next album sometime this year on Lex). Regardless of what the future may bring, Council Pop stands as a strong example of how hip-hop sophistication and “progression” can be usurped by pure enthusiasm for the culture.