Black Box Recorder, Metro, London<br></br>Jay-Z, Wembley Arena, London

Modern life isn't rubbish ? it's stupid

Talking over beats. It's an old idea and a simple one, but there are several ways to skin a cat. Take Black Box Recorder. There's a theory that, when it comes to obscenity on television or radio, you can get away with pretty much anything if it is said in perfect RP diction. If Sophie Ellis-Bextor said the c-word on primetime, she'd get less complaints than would Shaun Ryder. BBR have cottoned onto this. Not that profanity is their bag as such, but the way in which they sneak Luke Haines's singular worldview into the listeners' consciousness via the Trojan horse of Sarah Nixey's immaculately elocuted speaking voice and his band's shimmering, delicious pop is damned clever. Classic entryism, textbook détournement, and – in chart terms, at least – Haines's most successful exercise in subversion.

Their main predecessors in this are The Flying Lizards, the new wave act best known for their cover of "Money", who also used the format of foxy posh lady reciting the lyrics in a clipped, dispassionate voice (BBR's version of "Uptown Top Ranking" on the England Made Me album was pure Lizards).

BBR are too busy with their own agenda to restrict themselves to conceptual gags. That agenda essentially belongs to Luke Haines, a man who is, I am rapidly coming to believe, some sort of evil genius, a white cat stroking, or indeed skinning, Bond villain of pop (he's looking the part tonight in a pure white tux, mirrored by the similarly-attired John Moore). It is, therefore, a pessimistic and largely a misanthropic agenda, but – importantly this – only because he is disappointed with the all-pervading "stupidity" of modern life.

Typical BBR subject-matters lurking in tonight's set list are the cookie-cutter conformism of the education system ("The School Song"), the hopeless aspirations to celebrity created by the Heat magazine culture ("The New Diana"), and the truth about male adolescent sexuality ("The Facts Of Life"), all narrated by Nixey with the dignified restraint of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter. This show is basically a showcase for new album Passionoia. Now, when I tell you that Passionoia is Black Box Recorder's finest album yet, it isn't shorthand hyperbole for "if you liked the others, you'll like this". I'm telling you it really is their finest album yet.

It's before their surprise hit, "The Facts Of Life", that Nixey briefly removes the mask of decorum to make a joke. "It's quite appropriate that it's snowing," she says, indicating her white-suited sidemen. "You know, the Ice Queen, and my two Mister Frostees..."

The Red Entrance to Wembley Arena is a Hieronymous Bosch depiction of hell and a Moroccan bazaar rolled into one. All of hip-hop London is here – ticket or no ticket – trying to funnel itself through the double doors (Wembley's queue control leaves much to be desired) and rush the barriers. Guys haggle and hustle and literally fight, girls remonstrate shrilly with patient, put-upon stewards, screeching "Excuse me! Excuse me!" in that way that bears no courtesy whatsoever and actually means "If you don't let me in, I am going to kill you."

And for what? Up on the stage, the man who was born Shaun Carter and his chorus line of cronies are bellowing "Ain't no love in the heart of the city, ain't no love in the heart of town..." To the connoisseur, this may be a blues standard. To me, it's a ropey old Whitesnake single.

Jay-Z's career has been built not upon his meagre verbal dexterity, but upon well-chosen novelty samples: a kiddie's chorus from Annie, an old Doors loop, a snatch of Prince's immaculate "If I Was Your Girlfriend" (I'm restraining myself from issuing a fatwah for sacrilege here, so let's just say that Jay-Z and Beyonce's "Bonnie And Clyde" sure ain't Gainsbourg and Bardot's.) I have no problem with this in principle. I adored "Hard Knock Life". (Didn't everyone? Oh.) Where I have a problem is when people try to make a case for Jay-Z as a serious street poet.

Let's get this straight: in the cynically-rapping-over-other-people's-hits stakes, Jay-Z is this far removed from being P Diddy or the Fresh Prince, but bizarrely Carter seems to carry more credibility than Messrs Combs or Smith. The truth is that the man who calls himself "The Jigga" is no silky-smooth wordsmith. His nemesis Nas was forced to cancel his London show this week, depriving me of the compare-and-contrast opportunity I had planned. No matter, I don't need to cast around too far for another comparison: even Black Box Recorder will suffice. If the graceful and elegant Sarah Nixey is a Margot Fonteyn of the spoken word, the clumsy and clunking Carter is that pirouetting hippopotamus in a tutu from Disney's Fantasia.

Jay-Z is one of those Troy MacLure rappers: like the washed-up actor in The Simpsons who begins every cable TV documentary with the line "You may know me from such films as...", Carter spends half of every track banging on about what he's done and what records he's made.

Given the paucity of his subject-matters, it's little wonder that he looks so bored. Up on the big screen, his gormless physiognomy is almost as slab-like and expressionless as the illuminated black-and-white stills which flank it.

But at least you can tune your ears in to those novelty samples, right? Er, wrong. Jay-Z's DJ lazily cuts up the hooks on his Technics in front of the poorly-painted plywood backdrop of a cocktail bar. He might as well pour himself a plywood Martini. The sound mix at hip-hop gigs is often sub-standard, and in the cavernous echo-chamber of Wembley it's doomed. Which leaves... well, a load of thudding bass and a load of grunting. Hip-hop London, however, loves every minute. At any break in proceedings, the deafening chant of approval fills the air: "Boooo! Booo!" Which is – albeit in a slightly more old-skool kind of way – my sentiment exactly.

s.price@independent.co.uk