Pumped up, but a bit of a letdown

It’s a no-brainer to put the Streets and Dizzee Rascal on the same concert bill. On the most superficial level, they are the two British hip-hop artists who have gained a foothold with U.S. fans, but they also have a more substantial kinship: Both offer vivid, involving depictions of life on society’s lower rungs.

At the Wiltern LG on Saturday, one of the five dates they’re sharing during the Streets’ U.S. tour, they also showed a mutual tendency to flatten their distinctive artistry into conventional performances, as if worried that challenging their audience would risk losing it.

That was especially disappointing in the case of headliner Mike Skinner, a.k.a. the Streets. “A Grand Don’t Come for Free,” the new album by this Birmingham geezer (his favorite term for himself and his aimless, on-the-dole, couch-potato peers) is a rich, sustained tale that finds both comical and touching elements in a lad’s inability to cope with daily life and romance.

It might be too much to ask for a full rendition of his piece on stage, but Skinner might have strung together at least an abridged narrative. The tone at the Wiltern was so pumped-up that he wasn’t able to shift gears and bring the necessary tenderness to the touching breakup song “Dry Your Eyes.”

As a pumped-up show it wasn’t bad, with the low-key but likable Skinner pacing restlessly while a live band and co-singer provided aggressive accompaniment to his broad, working-class locution. His interaction with the crowd was easy and friendly, but the world is full of regular geezers. He has the chance to show us a real poet.

The same goes for Rascal. His acclaimed album “Boy in Da Corner” similarly evokes a troubled milieu, but his contemplations on loss of innocence and pent-up violence in London’s East End are less purely narrative and more introspective.

In an utterly original voice and language, Rascal captures a bittersweet longing that sometimes evokes Bob Marley, but on Saturday he shelved these qualities for a casual, rapper-and-DJ run-through that was highlighted by some impossibly fast freestyling.