Your Daily 90s Breakdown: Prodigy - Narayan + Firestarter (continuous mix)
March 26th, earlier this year, I saw The Prodigy at Roseland Ballroom, as they were on tour to support new (and still kickin’ it) music. I wasn’t entirely sure if I was going to see something good. Well, it was very very good. They’re awesome to see live. I would have enjoyed the show more had I not lost a sneaker in the mosh pit early on. (got the sneaker back eventually.) Yes, I sometimes join mosh pits, even nowadays. (Quick diversion: I was in the infamous mosh pit for the Limp Bizkit set at Woodstock ‘99, helping Fred Worst surf the crowd on a detached wallboard. There’s a famous picture of this scene in Rolling Stone; I’m in it.)
You have to be a really high-energy, danger-seeking person to engage in this sort of behavior. But if you are, then The Prodigy are perfect for you.
Along with Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers and The Crystal Method, as well as other acts they are pioneers of the big beat electronic dance genre which achieved mainstream popularity in the 1990s and 2000s, and are known for high-quality live performances. They have sold nearly 20 million records worldwide which is unequalled in dance music history.
I was going to write 1,000 words on their relative place and influence in 1990s music culture, but this is most of what you need to know.
So, two additional things:
Liam Howlett is the man you need to know. He’s behind this whole thing the way Quincy Jones was behind Michael Jackson. He’s quite the musical mad genius, literally. I’ve never heard any other producer or act produce consistently complex, tight beats and rhythms the way that he can. And for that reason, The Prodigy is another act for which I can listen to entire albums in one sitting without interruption. (I keep joking that I’m going to wear out my CD for The Fat Of The Land the way a needle wears out an album with continuous playback)
The Prodigy turned out to be one of the only electronica acts to chart in the United States after frequent media attention and promotion of the genre. Except electronica is not really a genre; it’s a mishmash of dance/beat music genres that are often very different from one another. It’s purely a marketing term, much abused by the inept record industry here in the U.S. They got what they deserved; though Europe has a rich history of electronic music (including a ton of innovation in the 1980s and 1990s), the electronica movement pretty much went SPLAT! here. Long story short, they had no way to properly promote it at the time; no radio stations for the genre, difficult to find placement on MTV (unless it was a super fancy video; “Smack My Bitch Up” had a video so infamous it was banned from airplay). It was like trying to promote soccer. I find this sad because a lot of that music kicks ass. I have my ways of keeping up with it, but it’s difficult to find here unless you’re watching car commercials. (You may have heard of Daft Punk and Justice. Ya hipsters.) There is a lot of great techno music outside of Fatboy Slim and Moby (Bleh. Moby.) and maybe what we need is a set of innovative U.S. house music artists to kick it off.
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Perhaps the best way of talking about how techno music has influenced EVERYTHING here on the sneak is not to talk about what it’s spawned but where it has come from. House music was actually pioneered starting from the British punk scene, and its first major flag bearer was… New Order. (Oh, you might have heard of them, too?) Meanwhile, trance music is a direct descendant of symphony music. Also, the tribal beats of jungle music have not only been around for centuries (that’s not just an exaggeration for the Amen Break) but they influence almost everything that you hear that involves guitar + drums. This is music that comes from great stock. And it exploded in the 1990s. (Just, everywhere but here.)
The problem is that you don’t know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, because you haven’t taken musical classes that would cue you into what is fine music (I have) and what is shit (everything you hear on the radio that Guidos dance to).
I don’t know entirely how to help you, except maybe start here. I listen to that once a week, at least, and it’s the music I listen to when I’m on the bike. It’s kinda ambient (it was, after all, for an overnight radio show) but there is some good stuff in there. Also, look here (that’s where I got it from). Paul Van Dyk still does a yearly show (around August / September) in Central Park and you might want to check that out. Ask me personally if you’d like to know more, including a buying guide, because otherwise I have another 10,000+ words for the blog that no one will make it through.
