The Prodigy - Classic or Dud ?

It’s plain black and white cover opened up to present had drawn cartoon images of the band members fashioned by future author of The Beach, Alex Garland.

That's an odd bit of trivia.

i also had no idea that voodoo people contained a nirvana sample.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4p1I7o0nY4

timely bump - just saw somsone has put up the band's only UK TV performance ('Everybody In The Place' on DANCE ENERGY): http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlq4DXCBgb0

Awesome tune, hilarious clip.

lol the '90s.

Press release I just got through about this spelled it 'Gilted Generation' in the subject header :/

MFtJG is still an awesome album, so dense and paranoid. It's aged much better than what they did before or after, though I love the hardcore era stuff too.

I prefer Experience to Jilted - the latter is more well-constructed and purposeful, but nothing beats the seratonin rush of the early tunes. Jilted is still top-notch, mind.

hey coming to ilm is just like gazing wearily at the pr spam in my inbox now!

New song, surprisingly OK.

NOW
THE WRITING'S ON THE WALL
IT WON'T GO AWAY
IT'S AN OMEN
YOU JUST RUN AN AUTOMATION

(this makes no sense but is still awesome)

figures that it would take a live version 15 years after the fact to make me see any glimmer of worth in "Their Law"

still the worst thing on World's On Fire tho

btw I'm the only person who bought this, right

the live version on the 'Breathe' single was good, and it seems to have been one of their most popular live tracks since MFTJG (but i love the album version anyway)

I thought it was one of their more popular tracks, period (obv I never liked it)

best thing about the new live album is that they pulled out "Weather Experience"!

their first release is best in expanded form and other rereties from before and have some good singles but they pretty much lost me afters.

I really love the new video. The song itslef is better than their last comeback, at least.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB_nKpEkILs

kinda self-parodic by this point

if by "this point" you mean 1998

I was in a nightclub last night where the DJ played Smack My Bitch Up and it felt very awkward.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/17/the-prodigy-the-day-is-my-enemy-oasis-blur looooooooooooooooool

The Prodigy: 'we should be as important as Oasis or Blur' looooooooooooooooool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU5Dn-WaElI

RIP Keith Flint

fucking hell

oh damn RIP

Shit.

49 :(

definetely king of cool in the eyes of 11-year olds mid-nineties.

RIP

Liam confirmed on Twitter it was suicide... RIP, so sad.

That is sad.

Sorry, Instagram, not Twitter, if that matters.

Oh no! RIP.

God fucking damn it. The Fat of the Land was the album I needed to open my mind to a whole lot of electronic music to which I'd been stupidly dismissive before, an important record for me.

Such a fucking shame. Used to play Outer Space and No Good on repeat as a teen

For a lot of people in the UK the Prodigy *was* the sound of being a teenager in the 90s, and the Fat of the Land era in particular was something you felt you outgrew and moved on from very quickly, and it's now comfortably recycled into the wedding disco canon. Difficult to overstate the shock and excitement of seeing Firestarter and Breathe on Top of the Pops and wondering where the hell it was all going to go and Keith was the central image and voice in all of that.

As it turned out it went nowhere much - I got used to dismissing that stuff as largely irrelevant to current dance music but it's also impossible to imagine whole swathes of current music, specifically EDM and everything that sounds like it, developing in quite the same way without it. And the subsequent descent into hamminess doesn't matter either, because I'd always assumed that Keith would end up doing and AC/DC, still churning round the festival circuit doing Firestarter into his 60s, becoming one of those self-parodic acts that resolutely refused to change. Damn.

Matt, completely agree. By the time Firestarter became a hit, I didn't much care for the Prodigy. Too cartoonish. But I could see how one could love the punk/dance combo. Dangerous? Lol no. But Keith was so much fun. Very sad ending. I can understand Liam's anger.

The Prodigy were a huge band for me as a teenager and ...Jilted Generation was very much my gateway into dance music. Matt DC OTM about the shock and now-ness of Firestarter, it felt massive. RIP Keith.

I absolutely loved The Prodigy, from the moment I heard Android I was obsessed with tracking that EP down, then Experience hit and I was along for the ride all the way including Fat Of The Land. They completely dropped off the face of the earth after that, was that Liam's writers block?

I was a teenager when The Fat of the Land came out and its sense of menace bowled me over, as you'd expect. It felt more modern and forward-looking than Marilyn Manson's contemporaneous schlock and Keith was a big part of that, no matter how easy it has become to dismiss them in the interim (cf. Pitchfork's retrospective review). I had a harder time connecting with Music for the Jilted Generation, which genuinely felt like it came from a different era at the time, but those reservations evaporated a few years later.

None of my classmates were into them, which helped fuel the mystique.

I loved Jilted Generation and I guess saw it as a ~mature statement~ after the purer rave fun of Experience, and Firestarter was def a massive cultural event as everyone said, but I also slightly resented the new rockishness and what I saw as forced attempts to be edgy. (Weirdly getting "Their Law" - rock guitars, PWEI collab - on some free NME or Select tape was the thing that made me go and buy Jilted so I don't know what changed!)

It was only rewatching the videos years later - not sure where it's from but there's a good making of Firestarter video on youtube - that I realised just how hilarious and unexpectedly camp Keith's performances were and felt bad for not appreciating the glorious silliness properly at the time.

Anyway. Poor guy.

(There's a BBC obit now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47442312 )

“They completely dropped off the face of the earth after that” - I remember there was a really long wait for their next single after Fat of the Land. It was “Baby’s got a temper” and it was fantastically bad. Liam tried to write another album on the same style but it didn’t work, and by the time they made a comeback it was too late and the material wasn’t as strong. “Girls” is great for the first two minutes but gets boring after that. I wonder if having to write material for Flint and Maxim to deliver gave Liam a creative push he didn’t have otherwise - the later stuff didn’t utilise them as much.

It’s odd having an icon from the rave era dying. In my mind 1989 was just (counts) 2019... twenty years ago? Longer than ten years. Can’t possibly be longer than twenty years. Next we’ll be crying about those lovable funsters Altern-8. Would anybody miss the Utah Saints?

I wonder if the band will carry on. Most of their classic early tunes were just Liam and whatever sampler he used at the time - “Out of Space”, “No Good”, even “Poison” and “Voodoo People” etc didn’t have Keith doing vocals. But their two most popular hits were dominated by Keith.

Would anybody miss the Utah Saints?

hi!

Oh god Poison was indeed great. One of these bands you never revisit. Well, I don't. Great for when you're a teen. You buy the record, play it and then delve deeper into the dance scene. A great gateway but just that.

surprised to read that all their albums bar the first one debuted at number one on the UK Charts (think that's right). I definitely stopped caring after Fat Of The Land but the first two albums had a profound effect on me.

One of these bands you never revisit.

I was doing a playlist last week for my 30th wedding anniversary and couldn't decide between No Good and Everyone In The Place. Couldn't believe how old those songs were and, of course, how long I'd been married.

Picked No Good incidentally.

I wonder if having to write material for Flint and Maxim to deliver gave Liam a creative push he didn’t have otherwise - the later stuff didn’t utilise them as much.

Maybe not the most key detail at the moment but The Prodigy records from Invaders Must Die onwards actually use a fair bit more of their two frontmen than any prior era - Keith didn’t get a turn on lead vocals until “Firestarter”, and near as I can tell that and “Baby’s Got A Temper” were the only proper verse-chorus verse songs either of them did with the group (as opposed to more catchphrasey rave-MC stuff, which is how they’d be heavily utilized in newer Prodigy material). I guess it speaks to how key Keith and Maxim have been to the overall effect of The Prodigy that it took me a long time to realize that.
Speaking of which, Liam’s obviously and understandably broken up about this but if he and Maxim want to keep having a go at it I’d certainly support them, and I doubt I’m alone in that.