The Prodigy - Classic or Dud ?

Music For A Jilted Generation remains to my ears one of the most evil-sounding pop records of all time. I guess I was the right age but it was such a contrast from the smilier rave stylings of the first album. Like the point in the night where things take a dark turn, people start looking like ogres and demons and everything's just dripping with grey slimey rave juice. Fat of the Land tried to go one darker but instead ended up sounding a bit comical. I love the Peep Show take-off of that era - 'This is outrageous / This is contagious'

I'm surprised to read the The Fat of the Land went double platinum stateside, because it didn't feel big to me at the time. I see that "Firestarter" made it to #30 on the US singles chart, which sounds about right: a decently big pop song but not a blockbuster. That was their only song that had any impact in the USA iirc.

Fat of the Land was a #1 album stateside, I think

That's right, and double platinum like I said, but the singles didn't hit like that.

breathe and smack my bitch up were all over us modern rock radio in '97

Fat of the Land came out in that weird moment where dance music came above ground in the US for a moment, but the majority of the interest ended up concentrated on acts that were less dancefloor-ready and more easily packaged as vocal hook-enabled commercial jingles, viable as "live" performers, or able to create music videos that held interest.

The Prodigy hit all three of those. FOTL had a rock sensibility and both Keith Flint's vocals and stage presence were instrumental in that appeal. Although he's not in the video, when I reached college in '99 swapping music and videos on the college network had taken off and every single network share had the Firestarter video.

I was laughing at a recent twitter thread asking why ravers in the US in 2019 are so weirdly aggressive. Really, The Prodigy -- and specifically FOTL -- are the dads of the US EDM festival scene.

indeed - MTV was pushing Fatboy Slim & the Chems a lot, but The Prodigy had a lead singer and were a lot more "band-like", plus their image sorta fit in with the Limp Bizkit-style 'alternative punk' look that you saw all the time back then. They hadn't really figured out how to deal with groups that didn't have a 'frontman' so it's not a surprise that The Prodigy were the ambassadors of "electronica"

oh fuck :(

RIP

The Prodigy was really a big deal in the U.S., I remember when Firestarter dropped on the radio it really *did* sound a lot different and people were immediately hooked by that track. It was released really far in advance of the album, so it built up this huge level of anticipation that the next great band was about to hit. I bought the CD almost immediately upon its release and while it wasn't really a total classic for me, it did hook me and get me interested in digging into this "electronica" thing. I think the deal with these guys and Keith Flint was they sounded huge and absurd and fun, in a year when the biggest single was Candle in the Wind '97.

I had just hopped on a British Airways flight to London the weekend that The Fat of the Land topped the American chart. During the month I spent in the United Kingdom, I listened to the BBC several times, during which "Smack My Bitch Up" was ubiquitous or seemed so. I heard it on car radios as I walked from my flat in Russell Square to one of the many bookshops on Tottenham Court Road. When I returned to the States, "Firestarter" and "Breathe" were all over modern/alternative radio. In many ways they augured the macho turn that this chart would take in the late Clinton years. But I still love those singles.

It came out the summer before I went to university, it was pretty much the only thing we played in the car on the first holiday I ever went on with my friends. I think I've only ever owned it on a shitty copied cassette and streaming it now I'm amazed to discover it actually has bass.

Serial Thrilla is still rubbish, Mindfields is pretty good though.

Prodigy headlined the last Lollapalooza tour in '97

https://www.lollapalooza.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Lolla97.jpg

rip.

really enjoyed the show i attended in 1998, the smack my bitch up tour. they were supported by foo fighters, so it was a bit of a dream line-up for me at 14.

weird role to have in a group, to be a frontman but only do vocals on a few songs.

actually it would've been 1997 and i was 13

breathe and smack my bitch up were all over us modern rock radio in '97

― call all destroyer, Monday, March 4, 2019 9:02 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

mtv too

when i was a kid i didn't understand and was scared of them but "breathe" was still the coolest thing i'd ever heard

I had a total brainfart, the ubiquitous video on college computer network shares was "smack my bitch up" obviously

firestarter was probably in there, but much further down the list

Unexpected and touching tribute from James Blunt of all people.

At the Q Awards years ago, when @NoelGallagher was saying he was leaving Ibiza because I’d moved there, and @DamonAlbarn refused to be in the same picture as me, and @PaulWellerHQ was saying he’d rather eat his own shit than work with me, Keith Flint came over, gave me a hug, and

— James Blunt (@JamesBlunt) March 4, 2019

(2nd part)

said how thrilled he was for my success.

Keith, I only met you once, but I shed a tear at the news of your death. In our business, there are no prizes for being kind, but if there was, that Grammy would be yours.

— James Blunt (@JamesBlunt) March 4, 2019

Using the death of someone who was kind to you once to offload a bunch of pent-up grudges you've held for years is an odd approach to paying tribute to someone. Takes all sorts, I suppose. That last sentence is premium Blunt cheese, too. Quality.

I like that story. Sounds like it was Noel, Damon, Paul, and the rest with the grudges! Good on Keith for showing kindness to an "easy target", if you will.

And yeah, this news gutted me.

Blunt does come across as surprisingly self-aware and self-mocking on Twitter, so I really doubt he's doing any more than shrugging at his open-mic-night-guy-meets-Westlife reputation than airing a grudge here

when i was a kid i didn't understand and was scared of them but "breathe" was still the coolest thing i'd ever heard

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Monday, March 4, 2019 12:37 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was like 20 at the time but same

Sensing that slow burn arc of the Prodigy going from hearing "Charly" randomly in 91/92 to where it crested in 97 here was really kinda amazing.

Show I most regret missing because of the insanity of the context -- the Moby/Prodigy tour in early 1993 in Orange County, when they played a long-standing rock/country venue in South County. That had seats and tables. I still wonder what the fuck that was like.

Here's the one contemporary documentation of that show I know of:

http://articles.latimes.com/1993-01-14/news/ol-1377_1_techno-music

Pretty nice piece by our own somewhat erstwhile AlexinNY:
https://vassifer.blogs.com/alexinnyc/2019/03/goodbye-to-keith-flint.html

It seems as easy to imagine a Prodigy Moby bill in 93 it seems hard to imagine one in 97.

“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.

the Fat Of The Land breakthrough was just so big (over a year after the huge Firestarter breakthrough,& three years after the Jilted etc etc), and so protracted in a still physical-media-dominant world, that they just spent two years touring bigger and bigger venues. Once they stopped, Howlett supposedly spent... six months? fiddling and nitpicking his Breezeblock mix into The Dirtchamber Sessions, before the whole enterprise collapsed exhausted and Leeroy sloped off.

Baby's Got A Temper sounded nakedly desperate at the time (trying to generate a Prodigy single by sampling Firestarter over a song about Rohypnol by Keith's rock band?), but the public, the band and Flint all seemed mutually happy to pretend it never happened ASAP.

FOTL-era Prodge as precursor to '10s EDM is OTM, except instead of having a goon leap around having fun and shouting, the kids had to latch onto the bloke at the back engaging in online slagging matches on edgelord-brostep.com/forum for their audience identification. What I'm saying, I think, is that for want of a few more Keith Flints, we could be without Comicsgate and Proud Boys today.

The Prodigy as an influence on dubstep yeah thats obvious but I don’t hear a lot of that aggression and menace (or breakbeats for that matter) in David Guetta of Aviici. Although that maybe has more to do with the uselessness of “EDM” as a genre name.

I’d say contemporary stadium house acts like Faithless were much more of a precursor to that.

All of their albums have gone to number 1 in the UK! Even the really shit ones! By the time that 2004 album came out they were completely anachronistic, but by 2009 they sort of made sense again. That was after two or three years of blog house and nu-rave and various indie bands checking them as a formative influence etc. I remember Invaders Must Die being half-decent in places, but the one from last year was awful and they felt like dinosaurs.

At some point, probably pre-97 in all honesty, it felt like their connection to dance music was severed. As opposed to, say, the Chemical Brothers, who even at their most indie-friendly always felt like they'd retained a feel for club culture, would put out maximalist bangers in between albums etc.

I think of Faithless as the Prodigy of trance, not as stadium house

Faithless, like Guetta & co fall between house and trance in a similar way.

I mean Rollo & Bliss were house producers first, taking in some elements from trance like those big buildups, just like Guetta, Axwell/Ingrosso, Aviici, Afrojack, all the EDM guys, it’s a pretty straight line through time.

Shit

https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/53648551_10155821222102251_8165130350394081280_n.jpg?_nc_cat=107&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr3-1.xx&oh=8d572e052f065576223cdf1b690d67e1&oe=5CDD10EB

aww, shit

Siegbran, I think that's a relatively narrow EDM definition?

I might be liberally clumping in the post-"dubstep" stuff under EDM, but my understanding (and limited experience) is that a large portion of the acts at modern EDM festivals is the drop-heavy rippling bass stuff. Which is more Prodigy-indebted, but much less radio friendly.

Half of the stuff thrown into dj sets by a couple edm acts that were playing at a side stage at a festival I was at last year were playing 90% stuff that sounded like post-Skrillex with rap vocals tossed in.

Hmm yeah that goes to show that EDM as a tag isn't very useful in discussing this stuff (in the wider definition even Moroder and the Pet Shop Boys fall under it), I was indeed more referring to the narrower "country/pop singer dropping inspirational lyrics over a huge anthemic build/drop" EDM, but yeah that (post)dubstep stuff is of course totally indebted to The Prodigy.

country/pop singer dropping inspirational lyrics over a huge anthemic build/drop

Based on admittedly anecdotal evidence, EDM's definition has narrowed down over the years, and this appears to be its prevalent meaning nowadays. I might be wrong, though.

my definition is "stuff that plays at events like Electric Daisy Carnival that isn't a legacy act or dance genre that I'd like (that is probably playing a small side stage for old people)"

The bit about the 5k is especially sad. I haven't been touched by serious depression or suicidal thoughts. I just know that for me, exercise is such a life-affirming activity.

I don't really know anything about Keith or the Prodigy, but there's been such an outpouring of grief from so many people I wouldn't have expected a connection. I'm sorry for all you who were fans.

that photo of keith running checks out - looks like he only started doing parkrun just a couple of weeks ago

http://www.parkrun.org.uk/results/athleteresultshistory/?athleteNumber=5457329

not bad times either for someone just starting out

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7800/46392084864_01710c36f3_c.jpg

The bit about the 5k is especially sad. I haven't been touched by serious depression or suicidal thoughts. I just know that for me, exercise is such a life-affirming activity.

Yeah, I've been doing parkrun for just over two years and personally know a couple of people who are in a much better place mentally since they started doing it. There's usually such a friendly community around the events too.

I'm listening to 'No Tourists'. It's... yeah, it sounds like what you'd expect it to sound like. But will anyone here vouch for post FOTL Prodigy?

Yes.

Yes but not in large quantities.

I'm not sure I'd particularly vouch for FoTL.

"Funky Shit" and "Serial Thrilla" might be the worst things they've ever recorded