Remembering Big Beat: Chemical Brothers vs. The Prodigy

If you were born between 1977 and 1985 and live in Southern Ontario, you may remember a period in the 1990s where fully one-third of your teenage friends suddenly declared themselves "ravers."

They left school on Friday afternoon as a jock, or a faux-gangster, or a goth, or a math nerd, went to some mysterious gathering over the weekend, and came back on Monday morning with a wardrobe made up entirely of fun-fur and cyan ballcaps and a small meth problem. When you asked them what the hell happened, they either began to blab uncontrollably about new friends named "Sunshine" and "Zippy," or else passed out due to drug-and-dance induced exhaustion.

One could point to several causes for this phenomenon: evil drug dealers, unscrupulous fun-fur manufacturers, or the fact that something like seven different active promotions meant that, for a brief while, Toronto was the dance music capital of North America. I prefer to point the finger at two bands from England.

Before 1995, electronic music was pretty much the exclusive property of gays, ginos and gay ginos. Then the big-beat explosion happened. Suddenly, "rave" acts started using guitar samples and rock drum loops. Dance music songs used a "verse-chorus-verse" song structure. Electronic acts had good videos and charismatic front men. "Electronica," as was the stupid catch-all term for all synth-based music, was the new rock 'n' roll.

And if electronica was the new rock 'n' roll, then the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy were like Elvis and Chuck Berry.

The Main Event

From Manchester, England, a band that makes really good videos, THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS.

The Chemical Brothers (aka Tom Rowlands and Ed Simon) started as a DJ duo in 1992, spinning in small venues around Manchester under the name "The Dust Brothers," as a tribute to the Beastie Boys' production team of the same name. One of their regular gigs was at the Heavenly Social Club, a spot frequented by a who's-who of Mancunian rock. By 1994, they working with acts like The Charlatans, The Stone Roses and Oasis. (Their relationship with Oasis ended rather suddenly. In 1995 they were DJing before an Oasis gig when Liam Gallagher decided he didn't care for their set and literally threw them off stage.)

In the summer of 1995, after finishing their first LP, The Dust Brothers were set to embark on their first American tour with fellow "electronica" acts Orbital and Leftfield. Before their first show, they received a cease and desist order from The other Dust Brothers, forcing a sudden name change.

Their debut album, Exit Planet Dust, went gold in the UK, mostly on the strength of the single "Life is Sweet."

Two years later, they released their second album, Dig Your Own Hole. Where Dust has been a domestic hit, Hole made the brothers international superstars. The single "Block Rockin' Beats" appeared on the soundtrack for every youth-marketed movie for the next half-decade and The Brothers became one of the few electronic acts to successfully make the transition to arena rock style shows.

You can look up what happened to them after that, but chances are you already know because you own at least one of their albums.

This is the video for "Setting Sun," their first hit video in North America. If you've ever done a bucketload of acid, then had to try and act normal in front of your parents because you were still high at 10 o'clock the next morning, you know what this video is all about.



The Competition

From Essex, England, a band that has kept re-making the same album for the last 10 years, THE PRODIGY!

The Prodigy were formed in 1990, at the peak of the British rave scene, by producer Liam Howlett and dancers/vocalists Keith Flint and Leeroy Howell. In 1991 they had their first commercial success with the single "Charly," which made simultaneous reference to a popular British cartoon of the 1970s and '80s and doing blow. "Charly" was part of a movement in electronic music known as "kiddie rave," where techno artists sampled bits of children's media in their songs. (See "Sesame's Treet" by Smart-E's for what may be the oddest example.)

Wanting to get away from that unfortunate label, Howlett took the group in a new, more breakbeat hardcore oriented direction for their first full-length album, 1992's The Prodigy Experience. While the album barely made a ripple in North America, it spawned a series of hit singles in the UK, including "Out of Space," which is still one of my favourite songs ever.

Their next album, Music for a Jilted Generation, saw the band go in a heavier, almost industrial direction on a number of songs. They even went so far as to collaborate with Pop Will Eat Itself on "Their Law," a song that took a swipe at the newly passed Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, a piece of legislation which effectively killed rave culture in the UK. Once again, the album was a huge hit in Britain, but barely existed over here.

In 1996, The Prodigy released "Firestarter" as a stand alone single in North America to help stir up hype for their dates on that year's Lollpalooza tour. With a video featuring Keith Flint in a new cyberpunk getup -- Keith had previously looked like a bit of a hippy -- and Sex Pistols-esque vocals, "Firestarter" was a massive hit and is forever linked in my mind with being 15.

Rather than strike while the iron was hot, the band wound up waiting almost a year before releasing their next album, The Fat of the Land. What they lost in momentum, they more than made up for by choosing "Smack My Bitch Up" as a single. A song based entirely around a sample of Kool Keith talking about domestic abuse, "Smack My Bitch Up" scared the crap out of parents and made Fat one of the best selling electronic albums ever.

The two big knocks on The Prodigy are that they don't make very much music anymore, and what little they do make all sounds like Fat of the Land. Both of these things are true, anyone who heard 2004's Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned knows that. But that doesn't make Jilted or Experience any less fantastic.

This is the video for "No Good (Start The Dance)" off of Jilted. Check out the strobe action.