By gleefully escalating the moral panic around British dance culture, the Prodigy frontman showed that rave could be the true successor to rock’n’roll
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Like virtually every 90s dance act that unexpectedly ascended from releasing underground club tracks to selling a lot of albums, the Prodigy were faced with a problem: their mastermind was a producer, not a pop star.
Liam Howlett was prodigiously gifted, visionary enough to have turned the Prodigy from a joke into rock stars. Their 1991 single Charly might be the ground zero of novelty rave, its sample from a 70s public information film spawning umpteen tacky imitations that sourced their hooks from old kids’ TV shows or adverts. By 1994, they were an original, eclectic musical force that drew on everything from the hardcore scene that had originally spawned them to hip-hop and punk. Their second album, Music for the Jilted Generation, went to No 1 in the UK that year, long after most of their imitators had enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame and been forgotten. But, like most dance producers, he wasn’t a natural frontman, the skills required to make fantastic records being different from the skills required to captivate an audience.
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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