Other mixes, of which this Alley Cat Mix is the best maybe
The not-as-good remix that was actually on the album Experience.
Here's a mix I never came across before - "Beltram Says Mix". From '92, Joey's own handiwork, not a clever joke.
At this precise point - "Charly" through "Everybody in the Place" to "Ruff in the Jungle" - the Prodigy are the best pop group on the planet.
Possibly the best rock group (even before "going rock" with "Firestarter" and "Breathe" - when they were once again, briefly, assuredly, the best pop group on the planet).
"Charly" hit at almost exactly the same time as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and really ought to have knocked the latter (great as it is) completely out of contention with alla da youth. "Smells Like" was the last gasp of rock; "Charly" and "Everybody" were the first breath of some kind of transubstantiated future-rock (as essence if not generative methodology or sound per se). The Nirvana song is about teen-spirit (as lost, betrayed, compromised, coopted); the Prodigy singles reeks of it. Innocence and insolence.
This is back when hardcore was chartcore ("Everybody" kept off of #1 in the UK only by the reissued and Wayne's World-boosted "Bohemian Rhapsody").
Hardcore Continuum, yes.... but the Prodigy are also part of what I call pop's Cartoon Continuum
So right then that the samples in "Charly" come from a kiddy-targeted animated publication information film
All six episodes of Charley Says
Bonus beat
Suggested by Matthew McK in comments, a killer B I'd never heard B4, on the flip of "Your Love"
12 comments:
I think The Prodigy were hampered by the perception of being a bit of a novelty band.
(Just to clarify - I also think they were the best band of the period 91-94ish).
The fact that Charly was fixed in most people’s minds as their essential essence - novelty rave track based on kids TV sample - and the formula of sped-up samples over hyperactive beats followed on their subsequent singles could well have reinforced that impression.
There was definitely a cheesiness and lack of ‘seriousness’ that didn’t endear them to the techno cognoscenti as well. I remember an (NME?) interview with Liam between their first two albums where he specifically said he was pissed off with Aphex Twin being viewed as a genius whereas he himself was regarded as ‘a cartoon’.
It's appropriate there's a Beltram mix because on relisten a lot of Charly sounds like Gershon Kingsley's Popcorn remixed by Beltram for R&S - and that's not a bad thing.
The Prodigy were a great pop group. My favorite probably being Out Of Space - it's just crams in so many ideas and so much energy. It reminds of the way The Beatles would chuck in key changes and weird middle-eights into songs. Oh - and there's ostriches in the video for some reason.
Are we going to get "Summers Magic" and "Sesame's Treet" in this series?
Sesame's Treet coming up soon!
I can't remember if I put 'Summers Magic' in the line-up, I tried to find as many examples as I could. There were a fair number - but not so many that the trend would really seem to be a scourge, such that Mixmag could assert that "Prodigy killed rave" or was it "'Charly' killed rave"?
Yes they were dismissed by your techno cogno's as novelty act.
The essence of pop is to be a cartoon so Liam should have retorted, "all they are saying is Prodigy is a consummate pop group"
Mind you he had aspirations to be a rock group, an alternative band. Jilted Generation as Generation X etc etc.
Yeah what's great about the Prodigy tracks is they are just jam packed with ideas, switch-ups, bridges, hooks. Definitely a maximalist, excitement-crammed approach. Probably Skrillex is their inheritor, in terms of putting on a show, and squeezing as much high-fructose energization into a track. Although the only tune that I can remember is the "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites".
They were so good 91-94 they could afford to throw something as astonishing as this away as a B-side....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1ryJxlEDI
I've never heard that!
This Wikipedia page lays claim to Mark Summers inventing "Toytown Tekno": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Summers
Simon - a big part of "Energy Flash" was a defence of the likes of The Prodigy against the "techno cognoscenti" - do you think you have won that argument?
Matthew McK - Banger
re. winning the argument
Well hardcore is definitely in the canon now, considered historically "important" but I suspect a lot of people who might accept 4 Hero and the darkside stuff might still draw the line at toytown tekno and the more cheesy side of the nuum.
Also, the kind of mentality that would dismiss things of that ilk, it just endlessly reconstitutes itself - there's probably people who might acknowledge or even venerate jungle but be reflexively sniffy of things today that are - structurally, in terms of demographics but also in terms of the qualities of the music - the exact same contemporary equivalents. whatever the 2 Bad Mice of today is. Probably involving Auto-Tune.
The Good Music Society is always regrouping
I touch on some of the ironies of that in this post about Hardwax in Berlin https://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-dream-of-nineties-is-alive-in.html
That said there does to be more hipster mileage in very street, ruff'n'cheesy, hyperlocal genres like footwork or New Jersey club.
And Footwork played in Chicago means something very different to Footwork played in Brussels or probably even Indianapolis for that matter. As you well know, "The Good Music Society" is less about any sound in particular and more about social distancing from the people who listen to it.
Toytown tekno was popular - these songs were all UK chart hits that warranted appearances on TOTP. At the same time, Bryan Adams and Jimmy Nail were still having chart hits at the same time with conventional rock songs.
Toytown tekno was shamelessly populist - these samples are deeply imprinted in the young people who bought these records. And also deeply weird. The tracks that surround these samples are designed to work in early 90s raves. There is nostalgia in there but it's not the nostalgia of Britpop. it's both cruder and also more ambitious.
the problem is the Prodigy were just too polished for hardcore. They could never have displaced Nirvana precisely cos in a bitter irony afx was more in tune with the ardkore zeitgeist under his Caustic Window, analog bubblebath, Universal Indicator guises. If you listen to experience again, it actually sounds like outsider hardcore, not even hardcore proper of the rickety sl2/manix kind. It doesn't actually sound like someone brought up on the london inner city soul/reggae/electro/hip hop continuum, despite having the exact same signifiers. They're polished up, as it were. Which ironically makes Liam the proto-Squarepusher, a shocking proposition I know! But iirc both are from Essex, so what does that say? PS this is not a diss of the Prodigy, I remember listening to the Experience album on my 512 mb compact flash card with all my study notes on the way to school over and over again! I'm not even sure if the double cd flac version would even fit today let alone leave room for my documents, most probably not!
The type of hardcore your British (and I think its really important to stress British here) detroit techno pietists moan and continue to moan about is really hard, soulless European techno, as well as hyperchipmunky stuff like Noise Factory (which to me is the best music ever.) I love the dark hard techno, but being Asian my relationship with that kind of stuff is quite different and I can see a potential bad boy/ibiza records tune and a c-tank record like walk on base as being dialectically constitutive of each other. Ironically, some of the people who recoiled from hardcore's insanity on the more shall we say balearic scene gravitated the poppy hooky sound of leftfield and underworld (and later chem bros/fat boy slim.) Actually before chem bros got big they were played by djs with a prog house leaning, Justin Robertson, Andy Weatherall (occasionally.) which is why all that stuff is in vogue again and you can even see people on ilx rhapsodising about what to me is mediocre conservatism.
And actually I think truly alienating hardcore is in a weird way blocked off from even hyper-pop recuperation precisely because it's so demanding, in the Cabaret Voltaire/Front 242 mould. The pop hipster recoils from extreme cheese just as they do extreme darkness and intensity, which is why a lot of the music the pc music guys draw on is not the crude pipe organ mid 90s happy hardcore, but the chart bound clubland versions, when the production threshold of the genre was in accordance with radio/mp3 player/smartphone standards. Haphazard production (which doesn't even need to be lo fi) can always act as its own protest at standardisation, even if the template it follows is standardised. Something Adorno missed, but that's what makes him an interesting imaginary interlocutor. So I'm not sure if the concept of the good music society really makes sense here, it does seem to be a bit of a petit-bourgeois strawman, middle class intellectuals appalled by the fact that the proles can have a sense of aesthetic discernment. That might be a bit of a harsh way to put it, but I think there's something in mod/northern soul, even if it was basically white kids refusing to embrace the current black music. But actually in that sense their idea of sophistication was already outmoded. Similar to 70s reggae types who can't get with Yellowman.
One of my favourite proto-happy hardcore things is actually funnily out of Germany, released on Force inc. by Ian Pooley and DJ tonka, both who went on to make serious disco house. But you know, this is actually disco in outer space, rather than talking about outer space, as it were. Just brilliant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s8NsEK1O4A
There is actually an interview with Dido's brother, Rollo Armstrong, in one of the old Muzik magazines, where he cusses out house producers and detroit techno/dnb producers for not righting big emotional song-like hooks. and I had the realisation then that hardcore in that sense is closer to extreme metal and deep/jazz funk, the riffs are hectic, but they aren't immediately emotionally resonant or hummable. If anything, ardkore operates on the principle of microriff schizophrenia. Whereas get on your high horse and Insomnia are entirely focused on building up to the breakdown, not switching in and out shit every 8-16-32 bars.
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