Here's a terrific reported piece by the great dance music writer Tony Marcus that I assigned him when I worked at Spin as a senior editor in 1998.
The printed version - published as "Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy" - is slightly different as it went through the typical magazine process of many people poking noses in, last minute excisions for space, etc.
Below, I have corrected one of my own howlers that made it all to the magazine stands. Tony came up with a lovely bit of wordplay - Grand Theft Audio. Unfamiliar with the term Grand Theft Auto at that time (not watched enough crime films I guess) I changed it to, wince, Grand Audio Theft. Doh!
The photos by Jake Curtis were great too - fun to caption - and I wrote up a sidebar of top Big Beat tunes and Big Beat ancestors. All together, one of the highlights of my brief time at Spin (others would be getting Peter Shapiro to explain what a dubplate was to the readership, in a profile of Grooverider, and a wonderfully designed and collectively written celebration of Kraftwerk on the eve of their North American tour. This feature prompted a letter to the magazine that really pleased me, given that the publication was going through a period of excessive snark: "Finally, a piece in Spin written by people who appear to love music". )
IT'S BIG - BUT IT'S NOT CLEVER
Spin, April 1998
by Tony
Marcus
You can tell as much about a dance scene from the atmosphere in the club's toilets as on its dancefloors. To walk into the men's
room of the Big Beat Boutique in Brighton, England,
is to enter a house of lunacy. For a start, there are just as many girls here
as guys, all waiting to get into the sole
cubicle. Every time someone leaves,
there's a spontaneous cheer
from the massive line, as if we're all
attending some kind of sporting event. There's also a camera crew--who all
appear to be completely blasted on
Ecstasy, red-faced and sweating--filming
a boy who's breakdancing in front of the sink.
"All you
fucking men should get out of here and leave the loo to the ladies," snarls
an attractive but definitely
trashed-out-of-her-box girl. "That's great
love," grins the cameraman, "Can you do that again so we can film you?"
Meanwhile, the boy next to me at the urinal has got problems: both his
hands are occupied holding a cigarette
and a bottle of lager. The girl beside
him helps out by unzipping his
fly. "That's it, darling," he purrs. "Now if you can just roll back
my foreskin." He starts to urinate. She giggles. "Thanks," he sighs,
"that's lovely."
The Boutique's dancefloor is pretty
unzipped too -a typically unclassifiable Brighton crowd of
art-students, S&M devotees, ravers, mods and queers, all buzzing on diverse
cocktails of drink and drugs. The crowd
ring DJ Norman Cook in a halo
of wasted human energy. Cook--better known as Fatboy Slim-- is also "off his tits", having knocked back
a naughty pill of Ecstasy just before going onstage. Stopping a record to
scratch a single beat in and out of a rising sonic storm, Cook doles
out euphoria with just a flick of his slender
fingers. The noise is incredible, something akin to AC/DC at their most tumultous, but freeze-framed --the DJ cutting and
retriggering the powerchord to end all
worlds. To a chorus of teen-screams ,
Cook gives his audience the
rave'n'roll rush they crave. He cuts the big beat in and out, in and out, then releases it to rampage
through the speakers. And everyone goes
absolutely bonkers.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
DJ/producer Norman Cook--a/k/a Fatboy Slim-- is
currently the cool
ruler of Big Beat. Pioneered
by The Chemical Brothers, Big Beat's mix'n'blend of hip hop breakbeats, rock riffs and techno noise is blaring out of the radio and gnawing its way into the charts. In its homeland,
Big Beat is being hyped by the
English music press and record industry
as the Next Big Thing after Britpop, while in America, it's already made
its way onto MTV, both as buzzbin videos and as irresistibly peppy
background music. Chemicals-soundalikes The Propellerheads have just been signed by Dreamworks for a reportedly Prodigy-size figure.
Where's Britpop foundations are whiter-than-white Sixties pop, Big Beat's roots are a confused tangle of techno, jungle, punk, funk and heavy metal.
Unlike electronica's deliberately faceless
underground producers, though,
Big Beat artists have embraced
Britpop's doctrine of stardom-at-all-costs; they
like to play live and love to talk about their drink-and-druggy
exploits to the music press. And
"the kids" lap it up. Big Beat
appeals to ravers, because it's compatible with taking illegal stimulants
and dancing like a maniac. But it
also appeals to rockers: they can
scour the music
press for tales of hell-raising mayhem, a la Oasis,
and unlike rival new forms of post-rave
music like techstep jungle or
speed garage, Big Beat doesn't sound
avant-garde or alienating or
"too black". In fact, it's as familiar as your most dog-eared albums: a pirate-raid on pop history, a Grand Theft Audio that ransacks the most
tried-and-tested licks from Lee
Perry, Grandmaster Flash, Led Zeppelin and Edwin Starr.
"Today's
forward-looking music is about plunder," declares Chemical Brother Ed
Simons. The Chemicals' entire
career has been a massive extravaganza
of piracy, whose booty
includes hip hop's block-party breakbeats, jungle's complex rhythm-programming and acid house's hypnotic
bass-riffs. Even their first name, The Dust Brothers, was stolen outright from
the American production duo behind the Beastie Boys's early records and
Beck's Odelay. The Chems' spirit of
shameless thievery informs everything about Big Beat, even though Simons and
partner Tom Rowlands now distance
themselves from their bastard
child, preferring to consider
themselves
"mature" album artists closer in spirit to psychedelic rock.
"My problem with the Big Beat
records is that everything's done for the DJ," complains Simons. "It's all huge drops and builds, whereas a
good record should groove a bit more."
Simons has
unwittingly put his finger on one of the best
things about Big Beat: the
way its crescendo-crammed tracks
are designed as tools for the DJ, as raw material that the turntabilist can plug into the mania of the
drug-dancefloor interface. These are the
reasons why Norman Cook is making Big Beat and why--unlike the Chemical
Brothers--he enthusiastically embraces the term.
Cook is a
perfect icon for a sound based around a Frankenstein-like
patchworking of dismembered bits
of other musics. Back in the mid-Eighties, he was the drummer in indie-janglepop hitmakers The Housemartins. Swerving in a seemingly unlikely
dancefloor direction with his next group Beats International, Cook scored a UK
Number One with a dubbed-up remake of
SOS Band's "Just Be Good To Me," before retreating underground, where he
crafted a series of clubland
smashes in a plethora of styles and using a number of aliases: Freakpower,
Pizzaman, Mighty Dub Katz, and now Fatboy Slim.
"I try to make underground music, but it always
comes out as pop," he says. These involuntary crowd-pleasing instincts stem, he says, from his desire to connect with the female side of his
audience. "I make music for girls," he admits. Where techno purist boys,
he complains, get really hung up on a
specific kick-drum or synth sound,
"girls just like a good tune. Until recently I lived with three women. When I
was working in my studio, if they'd didn't come in and say 'what's this?", I'd always scrap the tune. That's the difference between
pop and underground music."
Norman Cook's home--nicknamed House of Love, and decorated
with a collection of Smiley-face
memorabilia from the early
days of UK
rave --is in Brighton, the seaside town about
an hour's drive from London
that has its own counterculture of artists, musicians, writers, actors and
weirdos. If anywhere is Big
Beat's party capital, it's Brighton. Not only does it boast the
Boutique club, it's also the base
for Skint Records, whose roster includes Fatboy Slim, Lo-Fidelity All Stars, Bentley
Rhythm Ace, and Hardknox.
The Skint
sound is a hyper-eclectic mash-up of hip hop boombastics and
stadium-rock dynamics. "When I DJ,
I'll play anything --hip hop, disco, house, drum and bass, " explains
Damian Harris, Skint's boss and producer
under the name Midfield General.
"Big Beat DJ-ing is more like listening to a jukebox, rather than a steady flow of mixing. I used to work in a record store for years, where I learned
that there's probably 25% of any genre that's any good. So I play
the good bits from everything. The only
common denominator is that they've got to have a really big
beat."
It sounds
open-minded, but some would accuse Big Beat
of parasitism--creaming off the the crowd-pleaser elements
from different sounds and scenes,
but without ever innovating
anything for itself. Genres like jungle, house and techno evolve through tunnel-vision focus and needlepoint
intricacy. "I have a helluva lot of respect for musical purists," concedes Harris. "It's true that you
need that focus for the music to progress. But on the other hand, it's frustrating
that anyone involved in that process seems to get blinkered towards
other forms of music. "
Blinker-free,
Big Beat uses Technics turntables and sampling technology to steal
anything that isn't nailed down. In the digital age, where any recorded source
can be converted to zeros and ones, this means that everything is
fair game. A true Big Beat brigand loots across the spectrum of rap and
rave sub-genres, ignoring the class and race boundaries that
separate different scenes.
In the
early Nineties, British house and techno were shaped to heighten the rush and
buzz of Ecstasy. DJ's favoured long, fluidly mixed sets that enhanced the sensurround, cocooning sensations
caused by MDMA. Big Beat's jagged eclectism reflects a post-E dance culture. Kids are fuelling their fun with polydrug cocktails that may include any or
all of the following --E, amphetamine, cocaine, ketamine, 2CB,
pot, booze,acid, psylocibin mushrooms,
downers like Temazepam, and so
on. Big Beat music similarly
jumbles up sounds that were originally
associated with specific drugs:
marijuana/jungle, MDMA/house, cocaine/garage, amphetamine/hardcore, alcohol/rock.
"I do think England's love affair with Ecstasy is
probably on the wane," says Harris.
"A lot of people have got bored with E, and they can't handle the
comedowns. I'd say Big Beat's drugs of choice are
lager and amyl nitrate."
The amyl
connection goes back to the birthplace of Big Beat--a now-legendary club called
the Heavenly Social, where the
Chemical Brothers were
resident DJ's. Back in the club's 1994-95 heyday, nobody used the term Big Beat, though. Instead, people talked about "amyl house", a reference to the club's most popular high: the inhalant 'amyl nitrate', whose fumes offer an instant
peak akin to Ecstasy but much
briefer.
A small Sunday
night club in the basement of a
Central London pub , the Social was the
brainchild of Heavenly, a record
label /artist management and PR company famous
for its hedonistic punk-meets-rave attitude."We started the Social in August '94," recalls Heavenly's Robin Turner, "because the Chemicals
were DJ-ing all these back-rooms in glitzy house clubs. Ed and
Tom would be spinning in the back to about
30 of their friends --people
who looked like freaks and who
wanted to go out and get
fucked-up on pills, then wake up
the next
morning covered in bruises and think 'Oh
God, how did I get that? Must've jumped
off the speaker stacks!'". Turner decided that somebody had to take
The Chemical Brothers
backroom scene and turn it into the main event.
Even though
the 200-capacity Heavenly Social was tiny
compared with other London
clubs, it rapidly acquired a high
profile. On a typical night -- or so the media mythology runs --you'd find Tricky and Paul Weller propping up
the bar with Manchester indie-dance band
The Charlatans, and various
members of Primal Scream, Oasis and the
Stones Roses sharing a drink or three. Alongside these Britpop luminaries were many of Big Beat's
future prime movers: Mark Jones and Sarah Francis respectively founders
of the currently hot labels Wall of Sound and Bolshi), while Richard Fearless (now in Death In Vegas), Jon
Carter (a/k/a Monkey Mafia) and
Norman Cook shared the DJ booth with the Chemicals.
Big Beat's ethos of
mixing up the styles and listening
without prejudice is
admirable. But when it comes to mixing
up different races and classes, Big
Beat looks less impressive than it
sounds. Slip inside Sonic Mook
Experiment, a new club promoted
by longtime London scenester Sean McClusky. The DJ, Barry Ashworth is sliding dancehall
ragga into hard-nosed hip hop. In the basement , a crap band think
they're the Beastie Boys, a skinny white boy who can't sing trying to chat and flow over tightly
programmed breakbeats and sprawling guitar feedback.. Sonic Mook's crowd is wearing the
Big Beat uniform: top of the range Nikes, camouflage trousers,
pencil skirts, spanking new Levi's, fur-collared parka coats, and fleeces.
They dance to hip hop, jungle and dancehall reggae. But the weird, unnerving thing is that the crowd is
almost entirely white.
"I can't
fucking stand it here," offers a boy
in the toilets, in between dabs from a sachet of pink speed, "Everyone's
wearing black fashion and moving to black beats but the only black
people in the club are the three Ecstasy dealers. It just doesn't feel
right."
It's
tempting to take Sonic Mook as a symbol
of what's wrong with Big Beat --a mainly
white, self- consciously cool,
media/music industry set turning onto old
skool hip hop (Schoolly D, Eric B) ten years after the fact. Racial tourism is a long running syndrome in
British pop, going back to the Mods with their passion for black American
R&B. But there's another twist to this
story: Big Beat is in many ways a replay
of another British sound from six years ago -- the multiracial, working class style of rave music known
as "hardcore". Like Big Beat, 1991-92 hardcore was made from fast breakbeats, dub bass and zany samples, a
hybrid that eventually evolved into jungle. Which makes Big Beat
something like jungle's unsophisticated cousin--sharing the latter's hectic breakbeats and heavy bass, but favouring much more simplistic rhythm
programming.
"Jungle producers come up
with some great production tricks, but
as music I just can't get into it," says Norman Cook. "It's all
very intelligent. I don't really do intelligent
music, I'm more into mindless boogie."
"Mindless boogie"
just about sums up Big Beat's undeniable appeal--disco's glitterball
cheese fused with Seventies
greaseball rock-riffage. As such it recalls an earlier
phase of British rave'n'roll:
Manchester bands like
Happy Monday and Stones Roses, tracks like Primal Scream's "Loaded" and
EMF's "Unbelievable". Like the early Nineties
indie-dance crossover bands, Big
Beat's star DJs and groups--Jon Carter/Monkey Mafia, Derek Dahlarge, Dub Pistols, Death In Vegas-- fill column
inches with drug talk and
outrageous anecdotes.
Often it seems like Big Beat DJ's and artists are more out-of-it than the kids on the
dancefloor. It's chemical excess
as a spectator sport, and the opposite of club and rave culture, where DJs know how to
tantalise the drugged bodies of their audiences but
are usually sober themselves while on the job.
"With Big Beat, it's the other way round, " confirms Norman Cook . "It's the old rock'n'roll thing--you want
the stars to be larger than life and more
fucked up than you are."
Like
rock'n'roll stars, Big Beat DJs get groupies
too. Take the Girls Brigade, a gang of female London media-types who frequent the scene. Their exploits--which
include sharing LSD with The
Headrillaz, attending debauched
post-Boutique sessions at Norman
Cook's Brighton apartment, and vomiting at the feet of the Chemical Brothers during a
Heavenly Social boat party--make
the girl-hooligan's behavior
in the Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" video look relatively tame.
"From a groupie's point of view, Big Beat is
wicked," says Miranda, one Brigade
member. "The Big Beat lot are people you can
get pissed with, 'cos they like to get really
pissed. It's not hard to end up back at a DJ's flat after a club.
I've met loads of people who've
shagged Jon Carter."
Although
its boorish antics seem to cross gender
divides, Big Beat has become synonomous with the British phenomenon known as New
Lad. Behaviorally
equivalent to the fratboy, the lad is
working class rather than a college
student. A backlash against the Eighties notion of the sensitive, feminized New Man, the New Lad has spawned an
entire industry of masculine-and-proud-of-it
products and media in the UK.
Perhaps the most successful is the huge-selling magazine Loaded-- named
after the Primal Scream rave''n'roll anthem "Loaded" and its Roger
Corman biker-movie sample "we wanna get loaded and have a good time".
New Lad is
also a form of class tourism:
middle class English males envying the coarse vitality of their working class
counterparts, aping their pleasures
in a cartoonish flurry of soccer,
porn, lager and kebabs puked up on
the pavement in the wee hours of Sunday
morning. Happy Mondays's Shaun Ryder and Bez were proto-New Lads; Noel and
Liam Gallagher are Superlads. When Noel collaborated with The Chemical
Brothers on "Setting Sun", it was the cultural coup
of the decade --Britpop's delinquency fused with rave's 'aving it hedonism.
Apres
"Setting Sun", the deluge.
"You've got groups coming up now like Regular Fries
and Campag Veloct," says Heavenly's Robin Turner, "all trying to approximate The Chemicals or The Prodigy, who themselves were dance bands trying to
approximate rock bands."
Lo-Fidelity All Stars--Skint Records
bright hopefuls for 1998-- typify the new breed. Performing at a series of gigs organised around weekly music paper
New Musical Express's Brat Awards, the All Stars combine rave
music's sequenced rhythms with live
musicianship. Or at least the appearance
of live playing: for all the
presence of a drummer onstage,
most of the audible rhythm comes is programmed. Despite the fact that the euphoric highpoints of their show
come from the machine-beats and samples
(like the vocal intro from
The Breeders's "Cannonball" that's looped on their single "Disco Machine Gun"), the Lo-Fidelity All Stars project themselves as a rock band; the
singer emulates Liam Gallagher's surly
cool. And the All Stars are received as rock by the audience, who mosh violently as if attending an Offspring gig.
"It's great that indie bands have
realised you don't have to be rigidly stuck to the guitar/bass/drums/vocals format, that
you don't have to sit there and think
it's enough to rewrite the Beatles songbook," says Turner. "If that's what Big Beat has inspired
then that's fucking brilliant."
Not
everyone agrees. Dance purists think Big Beat is just rock music tarted up with ideas ripped off techno and house. They think Big Beat's shift of emphasis from sonic innovation to
rockstar posturing is a regressive move;
Jon Carter's forthcoming cover
version of Creedence
Clearwater would confirm their
worst fears. Trad rock fans, for their part, are not
placated by these nods to rock's heritage. They dismiss Big Beat as inane party music without songcraft or meaningful lyrics, let alone the redemptive power and resonance of your
Verves or Radioheads. And it's
true: despite the critical
plaudits, Big Beat's long-players lack the
widescreen emotional range and depth you
expect from a great album.
Like dance music, Big Beat reaches
its aesthetic peak on the 12 inch single;
even a brilliant Big Beat LP like
Fatboy Slim's Better Living Through Chemistry is more like a greatest
hits collection than an album.
Big Beat
could so easily alienate both sides of the pop divide its music
rampages across. But at the
moment, it seems all-conquering. It uses rock'n'roll's
hell-for-leather attitude to show up how
so much of today's electronic
dance music is po-faced and purist;
it deploys club culture's sonic science
to make trad guitar bands look
terribly dated.
And that science is
all about triggering the rush, the quintessential sensation that
unites house, techno , hardcore
and jungle. The rush is the peak of the drug-DJ-dancefloor interface, a synergy of MDMA, music and sheer adrenalin.
Not all club musics service the rush (trip hop and ambient
interface better with
marijuana's langor, for instance.) But Big Beat rushes--faster even than its ancestor-sources, in fact, its velocity boosted by amyl
nitrate's heart-bolting metabolic-acceleration
effect.
Norman Cook
is king of Big Beat because he knows how
to manipulate the rush. His druggernaut remixes
of Cornershop's "Brimful of
Asha' and Wildchild's "Renegade Master"--two records that united rock papers and dance mags in delirious praise-- aren't deep or meaningful or any of that classic rock crap; nothing exists but strategies for excitement, a collection of climaxes
and multiple orgasms.
"The less time I spend on a record, the
better it seems to work," grins
Cook. "It's about capturing the moment. I don't try and make it too complicated."
From punk to funk, rockabilly to rave,
simplicity is what counts, immediacy is all. Big Beat, for all its faults, understands this.
See, the truth is that the
greatest secret never told about rave culture was that it was always more rock'n'roll than rock itself. Instead of the rock star living out your wildest dreams for, you were your own private Jagger
chemically-hurled across an
ocean of delirious peaks and insatiable
desires. Commandeering rave's
pills and thrills, its rushes and explosions,
but packaging those
illicit energies inside the appearance of
rock form, Big Beat is 1998's number one bullet.
Which leave just one million-dollar question: Are you gonna bite?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
SIX OF THE BIGGEST BIG BEATS EVER
measured by
Simon Reynolds
FATBOY SLIM
"Punk To Funk", from Better Living Through
Chemistry (Skint/Astralwerks)
Of all the
Fatboy's classics--"Going Out of My Head", "Everybody Needs A 303", "Song For Lindy", the remix of
Wildchild's "Renegade Master"--"Punk To Funk" is Norman Cook's
finest moment, by a whisker. For a small eternity, it's just chunky breaks and
phat-verging-on-obese bass that wobbles like love
handles at a Weight-Watchers disco, then
a cheesadelic
EZ-listening horn section fades
up, huffing and puffing and blowing the roof off the sucker.
THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS
"Loops of Fury", from the Loops of Fury EP (Junior
Boy's Own/Astralwerks)
The Chems
at their most crudely rabble-rousing--a
black-and-white riot of stuttering beats, convulsive fuzzguitar-riffage and floorquaking electro sub-bass, plus sampled crowd uproar designed to
trigger a feedback loop in the audience. Cheesy and proud of it, the Chemical
Brothers have yet to meet an old skool rap or classic rave cliche they haven't wanted to steal. But when their collage of potent cliches sounds so electrifying, who cares? Extra
back-in-the-day points for the title's
twist on Rakim's "Lyrics of Fury".
UBERZONE
"The Brain", from the Space Kadet EP (City of Angels)
The best
producer working in "funky
breaks"--America's equivalent to Big Beat--California's Uberzone
distinguishes himself from rivals like The Crystal Method and DJ Icey by bringing a thrillingly
chilly early Eighties
electro feel to the party. As
with all the best rave fodder, every hook in
"The Brain" works as both melody
and rhythm: chiming tablas,
brain-eraser scratching, itchy-and-squelchy acid-house squiggles, icy plinks redolent ofl early Nineties English bleep-and-bass acts like Unique 3, and pressure-drop basslines
that rival jungle's low-end seismology.
RASMUS
"Afro (Blowing in the Wind)" from the Mass
Hysteria EP (Bolshi)
Old skool
rap sliced and diced into
locked-groove glossolalia, 78 r.p.m. squeaky voices, scratchadelic mayhem, farty basslines and jittery beats--Rasmus is
shaping up as the most boisterous Big Beat
provider after Fatboy Slim.
BENTLEY RHYTHM ACE
"Return of the Hardcore
Jumble Carbootechnodisco
Roadshow", from Bentley
Rhythm Ace (Skint/Astralwerks)
BRA may be
a bunch of jackanapes, but they've
sho'nuff got skillz. This is simply one of the best dancefloor productions of the late Nineties, a jamboree of
pilfered elements each of which
is there purely to put a grin on your face and a wiggle in your hips. As with Fatboy's "Going Out Of My Head", the killer hook is a frenetic powerchord-riff that draws the dots
between 1966 mod's amphetamine-frenzy
freakbeats and 1998 Big Beat's pills-and-Pils fueled pandemonium.
MONKEY MAFIA--"Lion In The Hall" (Deconstruction)
Madcap
drum-rolls, stereophonic tomfoolery,
dancehall reggae chants "timestretched" jungle-style so that the sample seems to crack apart, more percussion than you can shake a stick
at--DJ/producer Jon Carter stoops to all manner
of audio-stunts and cheap tricks
in order to conquer the dancefloor.
BIG BEAT ANCESTORS
JEAN-JACQES PERREY -- "E.V.A" (Vanguard, 1970)
PIERRE HENRY & MICHEL COLOMBIER---"Psyche
Rock", from Messe Pour Le Temps
Present (Philips, 1968)
These two
tracks--one by EZ-listening
Moog-maniac Jean Jacques Perrey, the other by musique
concrete composer Pierre
Henry--sound like the music playing in the discotheque scene in every swingin' Sixties movie you ever heard: Booker T & the MG's hopped up on
acid-spiked punch, fatback funky shuffle grooves daubed
with woogly synth-gurgles and electro-acoustic blips. Non-coincidentally,
"E.V.A" and "Psyche Rock" were both remixed by Fatboy Slim last year.
COLDCUT-- "Beats + Pieces" (Ahead Of Our Time,
1987)
Although their current
Ninjatune output gets filed as
"trip hop", back in '87 Coldcut pioneered the British fad for
"DJ records". Taking their cues from the cut-ups of Steinski and Mantronix,
Coldcut --alongside similar crews like S'Express, Bomb The Bass,
M/A/R/R/S and Renegade Soundwave--used
cheap samplers to make breakbeat-and-wacky-soundbite collages. As funky as hip hop but fast-paced enough to be played alongside house's machine beats, these DJ records were Big Beat
avant la lettre.
DJ TRAX--"We Rock The Most", from I Man, I DJ EP
(Moving Shadow, 1992)
HYPER-ON EXPERIENCE--"Thunder Grip", from Deaf In
The Family EP (Moving
Shadow, 1993)
Hip hop on Ecstasy, UK
hardcore rave was sheer Loony Toons mania: breakbeats swerve and
skid like automobiles in Penelope
Pitstop, and every cranny of the mix is infested with hiccupping
vocal-fragments and rap chants sped up to sound like pixies. Somewhere between a
cartoon caper and a car crash, these Moving Shadow classics are the Skint
sound five years too soon--which
either makes hardcore
astonishingly ahead-of-its-time, or Big Beat shamefully backward.
JOSH WINK--"Higher State of Consciousness (Tweekin Acid
Funk Mix)"
(Strictly Rhythm, 1995)
This
dreadlocked Philadelphian made the prototypical "funky breaks"
track--simple looped breakbeat,
screeching "acid builds" (Roland 303 bass-riffs), vocal timestretched to fraying point--and sold half-a-million
records worldwide in the process.
.
