60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “Firestarter”—The Prodigy

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Rob celebrates the song “Firestarter” while looking back at the electronic band the Prodigy. While contextualizing the band, he also discusses the backlash surrounding their song “Smack My Bitch Up.” Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Jeremy D Larson Producer: Justin Sayles Associate Producer: Jonathan Kermah Audio Intern: Kai Grady Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Charles Holmes, the Ringer Music Show. And I'm Cole Kushner from Dysect, and Charles and I are teaming up to create Last Song Standing, a new show where we determine an artist's single best song by debating our way through their entire catalog. And for our first season, we're covering Kendrick Lamar. We're talking good kid to Pimple Butterfly, Dan, Mr. Morow, the mixtapes, the Lusies, and the features. Listen to Last Song Standing on the Dysk podcast feed only on Spotify.

I cannot in good conscience recommend to you. the 1997 film Spawn based on the ultra-90s Macabra blockbuster comic book series greatly enjoyed by the scariest kid you knew in the eighth grade and starring Michael Jai White in the titular role

of Spawn. Spawn was either the devil or a willing agent of the devil or an unwilling pawn of the devil or an outright antagonist, hardcore sassing. The devil, the details escape me. Those aren't details. A very basic plot description escapes me. What I can tell you with confidence is that Spawn

had a dog. I do remember Spawn's cute little dog. I remember the dog's name, but I'd rather not say it, partly because of Beyonce, which sounds made up, but it's absolutely true. And I remember that at one point he goes to hell, Spawn, not the dog. And it seemed to me as a grumpy and opinionated 19 year old sitting in a movie theater in 1997, that hell, depicted here using the finest computerized special effects 1997 had to offer looked like trash hell looked like trash i apologize if you worked on this movie i'm sure you've done wonderful work subsequently uh or maybe previously but i need to live my pissy 19 year old truth for a second here hell looked like what it would look like if you tried to play doom

the macabra first person shooter video game doom on the oldest and shoddiest computer at library in 1988. To even watch this movie, everyone sitting in the theater had to pick up and manually load a giant old school floppy disk directly into the movie theater screen. The

denizens of hell, the huddled masses, the damned. I think it was supposed to look like they were flailing or writhing or what have you, but it looked to me like they were dancing. Hell looked like your meanest local librarian's false conception of what a

rave looked like. You can check. You can watch this movie on Netflix right now. You can also click on your profile pick in the upper right corner and then hit a count and then click on your profile pick again and then click viewing activity and then click the Ghostbusters circle with it a line through its symbol to hide Spawn from your viewing history so that even the Netflix algorithm doesn't find out you were watching Spawn. Hell, as depicted in the movie Spawn, looked like a lower tier Las Vegas nightclub or my oblivious. 19-year-old false conception of what a lower tier

Las Vegas nightclub would look like possibly the filmmakers depicted hell that way on purpose, but I doubt it. Bad movie, okay, which is not a crime against humanity, but I sure took it personally because the soundtrack to spawn had led me to believe

that this was going to be the raddest and most electrifyingly futuristic movie ever born. Yeah, the song, Can't You Trip like I do? Parentheses, can't you? N parentheses, trip like I do. A collaboration between the semi-industrial rock band filter

and the semi-rave-like electronic music duo, the Crystal Method, led me to believe that the Spawn movie was going to be better than fucking Blade Runner. I have no explanation for this. I was 19. That's the explanation. Hold on, though. Is it even possible?

Have I really done 73 episodes of this do? show and not yet discussed with you the wondrous world of 90s trash bro junk drawer action movie soundtracks? I haven't. Okay, that's my oversight and I do apologize. Do you hear something? Do you hear that? I do. I approach the topic of 90s junk drawer action movie soundtracks in any situation from any angle and this song just starts playing as though I summoned or manifested it. Look out. It's freak mama. So this is freak mama. a song title that I can totally say out loud without laughing and a dignified and absolutely necessary collaboration between the revered Seattle rock band Mud Honey and the also revered Seattle rapper

Sir Mix-a-Lot. I want to put you in the mud, honey. You see what he did there? It's pretty good. As undoubtedly you are aware, Freak Mama appears on the unapologetically bonkers soundtrack to the 1993 film Judgment Night, which does not exist. This movie, that's right. I wrote a thing for The Ringer about 90s, Trash Bro, Junk, Roar, action movie, soundtracks, and I was proud to break the news that Judgment Night is not a real movie. No one you know has seen Judgment Night. I don't care if you say you've seen it, you are lying. Not a real movie. Judgment Night was a sciop, if I am using that word correctly, a

sciop to justify the existence of the unapologetically bonkers judgment night soundtrack, which mashed together rappers and rock bands the way a two-year-old smashes together random action figures, Blanc, Blank, Blanc, Sonic Youth in Cyprus Hill, Teenage Fan Club and De La Sol, Faith No More and Booja Tribe, Pearl Jam in Cypress Hill, and who else? Who else? Oh, right, Mud Honey and Sir Mix-A-Lot. Oh my God. Freak Mama led me to believe that Judgment Night was a cross between the Godfather and the Godfather Part 2. Just the best film ever made.

Perpetually topping sight and sound magazines once a decade poll of the greatest films of all time. I'm just kidding. Judgment Night is not a real movie. They made up the fake movie Judgment Night just to sell the real soundtrack to Judgment Night so they could try to get doofy, hard-rocking teenagers into rap music. Also, the greatest film of all time didn't come out until 1994. The Crow, on the other hand, is a real-ass movie. The Crow is the only movie.

I saw The Crow in the theater as well. And when somebody, I think it was the bad guy, somebody in the movie was driving somewhere, and the Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots started playing on the car radio. And I had a sublime moment sitting in the theater, of recognizing the song playing in the car on screen in the movie. I had a that's chappy moment if you are online enough to get that reference. And if you aren't and you don't, then God bless you truly.

Remember how rad Stone Temple Pilots drummer Eric Kretz's drum fill is during the last chorus of the big empty? Of course you do. That's so rad. The Crow soundtrack on which 9-inch Nails covers Joy Division, Henry Rollins, the Rollins, the Rollins band covers suicide. Pantara covers poison idea. And the cure rage against the machine that Jesus and Mary Chain and my life

with the thrill kill cult are mashed together at last. The Crow soundtrack was a foundational piece of my identity when I was 16. Best 20 bucks I ever spent. The Crow soundtrack, gloomy but accessible. Violence but harmless.

Surly but sensitive. Goth but not really. Hard, but also pretty funny. If you thought about it too hard, sing it, Henry. Hilarious. A sequel called the Crow-Colon City of Angels arrived in 1996, and I saw that movie in the theater as well, but I don't remember anything about it except that Iggy Pop was in it.

But soundtrack-wise, the bad news is this time we get Bush covering Joy Division. The better news is there is a filter song called Jurassicol, where the guy from Filter just complains about old people, the financial burden of old people. It's a pretty good song. The much better news is we get whole covering Fleetwood Max Gold Dust Woman and the very best news is we get white zombie covering I'm Your Boogie Man by Casey and the Sunshine Band. Sing it, Rob Zombie. Hilarious on purpose. I could bombard you with stupid 90s alt rock movie soundtrack Arcana for the rest of the day, but I won't probably because all you really need to know is that in the 90s,

when kids were still buying CDs, and buying CDs was the only reliable way to get access to individual songs. Crow-style junk drawer alternative music soundtracks had a fun little moment that cost you $20 a pop to experience. There are

quote-unquote prestige alternative soundtracks from this era, singles, clueless, train-spotting, but nowadays I'm drawn to the dumbest and least prestigious examples imaginable. Did you know that divinels the Australian band

that brought you I touch myself did you know that divinels covered Roxy Music's Love is the drug for the soundtrack to the unfortunately

very real 1993 film Super Mario Brothers based on the quite popular and not at all macabra platforming video game with Bob Hoskins

in the titular role of Mario I'm gonna level with you I never saw that movie and I've never been able to bring myself to actually listen to divinels covering love is the drug. Let's listen to it for the first time together. Let's do it and be legends.

That's always been my favorite part of that song. In my years as a single man, I often fantasized about approaching a single lady and I just say go and she just say yes. Obviously it never happened. As with Judgment Night, these soundtracks were also designed to get dumbass vanilla rock and roll-and-roll-loving teenager. such as myself to listen to some other kinds of music for a change. These trashy movie soundtracks were trial balloons for whole-ass musical genres. And so it was in 1997 when the spawn soundtrack tried to get America hooked on a fun new style called Electronica.

Filter and the Crystal Method really vibed together, I have to admit. It's 1997 and Rock is Dead, FYI. Trotica is the future. Electronic music, dance music, rave, big beat. Call it whatever you want as long as you also slap down a $20 bill and buy it. The spawn soundtrack

is a marginally less bonkers judgment night sort of deal. Metallica and DJ spooky, the butthole surfers and Moby, Corn and the Dust Brothers, Marilyn Manson and the sneaker pimps who hated each other, FYI. Oh, hey, it's our old friend Henry Rollins.

And now he's hooked up with the rad jungle DJ and producer Goldie. That song's called T4 Strain. It's about marijuana and damnation. Also on the spawn soundtrack, This Occurs. The song is called One Man Army, no hyphen all caps,

a righteous collaboration between Rage Against the Machine, guitar god Tom Morello, and The Prodigy, the English electronic music group. The Prodigy. That's Prodigy vocalist, Maxim rapping there,

inviting you to taste the back of his crystal fist. This is the song that's playing in the Spawn movie when Spawn goes to trash hell. That's probably not true. I have no idea. The guitar solo is pretty silly and totally dope, though, because of course it is. Listen, One Man Army is

not the best song on the Spawn soundtrack. The song featuring Slayer and Atari Teenage Riot is better. But in 1997, you couldn't try to convince dumb-ass teenagers that rock and roll was dead and they maybe ought to get into electronic music instead without getting the prodigy involved sometimes soundtracks work like this throw in a mediocre song if only to

remind people of that artist's life-changing transcendent song the spawn movie came out on august first 1997 just a couple weeks earlier in mid-july the prodigy had the number one album in america called the fat of the land if you were a dumbass teenage at the time. Maybe you'd forgotten that title, but not this one. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 74th episode of 60 songs that explained the 90s, and this week we are discussing Fire Starter by the Prodigy. A while back we tweeted out a poll where you could vote for the song in an upcoming episode of this show, and the options included Fire Starter, Bitter Sweet Symphony, you can't touch this, fucking run, tub thumping, shoop, only want to be with you. It was a good day. It was a good

day, stay, I miss you, and live in La Vida Loca, and Firestarter did not win, but I'm doing it anyway, because do you know who I am? That's right. That's who I am. I'm the bitch you hated. Filt infatuated. Yeah. The prodigy are based in the town of Braintree in Essex, England, northeast of London.

Almost anything written about the prodigy feels compelled to mention that Essex is a poorly regarded region of England. Rolling Stone basically called it the New Jersey of England. That's rude. I don't want to go there now, but it's still rude. The prodigy at their height here in the Firestarter era consisted of four guys. You got Liam Howlett, who did everything musically, the musician, the producer, the primary songwriter, the obvious leader, the quiet dictator. got Maxim with a crystal fist, formerly Maxim reality. Maxim is a vocalist and occasional MC. You got the dancer Leroy Thornhill. When the prodigy make the cover of Rolling Stone in

August 1997, that article will describe Leroy Thornhill with the brief parenthetical, quote, who is unfeasibly tall and dances, end quote. That's it. Unfeasibly tall and dances. I quite liked that description. A couple years earlier in a Mix Mag article about the prodigy, Leroy Thornhill is described as rye and lanky and opting for steak. That's it. Leroy had a great gig. It appears. You know how everyone talks about the guy and the Mighty Mighty Boss Tones who just danced the official Mighty Mighty Boston dancer? That guy and Leroy had it all figured out. Who else? Who else? Ah yes. Finally you got Keith Flint. also danced in The Prodigy until he became a singer, a frontman, a generational focal point,

a self-inflicted mind detonator. Firestarter was the first song Keith Flint ever sang on record. And Fire Starter is the reason that when the prodigy made the cover of Rolling Stone, it's just Keith Flint on the cover. The article written by Chris Heath takes great pains to describe Keith Flint's current hair situation. quote, his hair looking from the front and transcribing from left or right currently goes green, flat, green, towering spike, black, flat, blonde, flat, black, flat, orange, towering spike, blonde flat, end quote. Plus the raccoon eyes, the pitch black coal makeup around Keith's size and the nose piercing, among other piercings. Keith Flint was a delightfully alarming looking human. He passed away in 2019 and what was reportedly,

but not quite officially ruled a death by suicide. He was 49. He was the fire starter. The twisted fire starter. In this circumstance, I always debate whether to mention a death like this immediately or wait until later, but I usually decide to say it right away.

So it doesn't seem like some stupid dramatic reveal. So I'm going to let Keith Flint describe for you, the scene, the environment, the lifestyle, which the prodigy emerged in late 80s, early 90s, rave scene England. This is Keith talking to Rolling Stone, but his concern that the colossal rave scene in England has gotten

over colossal and watered down and commodified and sullied by empty lifestyle signifiers. Just forget it's me talking. This is Keith talking. Quote, the emergence of the glow stick, silver foil, glittery face paint, and the future. Then people were talking about the internet. That hasn't got any fucking thing to do with the party scene. Fuck the internet. Fuck playstations. We broke into warehouses, right? We parked our cars and main roads. Ten cars wide, a thousand cars thick, with people leaning out of their windows at one in the morning going,

you can't park there. Fuck you. I'm going to park here. Take my car away. I don't want my car. I'm going to get in that building and I want to party. And you used to run to this building, police and stuff and dive in through the window and lock the windows up. And then the riot police used to turn up with the helmets and the sticks and the dogs and the shields. And you used to party until you were dragged out of that place. And that has got nothing to do with silver foil and circuit boards and fucking craftwork. It was the rebellion, the rebellion, knowing that you was a part of something that in many years time is going to be as romantic to a young person as the hippie person was in the 60s, end quote.

So, however far behind you think America was, in terms of the gigantic scale, mass market, 10 cars wide and 1,000 cars thick embrace of the rave scene, of dance music, of the infinite and celestial possibility of ecstasy-fueled electronic music, America was farther behind than you think. America sucked at this forever. Wow. We suck. America was the Essex, England of the world in terms of wrapping our puny little minds around the life-changing glories of dance music.

In Chicago, we got incredible people literally inventing house music. In Detroit, we got incredible people literally inventing techno. In most of the rest of the United States, we got people with no fucking idea of the seismic importance of what's happening in Chicago and Detroit. Am I over generalizing? Maybe. Am I nervously projecting my own sheepish, youthful ignorance onto the entire country? No. America is late to this party. All right.

America very much gets to the party eventually. Of course. Let me enthusiastically recommend you the 2016 book, The Underground is Massive. How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America by the great critic and author Michaelangelo Motos. But we're late. America historically. In that Rolling Stone article, Leroy Thornhill, who is

unfeasibly tall in dances, is being interviewed by some other journalist who says, there's a buzz that you could be the future of rock and roll in America. What do you feel about that? And Leroy says, we could be dead tomorrow. We're not the future of nothing. Take us

for what we are now. America is 10 years behind the dance scene anyway. End quote. Rude. but accurate, Leroy. The Fat of the Land in 1997 is the prodigy's third full-length album. But it's not just that America was slow to catch on of the prodigy.

It's that we were slow to catch on to the idea of the prodigy as the charismatic and boorish knuckleheads who are going to ruin the rave scene for everybody. Firestarter is not the first prodigy song that allegedly gets too huge for its own good or for society's own good. No, that honor would go to the first prodigy song. Oh, wow. So this song is called Charlie, Charlie with a Y, and it is the prodigies first single, released in August 1991. Liam Halleck grows up in Essex. The first musical group he ever loves is the specials, the great English Sky Revival crew. Rolling Stone says, he remembers how hard they looked on the back cover with the trill bees and

the suits and the shades and the missing teeth. They had that attitude and edge. He never really liked anything that was truly mainstream, and he never has. End quote. Young Liam loved early rap music. He loved Grandmaster Flash. Young Liam's first concert ever was Africa Bombata and word of mouth at Wembley Stadium. Young Liam was an aspiring bee boy, a break dancer, a hip-hop producer.

That aspiration didn't go so well for Liam. back to Braintree he went, where he bought himself a fancy keyboard, a Roland W30 sampler workstation, and voila, Charlie with a Y. And the good news is that young Liam Hallett gets to be on the cover of a magazine. He appears in August 1992 in the cover of the famed British dance music publication MixMag. The bad news is Liam is on the cover of MixMag holding a gun to his head. Above the headline, the prodigy. Did Charlie kill rave? With a

question mark. The old journalism rule if the headline is a question, the answer is no, applies here. But nonetheless, Liam was quite displeased. A future prodigy video for the song Fire will feature the members of the prodigy huddled around a campfire consisting of old copies

of Mix Mag. Fair enough. But it's true enough that Charlie kicks off a quite disconcerting trend of dance music novelty singles, coily sampling children's programming. I do apologize for this. But here we have the English rave group

Smart E's, Smart Capital E's, performing their minor hit Sesame's Treat. That's T-R-E-E-T. Do you see the various things they did there? Sorry about that. I am sorry. I'm just illustrating a point.

I do apologize. So this whole Mix-Mag article is basically yelling at the Prodigy for pushing the underground UK rave scene catastrophically overground. Now it's mainstream. Now it's lame. Now you can't even go out anymore because you're surrounded by bandwagon hopping

dopes who want to hear the Sesame Street song. And my favorite part of this interview is when Keith Flint at this point still just the alarming looking dancer responding to this idea of wishing raves could go back underground. He says, let's be quite honest.

Bosch a few eaves down your neck and you're somewhere else anyway. Drugs fuck you up. If you go out somewhere and you take three E's, for instance, you go to such a different planet that whether you're in 89 or 92, I don't think there's going to be much difference. End quote. Accurate, Keith. The first Prodigy album comes out in 1992 and is called Experience. That song is called Winded Up.

Notably, the video for Winded Up is footage of the prodigy touring America in the early 90s hanging out at Randy's Donuts in LA and so forth with a giant donut on the roof. Some people in America were clued into The Prodigy immediately, just not a ton of people. So it's fundamentally misunderstanding the whole point of music like this, to even talk about music like this in terms of full-length albums, in terms of autours like Liam Howlett, certainly in terms of flashy frontmen like Keith Flint. Let me also enthusiastically recommend the book Energy Flash, a journey through rave music and dance culture by the great English critic and author Simon Reynolds. It first came out in 1998. In America at first, it was called Generation Ecstasy into the world of techno and rave culture.

Simon has since updated the book a couple times to address the EDM of it all. So early on, an energy flash. Simon writes about his early experiences going to raves, and he says, it was some revelation to experience this music in its proper context as a component in a system. It was an entirely different and unrock way of using music, the anthemic track rather than the album, the total flow of the DJ's mix, the alternative media of pirate radio and specialist record stores, music as a synergistic partner with drugs, and the whole magic, tragic cycle of living for the weekend and paying for it with a midweek come down. There was a liberating joy in surrending to the radical anonymity of the music and not keeping.

caring about the names of tracks or artists. The meaning of the music pertained to the macro level of the entire culture, and it was so much huger than the sum of its parts. End quote. The prodigy from the onset threatened that system, that culture, because they give people the idea to sample the Sesame Street theme. But more to the point, the prodigy are just too charismatic, too singular, too unignorable as individuals.

They have a tangible rock star magnetism in a scene hostile to the very notion of rockstar magnetism. When the prodigy show up early in his book, Energy Flash, Simon writes, despite their exhilarating merger of underground energy and pop appeal, the prodigy were regarded as hopelessly uncool by tastemakers, end quote. But then again, you'd think this was a culture, at least theoretically hostile, to the very notion of tastemakers. But of course, you can't really keep tastemakers away from anything. That's a song called Out of Space.

The sampled reggae singer is the great Max Romeo. The sampled rapper there is the great Cool Keith back in his 80s ultra-magnetic MC's days. Cool, Keith in particular, is a patron saint of the prodigy. The experience record hangs together tremendously well as a whole. In 1992, is not necessarily flush with dance music records. anybody anywhere that hung together tremendously well as a whole. But Liam Howlett, Renegade Autour, feels the sting of a major magazine accusing him of

killing rave. The second prodigy record, released in 1994, and called Music for a Jilted Generation, and featuring a cover that recently spooked my 11-year-old son, begins like this. So, I've decided to take my work back underground to stop it falling into the wrong hands. Make a note of it. This song's called Their Law. That's not Keith Flint quite yet. That's a guy from the English rave rock band Pop Will Eat Itself.

The um and fuck them is Parliament. The UK governing body, not George Clinton's. Parliament, the law and their law is the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which sought to clamp down on raves of the fuck you take my car. I'm going to get in that warehouse and party variety. The fact that this song, their law, sounds here in 1994, like the 1997, let's bong some DJs and rock bands together,

spawn soundtrack, is, you know, notable. Here's what it sounds like to be ahead of your time. This is somewhat hacky of me, but I will live my truth and concede you that while listening to music for a jilted generation and a song called Poison in particular, the words that kept flashing into my head were, dirtbag DJ's Shadow.

Ooh, this song too, called Three Kilos. This song started a run of smash rave singles that featured flutes. I'm just kidding. I'm probably kidding. The drums there are sampled from Good Living, parentheses, Good Lovin by Bernard Purdy, the godlike soul drummer, Bernard Purdy, one of the greatest drummer ever born. The Prodigy, this whole project is a spectacular mid-air collision between bad taste

an unbelievably fantastic taste. The first two Prodigy records are pretty great. The first two Prodigy records sell jack shit in America. No offense to the Prodigy. No offense to America. We're talking 1992, 93, 94, when Rock is not dead. America's got bigger fish to fry. By 1995, though, we got, you know, calamities.

Rock in the classic sense, classic rock in the current sense is getting worse, is getting dead or. Meanwhile, dance music, however you choose to define and categorize it, is getting increasingly fantastic. This song is called Chemical Beats from our dear friends, The Chemical Brothers, a jovial English duo whose first album called Exit Planet Dust comes out in 95. I think it was last summer I was blasting this song through headphones while doing suburban-ass yard work. My kids were running around my front yard with the neighbor's kids. They're all having a squirt gun fight or whatever. We're deep into COVID already, so I'm not used to seeing my kids play with other kids.

And I get weirdly reclaimed about it, right? And I had this odd sort of euphoric. It's summer feeling. I was not rolling on E, obviously. I was rolling on iced coffee. I tell you this because I figure you deserve to know how I personally am usually processing this music. Shut up and drop the beat, Rob. So Michael Angelo Motos, who wrote that book, The Underground is Massive.

Also wrote a great piece for NPR back in 2011 called How, the major labels sold electronica to America. And he talks about how Rick Rubin, super producer and rap rock godfather, Rick Rubin, almost signed the Prodigy around 93 after their first record, but then didn't. Liam Howlett was very into that idea. Prodigy were on electoral records in the United States back then, and Liam says, I didn't like being on electoral records because they were always trying to get shit remixes done by people we didn't like. Rick came to our LA gig. We were like, shit, man, Rick Rubin is here. I wanted his autograph.

I grew up on the records he produced. End quote. Rick Rubin teaming up with the prodigy would have been rad. It also would have been the broiest thing imaginable, but so be it. Too bad. Didn't happen. So the Chemical Brothers break in America first with Exit Planet Dust here in 1995 to a modest but quite noticeable degree.

The term of art, the semi-corny genre name assigned to the Chemical Brothers at this point is Big Beat. The NPR piece quotes Norman Cook, the DJ in Brighton, England club Improzzario, soon to be better known as Fat Boy Slim, and Norman says, the name came from our club, the Big Beat boutique, which I'm tremendously proud of. I always thought the formula of Big Beat was the break beats of hip-hop, the energy of acid house, and the pop sensibilities of the Beatles, with a little bit of punk sensibility, all rolled into one. People like the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers. We saw it as very similar to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who grew up listening to Soul Records and Blues Records, then sold an English version of it, back to America.

In April 1997, the Chemical Brothers put out their second record called Dig Your Own Hole, which is the closest any full-length album in this universe gets to being a masterpiece, in my opinion, even though this is not a realm with much interest in full-length masterpieces. But Anyway, dig your own hole, finds the Chemical Brothers, taking the whole Beatles thing quite seriously. Yes, indeed, that's Setting Sun with lead vocals from your friend and mine, Noel Gallagher, He of Oasis, a legit rock star. How about that? That song's already a modest hit by the time Dig Your Own Hole comes out. Setting Sun is a cutting-edge crossover type single in 1996, and it's got some company.

Yes, indeed, that's Born Slippy from the British dance rockers Underworld with quake cryptic earworm type lead vocals from the group's own Carl Hyde. Sorry, the full title there would be Born Slippy Nux. Nux. NUXX. The original version of that song was a few years old when that version suddenly blew up in 1996 as part of the train spotting soundtrack. Speaking of prestige movie soundtracks or more prestigious than spawn movie soundtracks. Underworld had already made a couple rad albums, too, at this point. I'm a dub with no bass with my head man, man myself. But here's where Underworld really started to get there due internationally.

We got ourselves an exciting and vibrant and new to most of America and not at all dead-sounding subgenre, folks. And if calling it electronica is what it takes to sell it to America, then God bless. But if you want to sell tons of records in America, you need rock stars in the abstract, if not literal rock and roll sense. But fortunately, this surly little fucker comes out and blows up in 1996 as well. So Fire Starter, quite famously and quite lucratively, samples the Breeders, the Beloved by me and also many other people, Dayton, alt rock band, The Breeders.

Firestarter samples a quite random feeling surfish guitar riff from the Breeders song, SOS, one of the less radio-friendly tunes on the band's cataclysmic 1990. album Last Splash. That's the album with Cannonball on it, as I hope you are aware. The song SOS by comparison doesn't seem to have blockbuster potential, but Liam Howlett, as we've established, has fantastic taste.

And Liam here is something transcendent in this, and then he does something transcendent with it. I'll be honest and say that at first, the Breeder sample and Firestarter felt extraneous to me. Like the song didn't need the sample necessarily, and maybe Liam was just being. nice to Kim Deal and her beloved by me, especially Dayton, Alt Rock Band, The Breeders, but listening a little more intensely to Firestarter Now, yeah, this song needs that guitar part.

And it's awfully fulfilling to listen very intensely to Firestarter now and to picture nicer furniture just materializing in Kim Deal's house anytime this song starts playing somewhere. The Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey is sampled as well from the 1984 song Close to the Edit by the much weirder electronic rock group Art of Noise. So specifically, talking to the Onion AV club in 2009, Kim Deal said of the prodigy song Fire Starter, quote,

it did really well. And since I own like a quarter of the song, it felt like, wow, it's like gosh, where's this money coming from? She also said, you know, it's like, now I root for them since they used a song of mine. Now I'm like, you go, guys.

It's like I'm in the biology club and they're on the foot ball team, you know? End quote. Kim Deal is the best, but let's not kid ourselves. Firestarter ain't Firestarter until this guy declares himself the Firestarter, among many other honorary titles. This always sounded like mythologizing record industry bullshit to me, but the rumor is that when the fire starter video aired for the first time on the massive BBC show Top of the Pops, that the station got a record number of viewer complaints. Not because of the fire starter video is terrifically offensive. It's basically just black and white footage of Keith Flint

stomping around in an old London underground tunnel. But just because Keith Flint, as I believe I've mentioned, is a delightfully alarming looking human. So stuffy English people were basically just calling the BBC and going, please get that scary looking man off my television, which is fantastic. Even if it is mythologizing record industry bullshit, the author and radio host and record executive Dan Charnas is quoted in that NPR piece on Electronica in America and he says the prodigy proved that you can actually do pop records in techno. As for the video, he says, I thought it was dope. All hell broke loose. The crazy ass white dude was like flavor, flave only for techno. End quote. We're playing the I'm the bitch you hated part again. Let's get

nuts. In the prodigy Rolling Stone cover story, Keith Flint talks quite a bit of about the lyrics to this song and their profound importance to him. So the article says, Flint highlights both the self-inflicted line and the I'm the bitch you hated. They're both ways that he thinks of himself. It's quite deep, he mutters. I don't know if I want to say. He is the tape recorder.

I could explain it to you, but I wouldn't for the magazine. The writer says, listening to you spit out those words, you get the feeling of energy and joy. mixed up with self-hate. And Keith says, that's absolutely spot on. That's absolutely spot on. The writer says, I'm the bitch you hated.

That's a very weird thing to say about yourself. And Keith says, yeah, I don't know that I'd want to describe it. That is a very deep thing to me personally, and I can deliver that with far more power than the other lyrics. Keith has asked what compelled him after several years dancing with the prodigy to become a singer as well. And he says, that's unexplainable. Why does a river turn into an oxbow lake?

I've spent six years expressing myself with my body, shouting with my body. It's like a conductor of the music. From the party scene, when a tune came on and it was your tune, I wanted everyone to know it was my tune. Yes, fucking hell, rocking, just yelling at each other, dancing away. This is just an extension of that.

If I could get a mic and just go fucking hell, fucking hell, I would do it. That is the punk attitude, DIY aspect of the prodigy. Keith also observes, I'm not a singer. I love the fact that there's people out there that have been trying

since the age of nine to sing and get the voice right, do reamy and all that. And I can roar in, not ever written anything or performed delirically anything, and write a tune that's so successful. I think that's a brilliant piss take on a lot of people, and that gives me a buzz.

And finally, Liam Howlett is asked by the Rolling Stone writer to comment on the British tabloid headline, ban this sick fire record in an article that accuses the song Firestarter of inciting actual pyromania. And Liam says, I just couldn't believe it. I was more shocked than how well the record did, to be honest. I just couldn't believe how people could be so stupid. It was then that I realized that the prodigy works on two levels, a dumb level and the intelligent level. End quote.

Let's briefly explore the dumb level, shall we? So Firestarter is a huge hit in 1996 and the third prodigy album, The Fat of the Land, comes out in June 1997. And the first song once again samples the rapper Cool Keith in his ultramagnetic MC's days. And this new song is called, Indeed, Smack My Bitch Up. I have a vague but cherished memory of reading a Prodigy interview somewhere around this time where somebody, either Liam or Keith, argue that Smack My Bitch up doesn't literally mean what it means. But in fact, it's just slang for like, let's get excited, guys. I don't remember the details. But I do remember reading that.

And even as a dumbass kid being like, oh, get the fuck out of here. The bad news is, that's what the song's called. The worst news is, this is a monster hook. So right there in 1997, the earliest version of MTV.com quotes Janice Rocko, president of the Los Angeles chapter of now, the national organization for women, as saying, the song is totally offensive, it's degrading to women, it's trash, it condones violence against women, and we don't need to see that portrayed as entertainment, end quote.

And then MTV quotes Liam Howling. it talking to the early music website, addicted to noise. And Liam says, that song is probably the most pointless song I've ever written. But live, it works. It works well. Sometimes things can be so fucking simple and you don't need an explanation of the lyrics. Why explain the lyrics? It either works or it doesn't. And for us, it works well live. It's a really exciting track and it's just a good, hard track. He also says, to be honest, we're ready for whatever is thrown at us. You can't not be ready and use a lyric like that. To be honest, people, if they think that song is about smacking girlfriends up, then they're pretty brainless, end quote. And then comes the worst news yet, which is the

smack my bitch up video. I don't believe that singer has ever been publicly credited, which is too bad or maybe she's better off my kingdom for video footage on youtube or whatever of m tv's own kurt loader introducing the mega controversial jonas ocherlin video for smack my bitch up i think i remember watching this video on mtv but i'm suspicious i might be making that up mtv played the smack my bitch up video for like one week only between the hours of one and five a m it was preceded by a sweaty disclosures in which Kurt Loader said, MTV is about to air a video that some people are not going to want to see.

It depicts a violent and chaotic night world fueled by drugs and alcohol and sexual aggression. It is relentlessly lurid and contains full frontal nudity. If this sounds like something you'd rather miss, please tune out now. End quote. But see, spoiler alert,

the person in the video doing all the drugs and violence and displaying all the sexual aggression turns out to be a lady. a very naked lady. This was mind-blowing shit in 1997. Have I mentioned yet that the prodigy are at this point on Madonna's record label, Maverick Records?

Have I also mentioned that the liner notes to the Fat of the Land CD include a quote about importing guns or butter that is, in fact, a quote from literally a Nazi leader, Herman Goring? Have I mentioned that Liam Hallett thus felt compelled to tell the press to simply answer that question.

Yes, the quote is a Nazi quote, and no, we're not Nazis. Obviously, we've got two black guys in the band, so to even suggest that is totally brainless anyway. To be honest, that quote is like me using a sample. I look upon that quote is like a sample. I take it out of its original context, put it in my own context, and it means something completely different. I look at that quote, and that's like a B-Boy quote.

That's like something out of a hip-hop scene could have said that. End quote. Big yikes to all of this. I'm all for artistic expression and provocation and whatnot. But even in the context of ultra-dufous rock stardom, ideally you are never compelled by circumstances to actually say the words, yes, the quote is a Nazi quote and no, we're not Nazis out loud. That is, unfortunately, historically, very punk rock, but the bad kind of punk rock. Good gravy. All of this bullshit may very well complicate one's enjoyment of the Prodigy album, The Fat of the Land, which is no dig your own hole as album-length masterpieces go, but is quite enjoyable nonetheless. Both this song, Breathe and Smack My Bitch Up now have more plays on Spotify than Firestarter does, which intrigues me, given how much huger Firestarter loomed on MTV and whatnot at the time. But I see the appeal. That's our pal, Keith Flynn, of course, further coming into his own. as a rock star frontman. And our pal Maxim is too.

Maxim does the psychosomatic addict insane part. I never picked up on that. Excellent rapport those two. It seems inevitable in retrospect that this entire set of circumstances was not sustainable and that there's nothing more punk rock than flaming out spectacularly.

If provocation is your whole deal, you've got to feed the beast. It gets exhausting. So in 1998, there's a mild blow up at the Reading Festival where both the prodigies, and the Beastie Boys are on the bill. So early Beastie Boys, Rick Rubinera,

boorish, offensive on accident, but not really Beastie Boys, are a pretty explicit model for the prodigy. Nobody on Earth fought harder for their right to party than Keith Flint. But by 1998, as we have discussed, the Beastie Boys have renounced their boorishness, their misogyny, their rampant unenlightenment.

Now there's a whole deal because the Beastie boys try to convince the prodigy to not play smack my bitch up at the Redding Festival. Privately, they asked the prodigy not to play it. And the prodigy, quite publicly, announced this from the stage and play it anyway. That's worth a few headlines. That bolsters one's punk rock credibility, I suppose. But meanwhile, Electronica is a genre, as a sweaty marketing scheme,

ain't going to cut it for long. Electronic music itself, dance music, EDM, the music will be fine. But the further you can get from quote-unquote electronica, the better. The Chemical Brothers press on. Underworld presses on. Daph Punk, right? The first Daph Punk record, Homework, also comes out in 1997.

And Daphunk go on to do various notable Daph Punk things. But they feel tangential to the whole brief, this is Rock and Roll Now moment that Firestarter exemplifies. There is overlap. I was listening to Daph Pong's homework yesterday. and this song, Rolling and Scratchin, struck me to smack my bitch up without the unpleasant context,

which is to say without any of the words. And overall, to my mind, Daph Punk are not bound, are not tethered to this brief and strange electronica moment, the way the prodigy are. For the prodigy, the dumb level began to overshadow the smart level. It takes a while for them to even attempt

to follow up the fat of the land. And in 2002, the prodigy put out a single called Babies Got a Temper. This shit was baffling. Just baffling. I have a vivid memory of listening to this song for the first time. It's being like, what the fuck is happening? That song is pretty quickly disowned, more or less.

The next full Prodigy Record, always outnumbered, never outgunned, doesn't come out until 2004. And Keith Flynn and Max may not at all. And although both those guys do contribute to the next Prodigy Record, 2009's Invaded. must die. In terms of pure momentum and defensible artistic decisions, the fat of the land is kind of the end of the line. Keith Flint loved motorbikes and owned a motorcycle racing team. For a while, he also ran a pub in good old Essex. And he didn't interview once where he said that the pub at a fireplace. And every time he lit it, somebody would make a fire starter joke. And then he'd make whoever made that joke pay him a dollar. And then he'd give all the money to charity.

I read that in Keith Flint's New York Times obituary. The year Keith Flint died in 2019, I was supposed to see The Prodigy live at a giant chaotic hard rock festival on Columbus, Ohio. My brother went with me and reminded me of this. The Prodigy were replaced on the bill by Papa Roach. And Papa Roach, quite cordially, paid tribute. Mr. Keith Flynn, the fire starts. My friends, I'm here to do. tell you in front of God and everyone that

Papa Roach covering Fire Starter sounded way better and made way more sense than I suspect you suspected it would. Is the Papa Roach guy doing an English accent? He is. Isn't he? That's too bad.

That's a questionable decision. But I suspect that the original twisted fire starter, wherever he was, looked down upon that mildly entertaining questionable decision and recognized himself and smiled. Our guest this week is Jeremy Larson, reviews editor at Pitchfork.

He's also written for the New York Times magazine, Rolling Stone, Spin, and many other fine places. Jeremy, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be your fire starter. You're my punkin instigator. It's an important job. I couldn't.

Nobody else could do this but you. This entire week. I think I've been trying to think about how would Doc Holiday say, I'm your fire starter, as opposed to I'm your Huckleberry. I can't really get it. But I think it goes a little. I'm your fire starter. That was fantastic. I'm your fire starter.

Oh, my God. It's still in the workshop. No, I think you're done. I think you nailed it. We're done talking. I can't follow that. This is fantastic. This is the, okay, all right. Jeremy, can you tell me where you were and what you were doing when you learned that the prodigy used to have a live guitar player named Jiz Butt? Walk us through that revelation.

So this was about 48 hours ago. And I was sort of looking over some live sets of the prodigy from 1996 and 97 when they were really bled. going up. And I think they have a kind of a famous set at the Phoenix Festival, which is, I think, somewhere in Europe and kind of skip to Fire Starter. And all of a sudden, this guitarist just comes out. And he's just like playing one, charitably two chords. But I'll just, I think fact-checking, you could just say one chord the entire time. And it's, and honestly, it's great. And then I was just sort of looking at it. And I do think for the record, it's giz-butt. Excuse me. That's my mistake.

It's fine. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I feel like maybe there's some intentionality of some sort of like, you know, impish, maybe you might want to say it the other way, but you shouldn't. But yeah, he's actually a, he's actually sort of a somewhat renowned punk guitarist, has a couple other bands and has played with a bunch of other people.

But I did not know he was a dedicated live touring guitarist. I kind of thought that they just brought out a guitarist for that song, just to give it a little pep for the audience. But no, he's been around and does guitar for them. I think still to this day, I think we'll play with him. He also runs the Gizbutt Rock Academy. And his full name is Graham Anthony Butt. I just, just facts for you. What did you discover in watching prodigy footage of them at their height?

I think it's fair to say in 96, 97, like, what's stuck out to you about the live prodigy experience? Well, it's frenetic, to say the least. It is sort of a proof of life, right? And I think, like, one of the most interesting things when you look at, you know, ephemera and esoterica or anything from the 90s, where you see a bunch of people also enjoying it, sometimes you come across something and you'd come across, say, the, prodigy in a vacuum, right? Like someone had the fat of the land and you were like, oh, it's the album with the crab on the front. And then their logo is an ant as well. So sometimes you sort of like, Barrenseny Bears is like, did it have an ant on the front or was it a crab?

You don't know. Anyway, so, but when you see something, their performance and you see thousands of people enjoying it, like, for instance, I remember one of my first memories of the prodigy was watching the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards. And it was at Radio City Music Hall, and, you know, they had just a bunch of, like, live in-house performances from this, that, and the other thing.

And then all of a sudden, sort of 30 minutes into the show, they're like, and now the prodigy live from the UK. And they cut to this, you know, this field. And there are 20,000 people. watching the Prodigy perform Breathe. And I remember thinking, what is this? What is going on? And this was, and I don't think I did not have, did you, did you pay-per-view Woodstock

1994? I did not. I did not. I don't regret that, to be frank, but I did not do that. I did not do that either. So I don't, at that point in my life, I'm not sure how much live footage of festivals I had seen up until that point. Basically, yeah.

And kind of like as a 13-year-old, it's like, I was pretty blown away by can one band have, like, can that many people really like a band? Like, I know me and my friends, that's five people like the red on chili peppers. So that was, I could count on my hands. But like, and then a bunch of maybe 100 people liked our local band, but 30,000 people, is that how many people can really like a band? That seemed like a lot to me. Simultaneously. At the same time, right. So that was, it's this sort of moment of like, oh, this must be really good.

This must be important and it must be really popular. And I didn't know anything about it. And of course, I think, like, it wasn't like this difficult music to understand. It was pretty on its face, rowdy and punky and, you know, like, Rage Against the Machine was already there. And like, here's the British version, only it's less words. You know, like, I wasn't totally sure, like, what to make of it at that point. Yeah. You described it to me, and I quite enjoyed this.

That moment at the VMAs was when you realized electronic music might kick ass. And I really enjoyed that description. That's a lovely revelation to have at 13, however old you were. My experience with electronic music up until that point was next to nothing. I can't imagine it wasn't being played in my house other than the fact that, you know, as we all lived through Eurodance, the Eurodance craze of the early 90s, you know.

But that just registered as pop music to me and I think it was marketed as such. I was trying to think of like the first sort of electronic song that registered to me as like, oh, this rocks. And in fact, it was the KLF's 3am Eternal, the live from SSL version, which is the one that sort of got traction here in the U.S. And it does have that sort of, you know,

guitar riff in it, which one of the many songs from the 90s that is not really exemplary of the rest of the band's catalog, but rather an outlier. But it's still probably, you ask most American audiences of like, name one KLF song. It's like, well, they're not going to name,

you know, a deep track on chillout. They're going to name, You know, the Ancents of Moomu song. But, but yeah, you know, other than that and other than, you know, sort of bands dabbling in sort of electronics before then, I don't think I'd ever really heard electronic music until the prodigy. That is sort of by dint of my age and where I lived. I lived in a very small town in Wisconsin, and we just sort of, the two main sources of New York. music was the radio and MTV. And if it wasn't being played on MTV, it certainly wasn't being played on the radio. It didn't exist. It didn't exist, right? So, and it was strange because

when that's sort of your first, when the prodigy is your first taste of what electronic music is, like that is kind of a, that's like a big knot to untangle later in your life. I'll tell you that much. How is that going for you? Have you untangled it? We're getting there. It's a lifelong process. Yeah, it's like a big ball of Christmas lights in the basement. You know, we're still working on it. Did you buy into Electronica in 1997?

Did you believe at any point that it was the future of rock? You know, I definitely bought into it because I remember buying a propeller heads album. So, like, you know, I don't know. You bought it. They got me. You're committed. That's great. They're great.

But yeah, you're committed. You're positive. Yeah. Yeah. I loved it, you know, because this was also, I was still kind of enamored with the idea of, like, computers as this sort of, this object of fascination as opposed to just sort of like another part of your life. Like, they had this sort of kind of cool culture to it, you know, like after hackers and, you know, pre-matrix, there was still this kind of countercultural element to it. And I guess like Electronica felt countercultural to me in a way, simply because it was so foreign to anybody who didn't know what it was. Like you couldn't, my, you know, parents or old people couldn't understand where the music was coming from.

It was just like, are that, you know, and they sort of, the first inklings of people saying, oh, they're just pressing play on stage. It's like, well, you know, they're not. And there's a lot of, you know, a talent that goes into the sampling and the production and this, that, and the other thing. But, yeah, I, you know, it wasn't that I thought it was sort of the future of rock and roll, but it did fill, you know, space uphors a vacuum, right? And so I think it did fill in a gap there. Right. Sort of after grunge fell apart and before sort of new metal really became a safe. in the latter half of the decade as sort of...

99 about, yeah. Right. You know, there was this sort of gap that needed to be filled, and I think there were a couple things like vying for that ring at that time. Yeah, I remember also on the 97 Video Music Awards, that's when Marilyn Manson played the beautiful people, right? And, you know, so... And I think, you know, we can talk about this a little more, but I think aesthetically,

It's more like the aesthetics of the prodigy really sort of signified a turning of the tide in what rock was going to look like. You described, yeah, you said Firestarter to you was spiritually and aesthetically setting the table for new metal. And I was wondering if you regard that as a good thing or not. unpacking whether new metal is good is always kind of a we don't have that kind of time we don't have that we don't have that we don't have that we don't have that you know i don't have that bandwidth on my computer to do that i i um when i look at you know keith flint right and he has that sort of inverse mohawk um you know which which could give sort of balding men today just and just one more option really um it's on the table yeah exactly You can do the full shave or the flint, you know. Just give me the flint, sir. Give me the flint. Give me the punk and instigator, yes.

But there was, so there was his sort of, here's his haircut, which, you know, that could have been the guy from Cold Chamber. That could have been the guy from Mudvane. You don't know. And then, and then you had, and then you had, Maxim who wore kilts. Guess who else wore? who else wore kiltz and that was big in the new metal. Jonathan Davis, of course. Corn, of course, of course.

Maxim also wore custom eye contacts. West Boyle were custom eye contacts. Oh, man, you're doing it. You're breaking it down. There's these connections to be made. You know, the yarn and the pushpins are going up on the board. And I, again, like, and I'm not saying that they presaged it or they predicted it. But in the 90s, there was, there weren't many rivers, right?

And so you could just toss something into a big river and see if it floated. And I think that that's what happened with the prodigy, is that someone just threw them in there. And it was like, oh, yeah, I guess this is kind of like corn and Marilyn Manson. And this is something American audience are going to cotton to because there is a nominal frontman. And he's singing. And there's a sample of a guitar. And there's a sample of Cool Keith, right? Like American audiences aren't going to listen to Cool Keith or Ultramagnetic MCs, but maybe like one line of it, like that can get, you know, put in through a bunch of British ravers and look like it becomes like a kind of a big hit.

I was going to ask you if this whole idea of the future of rock comes down to Keith Flint. Like the idea that you need a frontman. You don't even necessarily need a guitar, but it wasn't until we had Keith Flint in the Firestarter video. that, you know, like, oh, we have a true lead singer. Like, the collective American brain just cannot process, like, a band that doesn't have a focal point. No. Yeah. You're absolutely right.

And I think we didn't, especially in the 90s, there was just there had to be a frontman, you know. There had to be somebody whose band it was. And then when you listen to the rest of fat of the land, you're like, oh, he's barely on this. Or like, he has maybe two other things. things to do. I mean, you know, he was just something that, that Hewlett, he was just like a guy that Hewlett met raving. Right. Right. And it was just like, like, he was just a guy. And, and then became on, like, as a hype man. I remember, I remember there's this, and I'm, I'm not quoting this verbatim, but I'm getting it close enough where Flint said something to the effect of like,

oh, I don't listen to public enemy for the lyrics. I just, I just kind of think it's like fun. I just kind of like hearing Flav-a-Flavs say, yeah, boy. And it's like that, that to me is a perfect encapsulation of, like, what Keith Flint was doing. Like, he was, like, there didn't need to be

content. There just needed to be the comment, right? Or the hype man. Like, there didn't need to be the definite article. There just needed to be, like, the filigree around it. And so, but then when you turn something of such little

content into the focal point of this band, it just, like, it cannot contain all of the attention that it gets, you know? And, and clearly when people are like, what else do you have to say? Like, do you have anything else going on? He's like, oh, no, no. That's, that was it. That was, that's my thing. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just the youth corrupter.

Like, what do you want me to do here? The only thing on his resume. How much broier was this scene than grunge or alternative rock? Like, is it unfair of me? Am I projecting a 2022 sensibility onto a 1997 phenomenon that I'm sort of overwhelmed by the testosterone of all this? To an even greater degree than like any rock band I've considered from this era? The testosterone of the prodigy is for sure at the forefront of their. entire image and sound.

I mean, I think you can't ignore the fact that MTV was not playing house music very much. They were not like looking at what was happening, you know, in Detroit. They weren't playing Moody Man or Dilla records or they weren't going down to playing, you know, Chicago House music or they, you know, or they weren't playing ballroom, you know, electronic music that was happening in New York. Like, they were like, how can we sell rave music and make it kind of capital, like, make capitalism work with it? Which is, again, it's like antithetical to the entire rave culture that was happening.

So I think to do that, you, A, you had to have, it had to be sort of masculine and edgy. And there had to be a bit of a, you know, prurient, you know, sexist, I'll go ahead and say like bent to it because that is sort of how you get the young male audience that, you know, watched MTV at that time to get onto those things. And, you know, I mean, just to go down the list of like, I can't name off the top of my head like a female or non-binary or LGBTQ like electron, like big beat artist. And I'm. apologize if there is one just just outside of my vision right now. But when you just look at Fat Boy Slim and Crystal Method and the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy and propeller heads, like, you know, that's just off the top of my head. But those are all like very sort of bro-facing bands. But I think that's sort of what worked in the selling of them. Sure. But the Prodigy specifically made so many, like, either deliberately bad or at least willfully upsetting

decisions. Like, there's just smack my bitch up, like, all of it. There's the Nazi quote in the CD booklet, you know, there's the comeback song that they disowned that used, like, the word rehiffinol, like, 50 times. Like, are these super smart guys being provocative or are they medium smart guys just being dumb sometimes. Right. We're talking about the smart dumb guy or dumb smart guy dialectic. Correct. Like, for sure.

I think these are dumb, dumb guys. Tough but fair. Tough but fair. There's a quote, well, okay, this quote maybe makes them smart dumb because this is from the 1997 spin profile where they kind of follow them around on their first little tour. And they played like small rock clubs because they wanted to, they didn't want to sell them as these, as these dance arena people.

They wanted to like be like, they were a rock band. And Howlett was like, I have a philosophy that our music works on a really dumb level, which is the level that most people understand. So I think that might be smart, dumb guy stuff. Because like I think he's,

I think he's aware. I think Howlett was sort of aware of it. Yeah. And could like step back from it. Because I do think, you know, there's some cool samples on this record. There are. The fact that fired starter samples the breeders right away and, you know, smack my bitch up kind of does, the fact that he takes the hook from a cool keith line, I think a lot of people might just thought that the prodigy made that line up. It's like, well, no, it's a sample from a rap song, right?

And look, that is maybe number 50 on the most offensive cool game lines that exist out there. So, like, you know, everybody should be thanking them that didn't sample something else. But the fact that that sample is the sort of thing that made that song feel offensive, I think is, you know, that might take a while to unpack. Sure. Again, not sure we have the time to do that. But again, like, okay, so maybe that's smart. That's interesting. But then you add the video to smack my bitch up.

and you're like, oh, okay. This is dumb. This is just dumb. This is just dumb stuff. Right. How did you feel about this smack my bitch up video in 1997 versus how you feel about it now? Take me on that journey. Wow.

All right. Well, so I don't think I watched it in 97, but I want to say I watched it at some point in high school. And to set the table, the 90s, you want to know what the 90s loved. They love twist endings, right? It's true. We love a twist ending. And then that is you got primal feared, fight club, you know, six cents. You just, just.

Usual suspects. Just set it up and then at the very end, just pull the rug out, you know? And so I think like this video, the pump was primed, let's say that, for me to love it. Because I was like, oh, is this what makes things art, like, that you. just at the very end, you just do something different than what you've been doing. And I think that's what art is. It might be. It might be.

And that's what I was taught in the 90s. So I don't know. So at some point I was watching this and I watched a video and, you know, and it is, for anyone who hasn't seen the video, it is a shot sort of like a first person sort of first, like shooter, like a video game. Yeah, it's like Doom in a club. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like Duke Nukem, but like... But sexy. Right, but that secret code where you entered in where you could like throw money at the stripper. That's a deep cut. All right, so back to the video. Take your time. You know, it's a, yeah, they shoot it in first person and you see sort of someone kind of wake up and they're tossing water on their face. They're clearly hungover.

They're going through it. they're in a bad way, but then the video sort of takes them on their journey through the night, which includes sort of drinking and getting into fights and buying drugs and doing drugs and heroin and everything you can imagine sort of, you know, filling their body up with destructive chemicals. And by the end of the video, you think by the behavior, you know, if you're like a, just a simpleton, you're watching this video. you're like men, right? Give me a break.

Toxic masculinity. But you'd be wrong because at the very end, camera pans up to a mirror and it is a woman. It's a lady. Doesn't that say something a little bit about our society and how we jump to conclusions about people? Which is exactly what I thought of when I was 15 years old, right? And I think by the time I went to college, I would sort of line people up outside of my dorm room and just be like, one at a time, come here. We're turning the lights off and you're watching this, you know? And we just sort of, and you do that thing where you're showing somebody something and you're kind of watching them watch it.

And you're making them really uncomfortable because they're trying not to make eye contact with you. It is very uncomfortable. So, yeah. So that's, again, and I think like at some point, you know, when when I ran out of weed in college and I moved on to other things, I had put this behind me. And then, you know, when I came back to it later in life, I was like, oh, this is awful. This is terrible. This is terrible.

What is happening here? Yeah, yeah. Yes. I was going to ask you about, you know, being exposed to Firestarter as a teenager and then considering Firestarter as a rock critic, you know, editing pitchfork reviews of the prodigy. Like, does your opinion of this music change? Is this a situation where the less context you have, maybe the better off you are, or the easier it is to enjoy? I think in a vacuum, the prodigy are really easy to enjoy, especially if you're just sort of, you know, if you're making a, you know, a, what's it called?

If you're making a curls in the squat, squat rack playlist, you know what I mean? If you're making kind of a weightlifting playlist, like absolutely throw that on. Leg day. Great leg day. Yes. And I will even go so far as to say that even with some context, like to know now that we have sort of who sampled.com to kind of go through this and be like, oh, cool. Like the breeders, like that's interesting. Like I wouldn't have picked that out.

And they manipulate samples such that they're not very obvious. Like the Bulls on Parade sample and snack my bitch up is like, oh, like you have to sort of have somebody tell you that's what it is. before you hear it. So I think when you're talking about context, when it comes to sort of sample context, I actually think they're more interesting. However, when it comes to sort of cultural context and like human context

and like what was prioritized versus what was marginalized, that to me is where like things get a little less savory when it comes to thinking about the prodigy because you just sort of think, well, like, well, what else could have happened in this space? You know, couldn't there have been something like that was a, like, why did we have to think that

dance music was so macho when so much of its origins were not, you know? Right, right. And it was a space for, you know, for LGBTQ people. It was a space for people who had nowhere else to go, you know? And then, and it, even rave was, it was, we talked a little bit about earlier. like it was such a this countercultural movement and then all of a sudden

the Big Beat Electronica was sort of sold to America as you know, maybe like you said, like the next thing in rock or like Rock's next phase. But it fell into

just more of the same sort of masculine mainstream pop culture and art. And in hindsight, that definitely bring like dense it a little bit for me, you know? Sure. To wrap up, another thing you said to me that I quite enjoyed, you said,

like, I feel like getting into Prodigy and dance music through MTV in 1997 was like getting into Metallica through stranger things. Total tourist shit, but that was the whole point. That's wonderful, first of all. Is there a fundamental embarrassment here compared to people who actually knew something about raves and dance music before 1996? Does it hit you completely different? If you don't know those things or have experience with those things. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I talk to people who were in the rave scene and people who perhaps like went to an early prodigy show when they had that hit single Charlie, you know, because that

was sort of their first kind of novelty hit. And then, you know, then they would say like, oh, well, they sold out like, this is not how they sounded and they used to be cool ravers and now they'd cut their hair, you know, the the, the crucible that all bands must go through at some point, you know. Yes. I think there is a fundamental embarrassment, but isn't everything embarrassing and isn't a lot of looking back at what you listened to when you were 13 a little embarrassing? Not at all.

I don't know what you're talking about. This is interesting me. I find you just sort of have to accept that you can, there is maybe something a little interesting to having experience this music two different ways, once without any knowledge and once with a lot of knowledge. Too much, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think that is sort of the curse of the music writer and the critic is that you.

One of them, yes. Right, one of, right, that you'd sort of learn too much about something and then it sort of curdles in your brain. And there was, you know, I really will never forget that moment of watching them on the video music awards and just having my mind being blown by watching these, you know, three or four people, if you include Giz But, I'm not sure if he was there or not, probably. just command a huge crowd. And that to me was more powerful than in any context that I needed or could have at that moment. There was just a simple of like, oh, this must be what good music is and I should like this. You know, there's an age where sometimes watching something and watching other people enjoying things is all you need to enjoy yourself. Absolutely.

Okay. So drop your leg day playlist when you have that finalized, when you've got that sequenced. I'll put that in chat. We appreciate that, Jeremy. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for talking. Rob, thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Thanks so much to our guests this week, Jeremy Larson. Thanks as always to our producers, Jonathan Kerma, Justin Sales, and Kai Grady. And thanks very much to you for listening. And now, without further ado, here are The Prodigy with Firestarter. We'll see you next week.