Prodigy

Fifteen years after its release, Xl Recordings reissued a few months ago "The Fat Of The Land", the third album by Prodigy. Alongside it comes an EP, "The Added Fat", featuring remixes courtesy of modern hard-electro figures such as Alvin Risk, Noisia, Baauer, Zeds Dead and Major Lazer. Almost as if to prophesy the value of what is today regarded by a good half of music critics as a minor experience, one born and raised on the crafty, obvious idea of fusing two complementary revolutions like hardcore and rave techno, only to then make them palatable to the widest possible audience.

The simplest way to show how unfounded this criticism is would probably be to have lived through, first-hand, that phenomenon which towards the end of the Nineties essentially bridged the world of raves and the emerging world of underground clubs: big beat. Lumping the trio – who in any case can be traced artistically back to Liam Howlett alone – into the same pot as figures like Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim, its foremost exponents, would be misleading and in many ways wrong. But while the latter carried forward the work of mainstreaming rave culture by softening its violence and flirting well in advance with trends destined for future success, Prodigy kept the shock of impact and devotion to hardcore as their trademark.

Less futurist and (paradoxically) more nostalgic, they became, almost despite themselves, a genuine icon of electronic hardcore as a whole, an incredibly attractive phenomenon, reaping through sheer skill and merit what an entire generation had sown before them. They were certainly not sonic innovators, but rather one of those artistic cases that matter for their aesthetic value and their role as standard-bearers: if punk and jungle, and their respective cultures, now share a major point of intersection in the collective imagination, the credit belongs almost exclusively to Howlett and his two frontmen. And it was precisely Keith Flint and Maxim Reality – both of whom started out as dancers and were "promoted" to their new role beginning with this very album – who would become the symbols of this marriage, the other great secret behind the Prodigy phenomenon's success. Theirs was therefore not mere luck or simple cunning, but pure foresight.

"The Fat Of The Land" was essentially the manifesto of this encounter. In the year it came out, it was preceded by a few months by another of the key building blocks of electronic music from that era, "Dig Your Own Hole" by the aforementioned Chemical Brothers, and by the surprising debut of Daft Punk, whose "Homework" essentially kicked off the forceful mass restoration of house music and, above all, of minimal aesthetics. The unexpected success of a track like "Around The World" – essentially the perfect counterpoint to what electronic music had been in the preceding years – was such a clear signal that it forced both ravers and the modern dance intelligentsia into an immediate reaction. And while the Chemical brothers were the first to seize the moment, blending their acid textures with electro-psychedelia, weightier techno and suburban breakbeat, Prodigy successfully pursued the path of conservation, setting fire to the most natural of all fusions.

Having set aside the experimental violence of its predecessor (the never sufficiently acknowledged "Music For The Jilted Generation"), Prodigy opened with "The Fat Of The Land" a whole new chapter in their career and in the musical landscape of the time. A phase that some have characterised as a deliberate bow to the masses, a thoroughly mistaken equation: it was the public that bowed to the overwhelming force of the Prodigy sound, not the other way around. The album contains some of the era's classics, and is perhaps the only record in the band's discography that can be called complete from start to finish: an immediate example is the track that opens the record, a striking introduction to a new way of interfacing rock and electronic music with sheer impact as the common denominator.

In its explosive drive as much as in its unusual, melancholy chorus threaded between the beats, "Smack My Bitch Up" is the gateway to a world made of pure, unadulterated energy, one that nonetheless requires a sinuous ignition process. "Diesel Power" is prophetic in this sense: a hip-punk track steeped in industrial belches, carried by Maxim Reality's obsessive rap, closely followed by the break-core of "Mindfields", the bridge between asphalt and ecstasy. The slow-motion hallucinations of "Serial Thrilla" and the ethno-core of "Narayan" (with Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker on vocals) mark contact with, respectively, the purest forms of jungle and acid house, while simultaneously opening the door to melody, an unexpected protagonist even beneath the tribal cloak of "Climbatize".

The passion for punk finds its ultimate fulfilment in "Breathe", an alienating, unbridled ride of pure electro-rock, with Flint in a state of grace as he navigates thunderous basslines, cutting bursts in odd time signatures, razor-sharp breaks and continuous jolts of adrenaline. "Funky Shit", meanwhile, marks a point of contact with contemporaries Chemical Brothers, both in its use of vocal samples and in its wide-open bass drum, assailed by an unstoppable flow of loops and acid fronds.

Completing the puzzle are the two quintessential classics of the Prodigy repertoire: the closing, exhausting "Fuel My Fire", an anthem to mental madness fired off at supersonic speed, and "Firestarter", which to this day remains the emblem of an era and a culture: rave explained to a rock audience.

It comes as no surprise that in 2012 a group of artists felt the need to pay tribute to a band like Prodigy by remixing part of their most important album. In a year that saw the explosion of a movement like bro-step – the most hardcore-devoted interpretation of garage – and of the likes of Skrillex, Caspa, Rusko and Vexd, it would be more than outrageous to keep denying the importance of a band that, whether they liked it or not, mainstreamed hard-electro sounds and brought them into the spotlight. Fifteen years after "The Fat Of The Land", the likes of Muse and Korn (this time genuinely more for commercial reasons than anything else) have had to bow to the impact of a style that owes almost everything to the mainstreaming work Prodigy pioneered.

After this album, the three from Braintree would retreat – this time for real – into the media-commercial management of their creation, managing to stay relevant only with the decent "Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned", a full seven years after their masterpiece. The clearest emblem of their metamorphosis would prove to be the later "Invaders Must Die", an album that, while accomplished, remained firmly anchored, without any evolution, to the stereotypes of the Prodigy sound. Those very stereotypes that the trio forged on the spot with "The Fat Of The Land", cleverly recycling from the adjoining worlds of rave and punk and tossing their mixture into the popular cauldron. And, all things considered, this was precisely their greatest and undeniable merit: if the violence and frenzy of Nineties electronic music was able to cross the threshold of the rave party, we owe that, above all, to them.

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20/01/2013