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Fatboy's delight >> The POP year in review. No dictionary needed by MIREILLE SILCOTT The music industry is breathing a collective sigh of thank-god-it's-over. 1998. Is over. The slump year. The year where Nothing Happened. No movements. Nothing they could even make up. Shit, they couldn't even rerelease anything that hasn't been rereleased already. Not even Gary Numan, for God's sake. 1998: Twelve months where every music journalist gave up writing about the current in favour of postulating on what the next big thing's gonna to be, what the Millenium's gonna bring, what's going to be the next punk, disco, grunge, rave. Silly, I say. In '98, I was busy doing much more productive things. I was body popping to Madonna. I was counting boy bands, I was being jealous of Brandy's lips, I was making mixed tapes off mass-market compilations (my Best of Now 98! Anthems 98! and Summer Magic 98! is a corker). I was hoping Blink 182 would never grow old. I was out-Fatboying Fatboy. I'm presently looking at a Tamperer record I bought that's called If You Buy This Record Your Life Will Be Better, and I'm thinking, yes, it was better. It was the stoooopidest year pop's had since I was in water wings and a soaking New Edition T-shirt. And I am going to miss it so.
So I faked it, I stopped hiding behind the fading faceless face of "quality" soundscapia. I related to Billie ("Why you wanna play that song so loud? Because we want to! Because we want to!"). I shopped at Urban Outfitters trying on novelty underwear and anything with a drawstring (hello All Saints) bouncing around the blobbiest remixes of Wildchild's "Renegade Master" with my 14-year-old brother. We agreed for once. At the tail of 1997, my Top 10 was comprised of dance obscurities, Cornershop, the Verve and Air's downtempo "bliss." His had the Foo Fighters in it. In 1998, the Top 3 on our Top 10s were the same:
2. "Intergalactic"-Beastie Boys 3. "It's Like That"- Run DMC vs Jason Nevins Actually, mine could also go: 1. "Rockafeller Skank"- Fatboy Slim 2. "Renegade Master Remix"- Fatboy Slim 3. "Praise You" - Fatboy Slim Because he was just the man. The Funk Soul Brother. The radio pop-loving spokesmodel for stupidity. The breaktastic big beat don who likes dropping "I Just Called to Say I Love You" in the middle of his sets at the Brighton's Big Beat Boutique club; who loops the refrain "Fatboy Slim is fucking in heaven" on a single; who makes cowboys boogaloo in his vids and is famous for hoovering more coke than any Hef alive. He's a bon vivant.
But the retardedness of the aforementioned was out-retarded by the people trying to be smart. Alanis Morisette takes the cake by singing about her bloody "metaphysical" backpacking trek in "Thank U" and buttressing the track with a pear-shaped video in which she is naked (and pear shaped). Madonna positively scared me with "Frozen," with all those flappy symbolic black birds, earth-chick bhindis, ugly Alexander McQueen witch dresses and interviews with fake-intellecto Brit accent(s). I thought she had completely lost the plot until she came back with a thin tank top, no bra, a tan and the searing "Ray of Light" tribute to the goo-goo side of go-go dancing. So maybe mother-now spiritualism didn't quite break her. The Beastie Boys, though, came close to the unforgivably vomitacious with Adam Yauch's newfound--and very loud--peace. Their overly righteous stage announcement at the Reading Festival that the Prodigy's harmless "Smack My Bitch Up" "sends out a message which just isn't cool," has been saved from my fuck-off-o-meter only because the Beasties managed to keep such brain-showers off their Hello Nasty album (which instead concentrated on the important things in life: video games, rapping skills and DJ tributes). >>> It was, Fatboy-axis aside, a mediocre year for the U.K. (Robbie Williams? Still?), and a choc-a-block year for America. England's humongous club culture is sagging under the weight of too many new sneakers and not enough new ideas. It's gotten so bad that, in the wake of French producer Stardust's (Thomas Bengalter) globally unavoidable "Music Sounds Better With You," the Brits have started putting "Le" in front of track titles and looking across the Channel for guidance. No disrespect to France, but this can't be a healthy sign for Britain. Rock-wise things have been no more vibrant: 1997's strong-enough post-Britpop pack (the Verve, Radiohead) has given way to cookie-cutter conceptualists like Gomez (arty-synthy-bluesy), Catatonia (moody-girly) and Placebo (glammy-rocky--supposedly). And if you're now going "who?" I wouldn't suggest you worry about it much. But the U.S.! Where do we start? There was the return to good ol' accidental Satanism (Korn, Rob Zombie) and mindless heaviosity (with irony! See Monster Magnet doing Mase moves), the proliferation of utterly forgettable soul twitters sung by completely memorable black teen-dreams (Brandy, Monica), mucho Fugee-ism (the beautiful ego of Lauryn Hill, the incomparable asshole of Wyclef, the glorious sell-out of Pras with that vixeny Versace chanteuse Maya), the clipped clickity-clack of Timbaland and Missy Misdemeanor productions and the return of unpolitical decadent boombast in rap: Will Smith and "Miami" and, of course, Miami itself, the bassland of Master P and his gaggle of asses. All of it was enough to make it thankfully easy to forget the Dad-likes-it-too lameness of the swing revival. I feel sorry for 1999. There's no way '99 can top George Michael getting caught with his gay willy hanging out and turning the episode into a number one hit called "Outside." There's no way '99 can top the insanity of Gerri Spice putting on a sharp suit and working for the U.N., or Cher putting on a boiler suit and getting all speed-garagey, or Jay-Z making 12-year-olds screw the stage in his live version of "Hard Knock Life" (the song which samples, um, Annie). Although Bryan Adams and Sporty Spice have just recorded a duet together, and I've heard something about Canibus running for government, so maybe there's hope after all.
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The stupidest, silliest, dumbest and bestest. I knew it already this summer, when tuning into CHOM was again a revelation akin to listening to CKGM in 1985--what with all this frat-boy barbeque pap à la Harvey Danger and Fastball and Marcie Playground and that "Closing Time" song by that band who's name I always forget (Stereofolies? Stereolophics? Stereo Stereo?) but whose poopy-booby organs made me sincerely pissed that I was not a teenager anymore--it would've been so good.
1. "Rockefeller Skank"- Fatboy Slim
And--ha, ha--all the pickle-assed underground aficionados have to like him too, because you just can't not. Not that anyone with or without taste could say no to the equally lampshade-headed Freestylers (dumbo party hip hop, dumbed down) or the Lo-Fidelity Allstars (dumbo party hip hop, dumbed down + dumbo party baggy rock) or Monkey Mafia (all of the above, plus moronic raggaisms) either. An irresistible blackmail.