Shawn Reynaldo’s Big Beat hell
I’ve got the ’90s on my mind. Granted, the ’90s are the one decade that pretty much never disappears from electronic music, but after listening to the latest episode of the No Tags podcast, I’ve plunged myself into a very specific ’90s rabbit hole, one soundtracked by Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method and a slew of big beat also-rans.
My intentions were good. The No Tags crew, with the help of guest commentator (and Manchester house / garage mainstay) Finn, devoted their most recent broadcast to something they’re calling Big Beat Cinema, “outlining the core canon and basic tropes … [of] the ultra-stylish heist movies of the late ’90s and early ’00s – think Ocean’s Eleven , Mark Wahlberg’s The Italian Job , Snatch and even The Matrix .” While film was the main focus of the episode, their conversation also touched upon the sheer absurdity that characterized much of that era’s pop culture, and pointed out the outsized role that big beat played in soundtracking the movies they were putting under the microscope.
This late-’90s / early-2000s time period is something I’ve previously tackled here in the newsletter. Back in 2022, I dove deep into Paul Oakenfold’s impressively bad 2002 album Bunkka , and just a couple months ago, I revisited nu-skool breaks, which might be the only Y2K-era dance music genre that’s never experienced any kind of significant revival. Big beat, however, is something that I’ve only mentioned here and there over the years, which is strange, because it was the sound that first introduced me to electronic music in the first place.
I was in high school when the “electronica” trend was foisted upon the American public as the proverbial “next big thing,” and when artists like The Prodigy, Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim suddenly started popping up on the local alternative rock radio stations—thanks to the grunge explosion a few years earlier, the San Francisco Bay Area had two of them during much of the ’90s—I quickly took an interest in this “new” sound from across the pond. (The fact that everything I was hearing could be traced back to the house, techno, electro and disco sounds that had originated years earlier in the Black and brown communities of my very own country was something I would figure out much later, but back in 1996, that history wasn’t part of the narrative being spun by the commercial music industry.)
Listening to the No Tags episode took me right back to that time, triggering memories of all sorts of artists and songs, many of which I hadn’t listened to in decades. Though I knew that big beat on the whole hadn’t aged well—that’s the one observation you’ll hear again and again whenever the genre comes up in conversation—I dove into my archives, sure that I would come across some long-forgotten gems. That was my original plan for today’s edition of First Floor: to compile and share a list of big beat tunes that had defied the odds and stood the test of time.
There was just one problem. Big beat really has aged terribly, and the more I dug, the more stinkers I found. Nostalgia had clearly clouded my memory over the past 30 years, because even the artists and songs that I remembered liking in my younger days have in most cases not really held up. Exasperated, I eventually decided to alter course, which is why today’s newsletter is not a celebration of big beat, but a look at where and how it went wrong. The songs below—which, admittedly, are just a sampling of the big beat canon—aren’t necessarily terrible, but they are very much “of their time,” and as it turns out, that time is in many cases not worth revisiting—at least not as a listener.
It’s not surprising that one of the first “electronica” acts to break in America was The Prodigy. Although their music was very much rooted in UK rave culture, they were essentially presented as a new variant of punk rockers, with snarling, wild-eyed and wilder-haired frontman Keith Flint cast as a sort of Johnny Rotten for the hacker generation. The fact that the bulk of the music was made by producer Liam Howlett, who largely stayed in the background, likely didn’t even register with most of the suburban teenagers who’d fallen in love with the canned subversion of songs like “Firestarter,” “Breathe” and “Smack My Bitch Up.” The subject matter of the latter doesn’t look great in retrospect—even at the time, the song’s provocative music video, which depicted drug use, physical assault, sexual assault and a range of antisocial behavior, was largely banned from television—but on a musical level, The Prodigy’s music has held up much better than that of their contemporaries.
Perhaps that’s because, strictly speaking, The Prodigy weren’t making big beat. Breakbeats were involved, yes, but the group’s sound hewed closer to hardcore, rave and techno. What the American music industry really liked, however, was its palatability to young rock fans, and that led to a number of artists being thrust into a similar mold. Sometimes that mold took shape via collaborations; the soundtrack to 1997 film Spawn is filled entirely with unholy team-ups between between the world of “electronica” and rock / metal, including Korn & The Dust Brothers, Metallica & DJ Spooky, Henry Rollins & Goldie and, most bizarrely of all, Butthole Surfers & Moby. The album’s biggest hit, however, was “(Can’t You) Trip Like I Do,” a collaboration between Filter and The Crystal Method.
Filter had broken into the mainstream with 1995’s post-grunge scream-a-long “Hey Man, Nice Shot,” and would later find much bigger commercial success with the decidedly softer 1999 ballad “Take a Picture,” but on “(Can’t You) Trip Like I Do,” frontman Richard Patrick joined forces with The Crystal Method to rework a track from the duo’s 1997 debut album Vegas . The original “Trip Like I Do” was a relatively standard-issue slice of crunchy, acid-licked breakbeat, something very much in the vein of songs like The Chemical Brothers’ “Block Rockin’ Beats.” But with Patrick on board, things tilted in a more aggressive direction, his hoarse howls bolstered by a jagged torrent of the overprocessed guitars that defined the era. The end product is a fascinating historical curio, but a great song it is not.
As amusing it can be to revisit the litany of head-scratching collabs that surfaced the late ’90s and early 2000s, the musical paths some artists forged on their own (albeit most likely with the encouragement of their record labels) are perhaps even more demonstrative of the era’s push to install electronic music as part of the commercial alt-rock canon.
People may remember Lunatic Calm’s “Leave You Far Behind” from the soundtrack to 1999’s The Matrix —where it appeared alongside tracks from Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Deftones, Rob Dougan, Ministry, Rage Against the Machine and others—but the UK outfit first released the song two years earlier. (A single from thir debut album, Metropol , it oddly enough also appeared in the soundtrack for 1997’s Mortal Kombat Annihilation .) It’s not clear why co-founder Simon Shackleton was painted blue in the video, but the general vibe is very close to that of The Prodigy, with the song’s angsty vocals unfurling atop a flurry of industrial-tinged breakbeats. Is this proto nu-metal? Quite possibly.
Fluke predated the big beat era—the group’s first single dropped in 1988—but their commercial breakthrough happened in 1996, when the song “Atom Bomb” landed on the UK charts. Originally commissioned for the soundtrack of the wipE’out” 2097 video game—which also contained music from Photek, Future Sound of London, Underworld, The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy—the steadily churning, slightly psychedelic track eventually became the centerpiece of the band’s 2007 album, Risotto . The LP also featured “Absurd”—the track in the above video—which takes the “Atom Bomb” formula, including its raspy-voiced talk-singing, and significantly cranks the tempo. What results isn’t technically a rock song, but it’s certainly rock-adjacent, and even sprinkles a few soaring guitars into the mix.
The Matrix soundtrack plays an outsized role in tellings of big beat history, and fans of the film will probably recognize the Propellerheads’ “Spybreak!” But while the UK duo did have the same swagger as many of their big beat contemporaries, their music rarely flirted with rock and industrial tropes. Instead, it displayed what felt like a raging fetish for the James Bond films, repeatedly outfitting the group’s bustling breakbeats with lush strings and classy horns. The title of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” isn’t an accident—the song is actually a cover of the theme from the 1969 Bond film of the same name. After contributing the track to Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project , a compilation that also included Bond covers from Leftfield, Pulp, Iggy Pop and LTJ Bukem, the Propellerheads then appeared on the soundtrack for 2007’s Tomorrow Never Dies with “Backseat Driver,” and followed that up with the swinging, jazz-infused “History Repeating,” a collaboration with Welsh singer Shirley Bassey—who’d previously voiced the themes to three separate Bond films in the ’60s and ’70s.
Again, none of these songs—save for maybe “Spybreak!”—veered into rock territory, but they did display a surprising comfort with schmaltz, a quality that would come up again and again as “electronica” seeped further into the culture. (Moby’s landmark 1999 album Play would prove to be a particularly lucrative example of this.) Moreover, they were radio-friendly, and all of the references to cinema’s most celebrated spy further helped to ensure that even people who’d never set foot in a club could still connect to the music.
The name Hal 9000 won’t ring familiar to many people, and 1997’s “Blow ’Em Out” wasn’t a hit song, likely because there’s almost no way that the song’s primary guitar riff—which was lifted from Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine”—was legally cleared by the Freskanova label. By today’s standards, the track is essentially an edit, and while it’s undeniably fun, it’s also a blatant example of A) big beat’s seemingly inherent need to hang with the rock crowd and B) the genre’s embrace of goofy, larger-than-life antics.
When it came to goofiness, however, Fatboy Slim took things to another level. Arguably big beat’s signature artist, his ’90s output was brazen, not just in its laddish bravado and obvious borrowing from funk, soul and hip-hop, but also in its willingness to suddenly change course and disrupt its own grooves. Take “Punk to Funk,” a 1996 single that also appeared on the UK producer’s debut album, Better Living Through Chemistry . The opening salvo of rough-and-tumble breakbeats and brawny, not-quite-wobbly bass blasts could potentially fly on modern dancefloors, but a little more than a minute into the proceedings, a cowbell appears and the song downshifts into what feels like a nod to WAR’s ’70s rock classic “Low Rider.” Ninety seconds later, things get even sillier, with horns that sound like the theme music of a ’70s game show.
At the time, Fatboy Slim’s willingness to throw all this stuff into a blender and serve up some party-rocking smoothies proved charming to the masses, and decades later, his music continues to pop in movies, television shows and generic “party” playlists. Yet DJs rarely reach for his tunes, likely because doing so requires a high threshold for not just cheese, but jokey, back-slapping, flow-disrupting chaos. Finding a “functional” Fatboy Slim track can be extremely difficult, and even a relatively straightforward dancefloor cut like “Michael Jackson”—a B-side which appeared on the US version of Better Living Through Chemistry —is relentlessly kooky, adorning its swashbuckling rhythms with dueling vocal chops that nonsensically say “Michael Jackson” and “Tina Turner” over and over again.
Not all electronic music needs to be stone-faced, but during the big beat era, giddiness reigned supreme.
Years before it appeared on the soundtrack to Go —an obvious Big Beat Cinema candidate, and one of several terrible big-screen depictions of rave culture that appeared during the Y2K era—Lionrock’s “Fire Up the Shoesaw” was a single from the UK group’s 2006 album An Instinct for Detection . With its beefy basslines and assorted hip-hop-isms, the song is in many ways a paint-by-numbers big beat tune, but its twangy riffs and swampy atmospheres push the proceedings into a strange zone that might be described as “The Beta Band visits a Louisiana frat party.”
It didn’t take long for big beat to start sounding (and, more importantly, looking) like a parody of itself, and few songs were more ridiculous than “Ooh La La,” a single from The Wiseguys’ 1998 album The Antidote . Filling the video with scantily clad dancers and sexually suggestive stewardesses looks pretty sleazy all these years later—although, to be fair, it was a rather unremarkable choice at the time, especially since the song’s commercial breakthrough was due to its inclusion in a Budweiser commercial in 1999.
Yet the music itself has arguably aged even worse, largely because of its obvious aping of old-school hip-hop. The song’s main vocal hook comes from a recording of a famous 1981 rap battle between Cold Crush and the Fantastic Five, and offers a clear example of something that was endemic within big beat: the recontextualization of hip-hop by white (and mostly non-American) artists, who primarily focused on the genre’s “party” vibe while discarding virtually all traces of its social and political content. The Wiseguys weren’t alone in this, and while a complete accounting of offenders could fill an article on its own, some prominent examples includes UK act The Freestylers, who scored a hit in 1998 with the Run DMC-sampling “B-Boy Stance,” and Fatboy Slim, whose music was full of cheeky nods to hip-hop—his You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby album even had a song called “Gangster Trippin.”
It’s unlikely that these artists were taking an intentional swipe at gangster rap, which dominated hip-hop during much of the ’90s—and was under intense scrutiny from the government, law enforcement and polite society as a result. Nevertheless, big beat’s reverence of throwback hip-hop sounds did provide a comfortable, more easily digestible listen for white audiences, and added fuel to then-prevalent narrative that the genre had somehow “lost its way.”
Not great!
Of course, if we’re going to talk about questionable decisions made by white big beat artists in relation to Black culture, it’s hard to top The Crystal Method’s “Keep Hope Alive,” which accentuated the duo’s booming acid breaks with extended samples of a speech by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Though it was meant as a tribute to the man and his message—and as a creative choice, it followed in the footsteps of the countless dance music producers who’d sampled Martin Luther King Jr.—it’s now something that should probably be filed in the “things white dudes should probably not do” drawer. (David Guetta, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to have learned that lesson, or at least he hadn’t back in 2020.)
I could go on and on about big beat’s flaws. Somehow the Chemical Brothers have gone largely unmentioned in this piece, despite the fact that their 1996 single “Setting Sun”—which was voiced by none other than Oasis’ Noel Gallagher—was a prime example of Cool Britannia run amok. (It can’t be overstated how much the explosion of big beat and “electronica” in America was seeded by Britpop fanatics and import junkies with a serious fetish for all things UK.) Basement Jaxx probably deserve a mention too, but even with all of their madcap antics—which I explored at length a few years ago in an essay about their 2001 album Rooty —I wouldn’t necessarily describe their music as big beat.
Apollo 440, on the other hand, were undeniably a big beat group. Granted, they’re probably best categorized as a footnote within the genre’s history, but their music—and 1999’s “Stop the Rock” in particular—was like catnip to brands and music supervisors, who licensed their tunes for a borderline absurd number of films, television shows, video games and advertisements. “Stop the Rock” does have a certain rambunctious appeal, though it’s hard to fervently defend anything with lyrics that say, “Dancing like Madonna, into the groovy,” especially when said lyrics are delivered in a chintzy robotic voice. What really sticks out, however, is how blatantly commercial it sounds. Did the song always sound like that? Possibly, but this sound palette has become so ubiquitous in mainstream culture over the past few decades that whatever bashy charms “Stop the Rock” once offered have been all but blotted out. Like much of the big beat genre, it now immediately seems like something you’d hear in a movie trailer or a cell phone ad, and while that may provide a quick dopamine hit or a little rush of nostalgic joy, it doesn’t make for an especially meaningful listening experience.
