REVIEW: Fatboy Slim, You've Come a Long Way, Baby
(Astralwerks/Skint)
- Krisjanis Gale
Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim is a funk collage artist, equipped, to a rather ridiculous extent, with all the tools befitting a solo act in this age of electronica.
This is immediately apparent upon viewing the three-panel photo spread of his home studio, bereft with vintage analogue synths, a 32-track mixing workstation, several samplers and other rackmount gear, hundreds of floppy disks, and a scattered library of probably over a thousand records, the shelves bending at the weight of it all.
What is Fatboy up to with this arsenal? Something big by the looks of it.
So many electronic artists take a lax view of music composition, seeing their machines as a means to an end in and of themselves, forever repeating a proccess, focusing on technique rather than style.
This is NOT Fatboy Slim.
Listening to You've Come A Long Way Baby , you get the impression that Fatboy is someone who thoroughly enjoys doing a bit of homework before setting forth to create a fresh mix. The gear, the arsenal of audio...NONE of it goes to waste.
Every song on the disc is a rather perfectly assembled semblance of long-lost grooves and hooks, with a cleanly fused layer of modern touches atop them.
Maybe you don't know what a TB-303 is, but you know you've heard of the "acid box" and "acid house." Maybe you don't know a speech synthesizer from a vocoder, but you've heard of Kraftwerk, and what they'd done with them. Maybe you don't listen to much funk or disco, but you know you've heard music from the 70's. Maybe you don't frequent raves, but you know you've heard the end result of this dance culture on rare late-night radio outings. And you've probably no idea how a sampler actually works or what it does, but you know every jungle and drum & bass artist worth mentioning has one.
You're probably like most people - very new to this whole bizarre phenomenon labeled "electronica." And even if you're not, there's certainly quite a bit of it out there that still seems undeniably alien to you. Electronica, or the status quo of it, at least, is not for everyone.
But everyone knows how to bop their head.
Fatboy's mission is to bop the heads of an entire society, utilizing a style that is new and different, but also leveraging a fierce respect for the past.
There are so many familiar bits and pieces on this album, that have been expertly cut up, chewed, swallowed, spit back out again, and rearranged that the resulting ultra-slick puree of rock-funk-disco-soul-house-trance-ambient-garage-techno has something for everyone. Everyone.
Of course, there's no accounting for technical clarity in all this sampling and resampling, mixing and remixing. This is not a clean album by any stretch of the imagination. Lots of dirt. Lots of clicks and pops. Lots of jerky transitions. And obvious digital clipping surrounding Fatboy's insistence upon chopping vocal samples to oblivion. (I believe these are the "rubber syllables" referred to in Rockafella Skank.)
But who honestly cares about a clean mix when they're playing music at floor-rumbling volume? We want something fresh, loud, and groove-centric.
Fatboy Slim delivers.
