Right About Now: The Funk Soul Brother
Like most people of my age and nationality, I was a fan of Fatboy Slim. Along with the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim was the unofficial official choice for “dance music it was okay for Britpop fans to like,” most likely because the genre they invented/mined/made mainstream, Big Beat, was essentially making rock music with samplers and senses of humor (The more popular Slim got, the more oddly gimmicky and “wacky” his public persona got, it seemed. “Look! Here’s a fake dance troupe dancing to one of my songs! Here’s Christopher Walken!”) – no surprise, perhaps, considering that Fatboy Slim was actually Norman Cook, onetime member of sincere indie band the Housemartins, and someone who’d been trying his hardest to make dance music mainstream in various guises for years before Fatboy Slim broke through.
The official version of the Fatboy story has him as an underground success until the release of “The Rockerfeller Skank,” the first single from his second album, but that’s not the way I remember it at all; it was earlier (less mainstream) single “Going Out Of My Head” that I always thought made him a success, although I wasn’t convinced until someone – my roommate at the time, I think? – played me the B-Side, “Michael Jackson.”
From there, it suddenly seemed like he was everywhere: remixing anyone and everyone, releasing single after single as Fatboy Slim, songs used in advertisements or TV shows or playing in shops; stories about him in magazines and in tabloid newspapers, as he wooed a much-beloved radio personality. There was no escape, and the more I heard his stuff, the more 2-dimensional it sounded. It was all flash and surface and emotionally empty, muzak for a hyperactive audience, and I just kind of… stopped being interested.
That’s not to say I have no Fatboy Slim on my iPhone. But the few songs that are on there are novelties of nostalgia: Something I listen to when it comes up on shuffle and remember earlier, simpler times. They’re not something I’d listen to out’ve choice, when there’s so much more out there.
