Asif Khan Inc.

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby – Fatboy Slim

Traveling on the synthetic beats and riffs of computer generated rhythms on an asphalt tarmac you feel a slight bump (which you usually brush aside as what civic minded folks would like to call ‘speed breakers’), and then once in a while you feel a monster bone breaker making you wish some civic authority had painted alternating stripes of white on it to make it visible and provide a sense of identity to that mound of sound. Break beat electronica was one such speed breaker, and Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim has been one such civic (?) authority who made those zebra markings to make it discernible. For though, he may not exactly be the only one who created this musical genre, he surely holds the distinction of defining the genre and providing it with an identity which spawned recognition for itself in the form of millions of swaying souls swaying across the most varied dance floors this world knows.

Proclaimed as one of the biggest exponents of Big Beat today, Fatboy Slim had his first brushes with success in the form of the appetizing popularity achieved by some of his early associations (The Housemartins, Beats International) before he assumed this moniker and went solo to make his debut album ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’ which achieved modest success. The follow-up album ‘You’ve Come a Long Way Baby’ (this was a tagline for the Virginia Slims campaign, something which carried on from the debut album title, which was related to DuPont) released two years later, however achieved a mindboggling success hitherto unknown to the electronic genre, endowing a veritable epithet of being the Bible of this genre. ‘The Rockafeller Skank’ featuring the ever-so-now-recognizable vocal sample of rapper Lord Finesse (right about now, the funk soul brother / check it out now, the funk soul brother) playing in a loop on some insane beats had already captured the airwaves and charts alike before the album was released, and adding it to the compilation added good reason for anybody wanting to check out the album to buy it. The album cover generated some controversy because of featuring an obese dude with a wry grin holding a cigarette (which does make us think though, sticklers that we are for deciphering cyptic connections; Obese=Fatboy, Cigarette=Slim, Title=Virginia Slims tagline; was there a connection really thought of?), which was enough to change the US cover to stacks of vinyl records. The controversy didn’t end here though, due to the liberal interjunction of profanities and supposed blasphemous connotations (Fucking in Heaven had to be edited clean to Illin in Heaven, man, he did get fucked pretty good by the censors on Mother Earth itself). Notwithstanding all this though, the hook contained within progression of ‘Right Here Right Now’, the bubble mouthed samples of ‘Gangster Trippin’, and the chemical nature of ‘Kalifornia’ paved the way for breakthrough success, though surprising the one which shone through and achieved critical chart-topping success was the piano based, electronica minus, soulful vocal based melody of ‘Praise You’ on this dance heavy track album. Undoubtedly one of the most overexposed album of its genre, this is one road bump which jars you to the bone each time you shake a boogie to it.