So, I've decided to take my POLL back underground... To stop it falling into the wrong hands: Music For the Jilted Generation

Oh man this is impossible

"one love" vs "break and enter" vs "no good" vs "claustrophobic sting"

The one from Hackers

"Voodoo People"

Break and Enter best encapsulates everything that's great about Prodigy in one song. And that sample... my god, that sample.

I'm leaning towards Full Throttle for the way it builds to the lush piano sample.

Which is probably not actually a sample, but you know what I mean.

"Poison"

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

no good.

summer of 94 i was 9 going on 10 and I remember hearing some older kids listening to this on their boom box in their garden and thinking, wow.

god i could easily vote for any one of the singles

one love or poison or no good or speedway or voodoo people

but i think it'll have to be no good for both the sample and the drum programming

gonna go with speedway. haven't played this album in a couple of years, but it's definitely a winner

Voted "3 Kilos," because it's good, but also because the title matches the sound so perfectly. I can't think of what else a song called "3 Kilos" would sound like.

The "Experience" poll would be harder.

Just put the record on, and I should have voted for "Voodoo People." Massive in every way.

Shit, meant to vote for Full Throttle but clicked on Speedway by mistake. I've always got the titles of those two mixed up.

"Break and Enter" is the best Prodigy tune ever, so that. The weird human voice-like sound that makes the melody (is it really a sample? from where?) is so weird and menacing and cool.

When I was 14, I went to France on holiday with my best mate and his family - we had a tape of this which we listened to on headphones pretty much anytime we went anywhere by car throughout the whole two weeks. 'No Good', 'One Love', 'Break and Enter', all great but I'd have to pick 'Poison', it's just so hard.

Tuomas, that sample is from "Casanova" by Baby D, another wholly classic tune.

i am realizing that i have zero memory of this album ;_;

can't decide out of:
Their Law
Full Throttle
Posion
No Good (Start the Dance)
Skylined

"No Good". It's perfect.

"Full Throttle." It's fast. It's (relatively) short. It changes directions. It barely needs pruning which the album overall desperately calls out for.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Had just decided to vote for Skylined when I realised I'd missed the deadline. Bah.

Last three tracks are EPIC. I guess you don't turn to the Prodigy if you want epic, though.

I think I've told this story before, but around the time this album came out, one day my cousin was sitting in his car at a parking lot and blasting it on his car stereo. When "One Love" started to play, some random dude came knocking on his window. My cousin opened the window, and the dude was like, "Yeah! Yeah! I love this track!", and proceeded to dance and sing the vocal sample along the tune.

(I guess this is only funny if you know what the vocal is like in "One Love".)

I dusted this off and gave it a listen this morning because I've been on a bit of a '90s electro trip at the moment, and while the obvious highlights sounded as good as ever, I realised just how much I've been underrating 'Speedway' for all these years, it seems to be one of those Prodigy track that seldom gets talked about but it really hit the spot for me today, so much that I listened to it several times in a row: that creamy acid intro, the relentless pulse, that menacing outro! Superb.

*tracks

Haha I just came here to say I had forgotten how rrrrrrrrushy "Speedway". It's like their homage to the first Underground Resistance album.

Oh I listened to this for the first time in ages the other day and it's amazing how much this holds up.

It could do with losing The Heat (The Energy) and a few songs could be pruned by about a minute, other than that still incredible.

'Break And Enter' is my highlight. When that portamento melody comes in..

One of the best things about the album (even leaving aside "No Good" which most of the time is my favourite track) is how ravey it remains, like no matter how tough and macho "Break and Enter" or "Voodoo People" are, Howlett can't resist throwing in oscillator riffs or high-pitched vocal samples.

Like, in my head "Their Law" and "Poison" should be compromised by their proto-"Breathe" ~rawk~ hardness, but they're way to cheese and (oddly) delicate to be anything other than charming.

Yeah - it's a really dark album that actually frightened me a fair bit when I first heard it at 14, but it's also the last one that's still firmly rooted in the rave scene. I have a mate, about ten years younger than me, who insists they only really got good AFTER FOTL and that going back to the Jilted era, he'd be frustrated at the long intros and lack of 'oomph'. He's hopelessly wrong of course, but it's interesting to hear that perspective.

Wow, I don't think I've ever known who even bothered to follow them after FotL, let alone think they got better.

I've met a few Americans who were unaware that they even had a career before FOTL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPI3b9iPSN0

'Speedway' is one of my favourite tracks on the album! Those creamy acid synths at the beginning, the relentlessness of it, and then that eerie as fuck outro. It's a great track, much underrated. I still love this album a hell of a lot. Still better than The Chemical Brothers entire career.

(It must be said that I still love The Fat of the Land too, although not as much as this LP, and definitely more than everything that came after)

Which is better, this album or Experience? I only know Fat of the Land, but I want to investigate further.

This one, especially if you like FOTL.

Yeah, this one. Experience is much lighter in tone and far more of a rave record.

Experience is packed with wicked tunes, but like many rave/techno albums of this era (see also: The Deepest Cut, Revolution for Change, 4Voice, Utah Saints, etc), it's more like a collection of singles and B-sides than an album you'd want to listen from beginning to end. MftJG is more clearly designed to work as an album, right down to ending with a three-piece "suite" that could never be released as a single, so if you want to listen to the Prodge for an extended time at home/on headphones, this one works much better.

In fact, if it didn't include "Poison", I'd say MftJG is undeniably the best album the rave/hardcore scene ever produced (even if it was released at the tail end of the rave, and already had the other foot outside of it). "Poison" wasn't even that bad back in the day, but nowadays it's impossible to listen to it without remembering how it pointed the way towards Prodigy's next phase as bloated crossover "rockers".

Got lots of time for Experience, but Jilted is such a great piece of work through-and-through

Poison is fine in context, but yeah I get what you mean Tuomas. It was definitely the indie/metal-club token dance track back in the day

Poison also rules out of context. It's a great tune.

I love Experience to death but MftJG is the Prodigy album IMO. Also, Invaders Must Die is better than Fat of the Land.

Strange to single out 'Poison' as the one which points the way towards the Prodigy being "crossover rockers" when it's 'Voodoo People' and 'Their Law' that have the crunchy sampled guitar riffs.

When you're not actually listening to it "Poison" seems like it's a heavy-handed harbinger of what comes next, but in reality it's pretty delightful, especially the way the drums become increasingly intricate over the course of the track.

Don't get me wrong, I can definitely hear elements of the direction The Prodigy would take on The Fat of the Land on this record, but I can just as much hear elements of Experience on the record too. For me, this is one of the strengths of the record, as well as the material being strong on the whole, and the album working well as a start-to-finish statement. There's some wonderfully eerie moments on this record to balance out the more full-on parts.

Strange to single out 'Poison' as the one which points the way towards the Prodigy being "crossover rockers" when it's 'Voodoo People' and 'Their Law' that have the crunchy sampled guitar riffs.

Those two are still instrumentals, and the guitar riffs are used pretty interchangeably with the acid loops, mutating from one to the other, so they're still in the rave mold of the old, just with different kind of building blocks. But to become crossover rockers they had to add some "hard" & "real" vocals, not just helium samples, and make one of the guys the face of the band who sings them. That's what they first did on "Poison", so it's more a portent of things to come than anything else before "Firestarter".

Also there's the video, which certainly tried to give them a harder image, no club scenes or psychedelic rave stuff there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Punks

I suggest watching this, as it predates FOTL, shows their live show, and shows that when performing they absolutely were using both Keith and Maxim as mouthpiece frontmen well before "Firestarter" came out.

If you look at the video with the sounds off, you could easily imagine they're some alternative rock band of the mid-90s, there's absolutely no rave signifiers left there at all. So when "Firestarter" came out, it was pretty obvious to see that as a continuation of "Poison", both aurally and visually: slower tempo, harsher sound (there's none of the the rave stabs or synths Tim mentions on "Poison", unlike most other MftJG tunes), aggressive shouted vocals (done by the band members themselves, not a sample), murky and dirty imagery of underground lairs and angry people. So yeah, I really feel all this helped to sell them to rock fans way more than the ultrafast breakbeats, psychedelic jungle visions and mutant flute samples of "Voodoo People".

(xpost)

'Voodoo People' and 'Their Law' also have vocals, though. Sure, they may be sampled, but they're not exactly helium samples. In the case of the latter, "fuck 'em and their law" is even the hook!

Even on 'Poison'; there's vocal samples... if you listen closely, the lyric "I've got the poison" is pitched up compared to the rest of the vocal.

In a sense, I see what you're getting at - it's a vocal from one of the dancers - but if that dancer happened to be Keith Flint, I'd agree that it points the way to 'Firestarter', 'Serial Thrilla', the cartoon punk side of The Prodigy. Since it's Maxim, though, I don't.

"Their Law" was not a single tho... And the sample is not used as hook the same way "Poison's" chorus it, it just gets played of couple of times during the drop, i.e. the way vocal samples are typically used in techno, rave, trance, and other types of mostly instrumental dance music. Whereas in "Poison" the vocal bit is repeated again and again, so it gets stuck to your head. That's a pop hook, "Their Law" hasn't got anything like that.

And AFAIK the vocals in "Poison" are not a sample, meaning they weren't sampled from an old record rather than done by the band members themselves. Sure, half of the vocal hook is pitched up a bit (tho not to helium levels), but it's still way different in it's aggressiveness than the reggae/soul/etc sample they used on their earlier singles like "Out of Space" or "No Good". Way more menacing, more punk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzZ1g6naNZ0

Here's a bit from the "Electronic Punks" VHS Dan mentioned above... Listen to the live performance of "Poison" (it starts at 5.55), they sing the vocals like rockers, and it doesn't sound that different from the record version. Whereas when they play "Their Law" live (here) on the same tour, they add a lot of extra vocals, the solitary "fuck 'em" sample isn't enough to work as a rock hook.

As DJP says, it shows that they were using Keith and Maxim as "frontmen" way before The Fat of the Land. It's typical of the time. That's what the Prodigy were doing in 1995.

A hook is still a hook, no matter what form it takes and the vocals on 'Poison', although performed by Maxim, are sampled and sequenced.

And AFAIK the vocals in "Poison" are not a sample, meaning they weren't sampled from an old record rather than done by the band members themselves.

By this argument, most of the second Portishead album doesn't use samples because the music they were cutting up and sequencing was written by them for the album.

A hook is still a hook, no matter what form it takes and the vocals on 'Poison', although performed by Maxim, are sampled and sequenced.

Er, there's a massive difference between a pop/rock tune hook when is a chorus that's repeated 40 times in a tune and get stuck in your head on the first listen, and a techno track sampling a line from some old movie or whatever 2 or 3 times when there's a drop in the beat. The latter is hardly a "hook", it's just some extra spice.

And my point wasn't that the vocal in "Poison" wasn't processed, a lot of pop vocals are... It's just that by crafting the vocal hook themselves they could further emphasize the harder, aggressive image that they were heading for, and they could sing it live like a "real" band. I don't think they tried to sing the samples from "No Good" or "Out of Space" on their gigs rather than just looping them, and the sources for them (old reggae and soul) were way more in line with club music of the era than the vocal styles of "Poison". Yeah, technically they're all samples, but it's the quality of the sample that matters. And in that sense "Poison" in all its rugged aggressiveness was pointing towards the future way more than any other tune they recorded before "Firestarter".

"when it's a chorus that's repeated 40 times in a tune and it gets stuck in your head"

I've always assumed (though not based on hard evidence) that the emergence of Keith and Maxim as frontmen was kind of an outgrowth from the existing rave/techno tradition of putting on live PAs of big tunes anyway.

Even with "Firestarter", I don't think there was (at the time) a strong sense that The Prodigy were becoming crossover rockers. In a lot of ways the band were overtaken by events - in particular, The Chemical Brothers' "Setting Sun" coming out in between "Firestarter" and "Breathe" provided a contextual narrative for the direction in which they were moving which then created a bit of a feedback loop, I suspect.

But prior to that point, I don't know that you could necessarily draw a substantive distinction between The Prodigy's flirtations with guitar/MCing/vocals and, say, Ultra-Sonic (though the qualitative chasm is enormous).

I've always assumed (though not based on hard evidence) that the emergence of Keith and Maxim as frontmen was kind of an outgrowth from the existing rave/techno tradition of putting on live PAs of big tunes anyway.

Yup. During Happy Hardcore events (for example) you'd have the DJ spinning the set plus you'd have an MC vibing up the crowd and adding extra "rapping" and all that stuff. I always saw Flint and Maxim fulfilling a similar role in Prodigy's live show and then later on record.

Er, there's a massive difference between a pop/rock tune hook when is a chorus that's repeated 40 times in a tune and get stuck in your head on the first listen, and a techno track sampling a line from some old movie or whatever 2 or 3 times when there's a drop in the beat. The latter is hardly a "hook", it's just some extra spice.

In the case of 'Their Law', "fuck 'em and their law" is a hook.

There were several techno/hardcore/trance artists flirting with guitars and hard metal sounds in the early 90s, as discussed in this ancient thread:

Metal techno: the worst genre ever?

Even Westbam sampled hard rock guitars in 1990!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImxqYor9HF4

But IMO what makes this stuff (as well as "Voodoo People") different than "Firestarter" and later big beat rock hybrids is that these producers were still structuring their tracks like club music... The guitars samples and occasional vocal snippets were just used as material to build a club track like any other, they just used those instead of the regular synths etc. Most of the times these tracks were still instrumental, they didn't have any sort of sung hooks, and the "rock" bits were typically heavily chopped samples, not "real" vocals or guitars. (There were some exceptions like Eskimos & Egypt who were doing "proper" songs with verses and choruses, but they were more like rockers flirting with techno rather than the other way around.)

(xxpost)

Also, Music for the Jilted Generation is MEANT to be an aggressive album - both lyrically and musically. It's Howlett's "pissed off at the Criminal Justice Act record. In many ways, it's more aggressive than The Fat of the Land.

You really feel that a line that's dropped exactly twice in a 7 minute track can be called a "hook"? Even the "I'm the law and you can't beat the law" mantra works more like a hook in that tune.

(xpost)

I'm actually listening to this album right now, and 'Poison' just came on. I hear more hip hop in this track than rock music, tbh.

x-post:

Yes!

When one thinks of 'Their Law', they don't think of the mantra you quoted, they think: "what we're dealing with here is a total lack of respect for the law", the guitar riff, the synth riff and especially, they think of "fuck 'em and their law"

Agreed, but most of the tracks are aggressive within the structural boundaries of the hardcore techno of that era (though often bending them in an interesting way). "Poison" is pointing towards something different... When I bought the album as 15 year old in 1994, I certainly remember that tune standing out way more than anything else on it, me and my Prodigy fan friends always saw it as the "weird tune", and it took some time for us to even start liking it. Everything else on the album we could see as an continuation of Prodigy's older sound from the Experience era, or as something that fit the club/electronic music of that time. But "Poison" was just odd.

(xpost)

I can't believe 'Skylined' got 0 votes. I find the parts where the string synths kick in to be so powerful.

You have a weird way of defining a hook... AFAIK, the hook is the bit that gets stuck in your head on repeat, not just what people remember of the tune (though of course in most cases they're one and the same). For example, I'm sure a lot of people think of the guitar solo when they think of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" or "Stairway to Heaven", but that doesn't mean those solos are the hook of the song.

this is quite a conversation...

Yeah, sorry about the diversion.

This thread got me listening to MftJG for the first time in this decade, and I realised what I love most about it is the way Howlett programs the beats... Like on Experience, you have your basic sped-up hardcore breaks, but on several tracks he accentuates or even derails their effect by adding a more bludgeoning, off-kilter four-to-the-floor thump. "One Love" is a great example of that, that extra beat really makes its rhythm work.

And also the way the drums sound on many tracks is so cool! On "Full Throttle", for example, you have that really weird beat that gives you the impression of massive scissors rapidly opening and closing... I was really impressed by that 1994, and that was the one and only thing I still remembered about it before listening to it again for the first time in years. So I guess those scissors are the hook of that tune? :)

xp Anyway, the reason Jilted works is that it's got one foot in Experience's heely-squeal beany-rave past, but it's also got this unflinching sense of evil running through it that had yet to be caricatused on FOTL. It actually kind of freaked me out when I first heard it at 14 - old enough to have heard about rave culture, ecstasy deaths, the M25 and the CJB, but not quite old enough to understand the reality of it beyond what was reported in the media.
Jilted represented the dying days of rave as this dangerous, addled demimonde full of wide-eyed zombies ingesting unidentified chemicals and racing away from the police. While Experience was giddy and fluffy, Jilted choked and hacked with unease. Those squealy rave sounds were still there, but they were being strangled and twisted into grotesque shapes. The safe-space of rave's golden era had been overrun by bad drugs, bad media and bad authority but the Prodigy were defiant - truly punk as opposed to the version of punk they proffered on Fat Of The Land. It's an album that starts with a statement of intent and follows through with it right to the end.
Hard to believe now, but at the time I remember my friends and I being truly shocked when Liam says 'For fuck's sake, I'm just trying to write this fucking tune man!' - that felt punk as fuck to this 14 year old. But it wasn't just 'Their Law' and 'Poison' that sounded dangerous - the whole thing, 'Speedway', and especially 'The Narcotic Suite' was saturated with it, and what better artwork to go with it? This face, halfway between agony and ecstasy, just about to sink below a mercurial swamp, still screaming, still wanting MORE.

*caricatured

and what better artwork to go with it?

At first I thought you were talking about this:

http://www.kotta.se/prodigy/pics/jiltedart.jpg

I have a soft spot for that, corny as it is.

That inner sleeve artwork was and still is utterly classic! If you can't appreciate it, you've become an old fogey inside & belong to the other side of the bridge.

I had a mate, a couple of years older than me, who had the inner sleeve in pride of place up on his wall. He was so cool...

You can just tell the dude is mouthing 'Fuckin' poliiice - FUCK OFF!'

... AFAIK, the hook is the bit that gets stuck in your head

Dingdingding! Yup, correct!

le, I'm sure a lot of people think of the guitar solo when they think of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" or "Stairway to Heaven", but that doesn't mean those solos are the hook of the song.

Nobody considers the guitar solo to be the hook in 'Stairway To Heaven'

Well the solo is pretty much the only thing I remember from that tune, so by your definition it's the hook.

So, we can ascertain that you're not particularly great at detecting a hook, then.

Anyway, the reason Jilted works is that it's got one foot in Experience's heely-squeal beany-rave past, but it's also got this unflinching sense of evil running through it that had yet to be caricatused on FOTL.

Yeah, I definitely agree with this. Like I say, I like FOTL, but it's certainly got far more of a cartoony sense of evil to it, where Jilted feels far more atmospheric and serious in tone.

It's an album that starts with a statement of intent and follows through with it right to the end.

Yup, and the album was originally supposed to be longer! Howlett had to edit 'One Love' and remove another track (the name of which escapes me) to fit it all on the CD.

But it wasn't just 'Their Law' and 'Poison' that sounded dangerous - the whole thing, 'Speedway', and especially 'The Narcotic Suite' was saturated with it, and what better artwork to go with it?

Yeah, particularly the outro to 'Speedway' and the "MY MIND IS GLOWING" part of 'Claustrophobic Sting'

Isn't the edit of "One Love" the same that's on the single, which already came out in 1993? (Someone must've liked that edit, because only that is included on the CD single, even though there would've obviously been space for more. The full mix is only available on the vinyl single.) When the album came out, I remember being a bit surprised that "One Love" was even on it, at that point it felt like ancient history already... I guess it was included for the benefit of people who only buy albums? It's a dope tune, but sonically it feels more like it belongs to the Experience era, so it's a bit out of place on MftJG.

"MY MIND IS GLOWING"

:-D that's the quintessence of the record

a few beers into my weekend and because of this thread i have put this on.

due to general ignorance and '94 being my year of FAX/ambient i missed out on this album at the time,
but have since picked it up in the cheap bins just for grins.

i have to say it is indeed rather special.

oh, and despite not having the remastered version, this is soundng insanely good.

The vocals on Their Law are original to the song, not sampled. (There are bad audience bootlegs of PWEI playing it live with full verses, too.)

Yeah, I suspected it might be... But my point was that the "fuck 'em, and their law!" line not used like a hook in a pop song (like the vocals in "Poison" are) rather than like vocal sample in a techno track: it's played only twice, during the beat drop. So it's not really any different from, for example, how the vocal samples are used in this track:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2KAplrXOPE

But I don't feel "space where time becomes a loop" or "cut the midrange, drop the bass!" are the hooks of this track any more than "fuck 'em, and their law!" is of Their Law. If you want to identify a hook, it's the synth and guitar riffs, not some vocal snippets used to add flavour. Whereas in Poison the vocals clearly work in the manner of a pop tune chorus. And that's really the template Firestarter and Breathe followed later on, they didn't follow the Their Law template (which, despite the presence of PWEI, is still structured more like a club track).