Big Beat Bashin'

i dont like it when people dis it as a scene or try and distance themselves - the 96 essential festival was amazing in the skint tent, big beat boutique at the old concordewas truely the most perfect club - screw your body and soul or twilo moments, gimme carpet and cook.

and the biggest tradgedy was wrekked train leaving the lo-fi's

then there were loads that took huge chunks of records and just chucked them out there - or remixed CLASSIC tunes - that was wrong - would i prefer to listen to the bronx dogs 'tribute to jazzy jay' or edwin starr - hmm no contest

then there was the arse - crystal method and some other stuff

i also believe there were some delightful bits that in no way could be linked to beer - jaques lu cont for instance - witty and funky but id rather have a daquari to it

I think Blueski grasps exactly why I went off Big Beat so quickly. It brought rock values and sounds into electronic dance music, a genre I valued for it's "thoughtfulness", "paranoia" AND "cheesiness". All adjectives were good things from my persepective. On the other hand rock (and I'm sure the Stroke's, though I've fortunately never heard them) does bore me stiff.

What was good about big beat ... BRA's sense of fun and cartoon mania, the skanking jamaican beats, a lot of old skool hip-hop and electro influence, FreQ.nasty (I think the Beastie's Intergallactic was a great Big Beat record)

What then began to suck ... everyone using rocky electric guitar and bass loops; all rhythms tending towards the same breakbeat (true this happened to d'n'b around 96 too); Fatboy Slim starting to use 4 on the floor beats but without the subtlety or funk of good house music.

the flipside 'Morning Lemon' (also featured on the 'Brothers Gonna Work It Out' mix) is terrific - a psychotic electro b-boy extract although it was really an extension of 'These Beats Were Made For Breakin' altho i think that actually came on the flip of 'Elektrobank' so dunno which came first.

and tho Crystal Method were a bit iffy, i did actually like 'Busy Child' and their recent album 'Tweekend' isnt too bad either from what i've heard

Big Beat was great, I don't really know if it was beerboy music, and I don't really care. So is Eminem or something anyway and it doesn't put me off him. As for the criticism of "bringing rock elements to dance", yes it is fuckin annoying but any of the big dance daddys could be accused of that too, Orbital, Chems, whoever. It's only annoying because people who like these bands don't like lots of other dance music.

I'm still waiting for Dan Perry to get Muzikizum though, it seems so right! (even if you didn't like Lazy)

The point is though, it brings in a guitar but does something clear and visceral with it. It doesn't make 808 State suddenly sound like a rock / dance act. (One of the things you could argue about BigBeat is that it's really a revival of the early 90s rock / dance crossover acts like Pop Will Eat Itself, Jesus Jones or Carter USM.)

half of Primal Scream's 90s catalog e.g. 'If They Move Kill Em' Campag Velocet 'To Lose La Trek' (Pete Voss may sound like a twat and rhyme badly but i love the vibe of this track) Stone Roses 'Fools Gold' - nuff said The Fall 'Telephone Thing' Death In Vegas 'Dirt' (fuckin phenomenal record) Happy Mondays 'WFL' - nuff said again The Clash - The Magnificent Seven (more bad rhyming this time from Strummer but this track was as big in the Bronx as it was in the Bush, good fusion of disco, punk and hip hop)

and those are just for starters. there's something about all those tracks - they fit in with the modern definitions of dance music and they all feature guitars prominently - huzza

I think those examples you give are more perfect fusions of rock and dance actually, whereas "bringing rock elements to dance" is often just a synonym for "dance music which rock fans could get" and often rock fans only "got" it because the act actually made an album.

Dirt is fucking great alright though. I'd pick Shoot Speed Kill Light as the number 1 Primal Scream rock/dance fusion thing, and probably the best fusion of the two ever.

i have no idea of blueski still posts here under a different pseudo, but damn.
spot on.
after too many years of ear shredding synths, this stuff sounds fantastic.
basically, fat boy slims live @ boutique mix = sheer brilliance.
and yes, i realise this puts me in the killfile pile, but i care not.

nah i still have my live @ social and live @ boutique mixes

"big beat" is easily as diverse as "house"

yeah a lot of it was shit, and a lot of it was gold

one thing people seem to forget was that it struck at a high water mark for dance purism, when a lot of DJs were spinning an hour of music that all sounded the same

we take dj eclecticism for granted in our post-electroclash post-beardo world but i think big beat kinda kicked it off (again)

all those + fsuk vols 1 - 4 = big beat collection par excellence.

[xpost !! ]

i say again because go back a few years and it's all undifferentiated acid house / early techno or super eclectic balearic

but i recall 95-00 as an era w big high walls between jungle and techno and house and trance

fsuk 1 is kinda shitty imo but i still have 2-4

when a lot of DJs were spinning an hour of music that all sounded the same

you see i dont agree with this.

many of the classic big beat mixes prove just how diverse this so called genre was.

a cut up tempo ska rhythm one minute, a full on 808 acid riff the next followed by old school hip house the next.

i think its this random chaos approach that makes the fsuk (for example) mixes stand out from the crowd these days

</nostalgia_trip>

yeah .. fsuk 1 is a bit too 1 dimensional (but was necessary to set the 'scene' for many)

the rest = aceness when in the right mood.

many of the classic big beat mixes prove just how diverse this so called genre was.

think that was TLG's point: that big beat welcomed eclecticism at a time when it was otherwise in short supply

ahhh .. re-read post.
ta ..
and sorry TLG ..
clearly, we are singing from the same hymn sheet

i.e. one word - 'at' in TLGs post - carrying so much weight.

i'm listening to elijah + skilliam and this kinda sounds like grime too

ah fuck brain not work

i meant it kinda sounds like big beat

as a rock person, big beat gave me an easy entry point into dance music in the mid-late 90s. loved the chemical brothers live at the social, monkey mafia's 15 steps EP, random tracks by the likes of propellerheads, lionrock, depth charge, funki porcini, etc.

still like all that stuff

@tlc : ha.
not heard their stuff, ta for the tip off.
tonight i have come to realise that big beat + ska's up beats = my sweet spot.
but then again, i was all about the ska-acid thing that that was supposed to blow up wa-a-ay back - and beyond a few classics, that went nowhere
just dropped lo-fis boutique mix.
i mean seriously, no diggity dropping into sitar funk before heading into full on go go = truly glorious.
and just adds fuel to the fire re 'f*ck it' rules.

the problem with this line of argument is that it's actually the sensibility that's just as broad, and maybe that's what someone was getting at upthread about the festival experience, the actual big beat tracks on these mixes are on average a little meager compared to the average non-beat track, its not necessarily that the sound as is more thin but that the shtick is kinda thin and so the sound maybe only works in context, if even then. i think i might have to actually be drunk to want to hear some of this stuff. and really good big beat tends to fall a little to the left of average. anyway, now that youtube exists, enjoy some proto-dubstep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFX1hPt5mBw

the surf guitar is so misinformed

i guess at the time acid had been overexposed (how it's not right now is kind of beyond me)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OwOpCUW_Vs

^^ i have no idea how to dance to this but its great for cleaning the house

that Revenge Of upload should have used the single cover for the image, with Mad Frankie's disappointed visage sternly surveying the listener. that comp cover looks like a mid-80s Madness promo.

like chores, it feels much longer than it actually is, and is actually worth it in the end

xpost

time to dig in the archive for that mekon cd ..

tbf i understand they were still learning to mix at the time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN2aofeyLy0

^^ see if you can last through the whole 7 minutes

i did, but possibly only because i got on ebay and forgot i was listening to it until it ended

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1aJt7-dj0A

this is flawless, except it reveals the taste for zany humor, and also that it kinda just sounds like modern house

Adore that first Lo-Fis album so much. And yeah they were best in house mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBeYLtZrD0Q

maybe my favorite big beat track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6QWP-9fAbg&feature=relmfu

Revive!

So I listened to some amount of Big Beat and surrounding 90s "electronica"-boom stuff at the time, but I haven't much revisited it at all ever since. Last night I put on somebody's big playlist of this while doing work, and I was surprised how fantastic a lot of it sounded. Part of that was just the playlist aspect, hearing nonstop cream-of-the-crop tracks outside of that mid-90s context where every third commercial and movie was packed with tedious versions of this sound. But I expected way more of it to feel amusingly dated, boneheaded, naive, or formulaic, and that just wasn't the case very often.

I agree with a lot of thoughts toward the start of this thread: I think it helps that the mission/brief for this stuff was very straightforward — make everything slam excitingly, that's it — so if an idea works it just kind of works. (That feels like the case with a lot of genres that compile or playlist well; I remember thinking the same thing about electroclash mixes feeling like punk comps.) Even predictable and formulaic elements — nastily distorted acid bass, grim-sexy muttering vocals, bashing a 70s sample to death and back, sirens, wanton abuse of compressors — felt totally satisfying. I suppose the only reason to listen to this 30 years later is that you want to be hit by those things over and over.

My main takeaways were: (1) I never noticed quite how good Chemical Brothers were at making hooks out of barely tonal noises — other people keep stacking rhythms and melodies, but these guys really figured out how to make a memorable loop out of just sounds — and then (2) I really missed out on the share of this that bordered into ragga — I was enjoying that stuff the most and I don't think I'd heard any of it before. (Also if you do anything with music production it's really funny to think about how audibly low-resolution a lot of digital audio and effects are in these tracks, in ways people now use downsampling and bitcrushers to imitate; at one point I was like "dang, how did they get that effect in 1996" and then I realized it was just low-res processing being gradually stretched to its breaking point, not the modern effects that simulate that.)

this is like a controversial opinion that’s going to get me banned but a lot of chem bros beats sound really clunky clumsy unbalanced unfunky to me lately. I get it’s supposed to have this big bottom rock thing going but it doesn’t really explode like I want it to, it just sounds like a constant tumbling clunky drum fill, like on electrobank for example. Still love the Noel Gallagher tunes hugely though idk

I was just too into this stuff at the time to have ever wanted to relisten much in the last 20 years lol tho would always defend many of the values behind it and always taking a broader definition than perhaps most would in order to include more stuff from '94 if not earlier.

revisited How to Operate With a Broken Mind recently and I was stunned by how good it sounded. definitely has that CD-era problem where the songs are just too long for no real reason but it still hits hard and is funky as shit. been dropping Battleflag into some DJ sets lately which has been great because it doesn't seem like people know the track anymore. so you get the "oh my god what is this" reaction sometimes.

the Propellerheads album on the other hand sounds ridiculous to me now

Gotta say I really enjoyed some Fatboy Slim production breakdowns on YouTube recently, where a dude had the stems and tried to match the original mixes using Ableton, and Norman was on hand for commentary.

oooh yeah I've been seeing those videos where he goes through tracks on the You've Come a Long Way album and shows off how they were made and all the little tricks he uses, definitely made me respect the guy a lot more. he seems like a good hang if nothing else. also I've prob mentioned this here before but I feel like that album is like a precursor to YTP/brainrot culture - I never would've said it held up like, a decade ago, but it actually feels pretty relevant now

If you like Big Beat, you might like contemplating Big Beat Cinema, as outlined in the No Tags podcast, episode 37

https://notagspodcast.substack.com/p/37-big-beat-cinema

I know I did!

I always think the reason Chemical Brothers crossed over is that what they did had so much more in common with rock/indie music than dance music. I mean, they were working at the right tempos, but it' really easy to imagine something like "Hey Boy Hey Girl" played by a traditional band. It was never about timbre and texture with them, it was big riffs and recognisable moments.

I really liked "Live Again" off their most recent album because it was the first time I thought they'd taken a really direct approach to groove and rhythm, even the other stuff I've enjoyed by them always has an energy-sapping drum break or lacklustre breakdown. There's a double-drum hit in "Star Guitar" that I find particularly inert.