Dancer Leeroy Thornhill left the group years ago, and neither Maxim Reality nor Keith Flint is featured here. The good news is that calling the band "they" is more misleading now than it has been in recent years: The Prodigy's fourth album, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, is mostly the work of musical linchpin Liam Howlett. OK Computer, "electronica," Rage Against the Machine, Woodstock '99- it may seem like ancient history, but that divide is the uphill battle The Prodigy face after a seven-year gab between records. In retrospect, The Prodigy may not have become America's Great Electronic Hopes but "Firestarter" could be the world's greatest nu-metal single, a rousing anthem for the Mook Era that was unfortunately taken to heart at Woodstock '99, the abandoned festival that served as rap-rock's peak in popularity and its cultural nadir. However, instead of inspiring you and your band to trade in your guitars for turntables, The Prodigy- along with unlikely and otherwise unrelated contemporaries such as Korn, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine- laid the groundwork for the string of mostly limp rap-rock/nu-metal bands that dominated modern rock throughout the late 1990s and into the new millennium. At the time, The Prodigy had been billed- along with the Chemical Brothers, Orbital, and Underworld- as the leaders of the mainstream media's regretfully named "electronica" movement, a moment in which electronic dance music was going to finally crossover to MTV and radio in the U.S.
Those prognosticators were correct: The album (which, fact fans, debuted at #1 in the same week that Radiohead's OK Computer bowed at #21) was a significant modern rock signpost, albeit not for the expected reasons. A handful of industry insiders and media outlets expected The Prodigy's third album, 1997's The Fat of the Land, to alter America's pop landscape.
0 kommentar(er)
