PRODIGY – "Breathe"

“Psychosomatic addict insane!” Prodigy get all daaark on Popular http://t.co/5xKaxuqBn2

I remember the single, album and band being a big hit with the pupils I was teaching at this time – for them it must have sounded new and exciting but to me it seemed a reheated version of past rebellions, including their own previous number 1. Listening now I can appreciate the craft in the use of samples and dynamics but it’s a bit like appreciating the woodwork in a fairground haunted house.

EX-HALE

Bit of a palate cleanser after R&J….

A decent record, but doesn’t quite scream out “hit” to me the way “Firestarter” did. This feels more subdued, almost more of an album track. My gut feel initially was that this was one of those coattails #1’s that seemed increasingly prevalent in the UK starting around this time. A quick look at Wikipedia shows my gut feel to be quite wrong, as “Breathe” hit #1 in at least 5-6 other countries as well as the overall Eurochart. Most surprising to me was its #2 placement in Australia where “Firestarter” reached a measly #22…

So, my above analysis is probably biased by “Breathe”s weak performance in America where it got overshadowed by “Firestarter” and “Smack My Bitch Up” (remember in the US, this only there was only about a six month span between these three releases in 1997). It got some radio and video play but not a lot.

6/10 from me.

The Prodigy had started the fire, so how could they keep it going? The answer is this – to make a record that sounds as menacing as Firestarter is thrilling and, to my mind, is even better. A record that repudiates the cliches of dance – the only way they’ll set you free is if they break into your prison – and gives everyone something to be scared of. This is the final part of the ‘Dance Music Doesn’t Have To Be Shit’ trilogy of 1996, and it’s the best part. Hard to choose a best bit, but Maxim – sidelined on the previous single – warning? invitation? threat? promise? of ‘Breathe with me’ starts the record off perfectly, and the track never stops delivering. By now, we were all playing their game.

10,

The footnote to this, though, is probably the real story. When The Fat Of The Land came out, it seemed to be the one record that people at school loved. Whether you were a rocker, a dance fan, an indie kid or a popster, you had that album. And why wouldn’t you? It’s a classic.

And, for what it’s worth, after TFOTL came out, they released a single that was even better than this – Smack My Bitch Up is utterly glorious, bashing you round the head from the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-PCP-by-the-Bunnied-Welsh-Band intro all the way through the opening call to arms, through the warbly-singing-doesn’t-have-to-be-shit bit, to the WONDERFUL moment when that ends and – SMACK MY BITCH UP! – the main track returns. A pure 10.

(Yes, I know I’ve spent more time talking about SMBU than Breathe, but hey-ho).

#11 “the brooding one” I think is called “Mindfield”. I have some lasting love for the track Crispian Mills guested on.

For we Tricky fans stateside who loved “Pre-Millenium Tension” and the Nearly God project but heard how wave upon meticulous wave he’d boxed himself in musically, “Breathe” was a thrill — a breath, if you will.

…saying all that, Smack My Bitch Up is as good as anything they did for their first two albums I think. That and ‘Omen’ are their two best post-1995 singles.

Sample watch: The “play my game” hook is from ‘I’m a Man’ by The Spencer Davis Group. The sword effect is from ‘Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ by Wu-Tang Clan. The drums are from ‘Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed’ by Thin Lizzy.

Is there a single edit of this? When I listened to it, I only found versions (on Spotify) from the album at 5 or 6 minutes long* and I suspect this profoundly changed my view on this record – because by the end I was getting a little bit bored. All the best bits, the hooks and standout samples (the Wu Tang sword clashes in particular) are introduced early in the piece, so by the end I definitely got the sense that this had blown everything in the first 3 minutes or so. A bit shorter and I might have a different opinion – maybe I should search around on Youtube.

* I am going to look bloody stupid if the album version is the single version and it just felt to me like it was going on forever, without me actually checking the time stamp. Though maybe that does say something about how I feel about it.

Since we’re done with The Prodigy (I think), there are some other things that have been pointed out by Billy and Tom that I’d agree with. Omen is excellent – feels like a great clash between Experience era and FOTL era Prodigy and hopefully shows that Liam Howlett has still got it in him to produce another great record. Other than that, I’d also agree with Tom that their output got worse, at first slowly but then at gathering pace, from the first album onwards. “Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned” in particular seems both like a greater waste of a fantastic sloganeering title than “Chinese Democracy” (seems a perfect fit for The Prodigy’s image – I can imagine The Clash producing a record similarly titled to fit in with their mythos – but married to The Prodigy’s record, the title feels like the most important thing about it) and a bigger let down from a massive 90s album than…well, we’ll get to that, d’you know what I mean?

Cheers. It must be that the single edit is on the video, you’d think. Maybe I should be going to Youtube more than Spotify to listen to some of the upcoming #1s.

It’s not just singles either. We’re definitely also in the era of albums being as long as there is space on a CD. This is also mostly for the worse, in my opinion. Off the top of my head, only Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen… justified going on for 70 minutes.

When The Fat Of The Land came out, it seemed to be the one record that people at school loved. Whether you were a rocker, a dance fan, an indie kid or a popster, you had that album. And why wouldn’t you? It’s a classic.

Evidence of this: somebody actually stole my copy.

I’m not entirely convinced British music was lapsing into conservatism in 1996-97 as much as is now claimed. I remember it quite differently

Yes, this idea is basically 20/20 hindsight. That, and the way the people who claimed to hate Britpop the most didn’t seem to listen to anything else, the better to stoke up their hatred.

‘Out of Space’ (a massive 10 for me had it reached #1!) seems to be the most-known Prodigy track to the current generation – it’s the one I’ve heard the most in clubs over the last few years

I’ve mentioned this before, but Jamie xx played “No Good/Start The Dance” at the XOYO 1st birthday a few years back. we did.

It’s also true that both Fat of the Land and Jilted were games music…great for a turning dogfight with the mutants.

#21 …and astonishingly, it took me years to realise that despite owning both records. I just utterly failed to make the connection, whereas normally I’m anal enough to spot insignificant little samples all over the place.

I would suggest that “I’m A Man” has actually aged a lot more gracefully than “Breathe”, certainly if the response I’ve seen present-day audiences give to DJs playing the tracks is anything to go by. “Breathe” really does seem to have been sidelined in most people’s minds as the less interesting brother to “Firestarter”, whereas “I’m A Man” still stokes an enormous dancefloor response (and not without reason- it’s wonderful).

But while we’re on the topic of the status of “Breathe” within the Prodigy’s back-catalogue, I’m sure I remember it selling half a million copies in the UK and sticking around in the charts for some considerable time. It certainly wasn’t completely a fanbase propelled hit like the Chemical Brothers effort from a couple of months before – I just think that it’s become a bit sidelined in the years since. 7 out of 10 does feel about right. It’s good, but it’s certainly not scaling the heights they’re capable of.

The week Breathe topped the charts saw new entries at one and two; still a relative rarity at the time. The record that lost out was What’s Love Got To Do With It by Warren G and Adina Howard and it would have been interesting to see Tom’s rating (for me it’s typical of the lazy hip hop that would dominate the charts over the next few years). Also Breathe prevented the Fugees making it a hat trick and one place behind was Mark Owen making a disastrous tilt at a solo career – disastrous because his solo work has picked up a cult following over the years but even his fans don’t rate his first single and he didn’t quite have the commercial clout to compete in the Christmas market.

Another collection of noises cleverly deployed to hide the absence of an actual song. This is just about OK in the instrumental bits, but when the singing starts it’s actively unpleasant. While that may have been the point, it’s not at all frightening, either, just tiresome and predictable. Less fun than R****n and J****e. TWO.

Thats the Rohypnol one, right? That is indeed every possible way in which the Prodigy could be shit compressed into one record.

#40 The four minute single edit is easily found if you look on Youtube, which is where I had to go to remind myself of it, having probably not heard it in the interim. This is OK – I think I prefer it to Firestarter and I especially like the drumming – but it was also clearly aimed at people much younger than myself. 6.

Ughhh – “Baby’s Got A Temper” was getting some kind of promotional push during a six-week stay in the UK in the summer of 2002. Saw much more than I would have liked of that video. At the time it seemed just impossibly distant from their glory days – hard to grok that 1996 to 2002 is rather less time than between 2002 and now.

The opening of “Breathe” is masterful. Within a few seconds we’re in a science-fictional scene of menacing cyborgs: music for Daleks, music for the Terminator, music for Darth Vader as daunting as the Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back. A few seconds later, the drums kick in, and The Prodigy invent The Propellerheads, whose expansion on this sound would be used to great effect in the soundtrack of The Matrix. And then comes the slash of the whip, rounding us up like cattle; and underneath it all, that fibrillating bassline, maintaining the tension throughout the track. I can’t fault the soundscape of “Breathe”; it’s one of the most effective musical collages in pop.

The lyrics maintain that sense of menace, even if I didn’t always understand all of them (it’s only this thread that has let me hear it as “come play my game”, rather than “don’t die boy die”, and “addict insane” never quite registered). I should really say, then, that the delivery of the lyrics is what contributed to the mood of the track for me, although “inhale, exhale” is a fantastic hook. Music for Daleks, indeed.

Noting the track’s sense of menace is different from saying it was frightening, because it wasn’t; by the mid-90s we knew full well that most pop/rock menace was an act. We’d lived through Alice Cooper, heavy metal, punk and the rest, and even if not all of us loved it all, we were all by now familiar with the tricks. The truly frightening figures of pop, as recent revelations have shown, hid their menace rather than flaunted it. But just as there’s always been an audience for horror movies, none of whom believe that Bruce Campbell’s hand was actually possessed in Evil Dead II, there’s going to be an audience for musical menace.

As an Australian I always thought of this as the more popular track of The Fat of the Land, the almost-number-one that “Firestarter” wasn’t. But as with the Chemical Brothers, I was late to this party. “Breathe” was everywhere in Australia in 1997, spending 34 weeks in the charts from December ’96, but I didn’t pick up the Prodigy’s albums until early ’99. I remember the Fat of the Land posters competing for my attention and cash in ’97 with a certain Oasis album, and betting wrong (although at least I had Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space to console me); and in 1998 I was too busy travelling and finding work to listen to much new music.

Never mind: once I did pick up The Fat of the Land I recognised it immediately as one of the key albums of the decade, a relentless rush of thrilling sounds let down only by its closing track, “Fuel My Fire”. If they’d found a better song to follow “Climbatize” (their equivalent of Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days”), or even closed with that instead, I’d consider it almost flawless. Even tracks like “Diesel Power” and “Funky Shit” work beautifully in the context of the album, though I doubt either would have done much as singles. And of course the album opens with a track even more thrilling than the two we’ve seen here. I’ve never seen its video (and by the sound of it don’t want to), but “Smack My Bitch Up” is aural crack, as compelling an opening as the pilot of Breaking Bad.

So for me, The Fat of the Land is as far from a shark-jumping album as it gets. I don’t mind their earlier albums, although they each have stretches I find skippable. “Baby’s Got a Temper” was a massive disappointment, and Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned and Invaders Must Die didn’t do much to recover the situation. With the 2002 single in particular, the Prodigy seemed to be flailing around for relevance, their sound and themes a terrible fit for the post-9/11 mood. But in the late 1990s, they made perfect sense, even to a 30-something power-pop/alt-rock listener as far from urban England as you could get.

I’ve gone back and forth on what score to give this, struggling with the anchoring effect of Tom’s 7 and a reader average the same, knowing that I can’t honestly say that it’s “difficult to imagine anyone else not enjoying it”, and thinking that I surely shouldn’t repeat my score for their earlier single. But how can I do otherwise? 10.

@48 I had thought the “The” was intended to avoid confusion with Prodigy from Mobb Deep – possibly after a word from his lawyers – but the dates are wrong.

In fact, between 1996 and 2004 is when people would have been most likely to mix them up.

Were they trying to show they were a “proper band”, like Buzzcocks and Talking Heads? When The Prodigy first appeared, people always used to think it was just Liam. Which, in fact, it probably was.