Fatboy Slim

Fatboy Slim is Norman Cook, a balding British DJ who’s been around the block a few times. He originally played bass in the moderately successful pop band, the Housemartins, before packing it in and focusing on carefully crafted, sample-happy dance music. His first incarnation was under the name Beats International, where he showed an uncanny ability to mix bits and pieces of widely divergent songs together to create a new, seamless track (he had a moderate hit with Dub Be Good to Me, which fuses, among other things, an a capela version of the SOS Band’s Just Be Good to Me with a loop from the Clash (The Guns of Brixton, I believe).

A second Beats International disc, Excursion on the Version, found Norman moving towards reggae and away from popularity, although his knack for picking great samples was still intact (that album closes with a great cover of the three-hanky Elvis weeper In the Ghetto, which uses a bite from the highly evocative theme from Twin Peaks to liven it up).

After the death of Beats International, Norman resurfaced a few years later with a retooled sound as Fatboy Slim (I’m skipping his brief tenure as Pizzaboy because, really, who cares?). More focused on the groove and less on trying to weld as many bizarre samples together as possible, Fatboy Slim was a minor hit among the raverati until the second album came out, which immediately conquered the known world. How and why these things suddenly come out of nowhere to take the world by storm is something that has long been analyzed and will never be captured, but You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby exploded into the cultural consciousness like a disco supernova. Not that it’s bad or necessarily undeserved, but it isn’t leagues ahead of its predecessor, so who knows why it caught on like it did. One thing that immeasurably helped sales, I’m sure, is that for a few months there, you couldn’t turn on the TV or see a film preview without hearing one of the tracks (a role that Moby would fill the following summer). Fatboy Slim was the sound of selling the summer it came out, and everybody was rushing to license those infectious grooves to sell their shoes or gum or tits or whatever.

And that’s what Fatboy Slim is really all about – the groove. It’s a much more stripped down sound than the exotic mélange of Beats International and tends to use the same catchy riffs and sound bites over and over and over and over and over and over again until you slip into a funk-fueled trance. And for a while, you couldn’t go outside without hearing the numbingly repetitive refrain from one of his biggest hits:

He also built up an entire track by repeating the phrase “Fatboy Slim is fucking in heaven” (reportedly taken from an answering machine message in which a producer claims that if he could get a Fatboy Slim remix for his band’s latest single, “then I’d be fucking in heaven”). The Fatboy repeats that little bon mot so many times you think you’re about to go insane (and then, just to push you over the top, he snips it down at the end to the blurry mantra “fuckinginfuckingininfuckinginfuckinginfuckingin….”ARGH!

Gangster Tripping is as good an example of his style as anything else on the disc. The beat’s great, in a slow, head-nodding way, the horn breaks are almost unbearably funky, and it’s filled with incomprehensible but infectious vocal bites repeated ad nauseum. Cook has a wonderful ability to turn little spoken phrases into funky percussive elements that are almost impossible to listen to while sitting still. Fatboy Slim is fucking in heaven, and, when I skank around the room to his perfectly crafted, stripped down, sample-happy freaky funk, so am I.