FEATURE:
Full Throttle
The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation at Thirty
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ONE of the defining albums…
of the 1990s might well be one of the most important albums ever. In terms of how it both fitted into the mood and landscape of music and the underground in 1994, but also how radical and remarkable the album was. On 4th July, 1994, The Prodigy released Music for the Jilted Generation. It followed on from their 1992 debut, Experience. In my view the defining album from The Prodigy, I think that Music for the Jilted Generation still sounds so fresh and essential. In the sense that nothing really exists like it! Nothing that has the same grime, attack, incredible production values and this amazing soundtrack. Throwing Breakbeat, Hardcore, Dance and Trance into this variegated and intoxicated brew, this album arrived in perhaps the finest year for music ever. Even in 1994, I don’t think anyone had taken Breakbeat and Hardcore to the mainstream. This was a defining and seismic album that was produced by Liam Howlett and Neil McLellan. This was the pre-Keith Flint line-up (in the fact he was not in the studio but was performing with them and photographed as part of the group). I cannot really think about any album from The Prodigy without thinking of the late great. In any case, The Prodigy’s second studio album is a mind-blowing piece of work. I want to get to some features about Music for the Jilted Generation. Those that explore its legacy and importance. In 2014, to mark twenty years of a true cornerstone, Vice looked at the context of music in 1994. What was happening and where The Prodigy fitted in:
“Jungle had gone overground, four-to-the-floor was exploding into hard house, happy house, handbag house and all the rest, the grimmer side of heavy drug use was becoming impossible to ignore, skunk was beginning to oust waftier, more benevolent strains of weed, and the words "dark" and "darkside" were slang terms of choice. Where two years earlier the breakout smokers' hip hop sound had been the boisterous party funk of Cypress Hill, now it was the Gothic drama of Wu-Tang Clan. My personal illustrative moment was seeing a beat-up old Mini barreling through Brighton; blasting out distorted gabba on a crap soundsystem and in place of the standard "ON A MISSION" rear window sticker, so symbolic of the "go-get-'em" energy of rave, they had "MISSION ABORTED".
This is the world that Music for the Jilted Generation was precision-tooled to soundtrack. The Prodigy had already come punching and kicking into the dance world, both perfecting and satirising the sound of hardcore, "killing rave" (as an early Mixmag cover story had it), proving that performance and bolshey personality still had their place among the faceless DJs, and delivering an absolutely shit-hot album in The Prodigy Experience. But Music for the Jilted Generation was the perfect divestment of any last fucks given, a willfully uncool thrash-about that didn't rely on allegiance to any of the micro-scenes now proliferating, but somehow provided some weird sort of negative unity across the whole proverbial generation; perfectly expressing the skunk-paranoia, vodka-swilling, bad-E's collective "UGGGGHHH" that came after all the "Woo yeah, c'mon, let's go!" of rave's peak years.
Early tracks like 'Charley' and 'Everybody in the Place' showed the first glimmers of an instinctive understanding of The Big Riff that was not about the hypnosis of techno, or even the hyper-stimulation of hardcore, but about dragging the music back into the fist-pumping, chant-along experience of rock music. For better or worse, they and their shows preempted everything that is big and brassy in 21st century EDM. Every new superstar DJ with huge LED shows, massive riffs and vertiginous drops, and most of all Skrillex, owes them a very substantial debt.
Just like a lot of new EDM, Music for the Jilted Generation is basically very ugly. The pop-hardcore of The Prodigy Experience is still there: teeth gritted as tightly as ever, rock riffs expressing hard guitar music as full fat cheese, heading back towards the trash of Mötley Crüe and co. that grunge self-righteously decided to save us from, and the electronic elements all reach for the shiniest, most instant rush effects. If you listen now to 'Start the Dance (No Good)' you'll hear how, for all its hardcore tempo and breakbeats, it sits as close to Faithless and Felix 'Don't you Want Me' as anything you could describe as underground. Everything is on the surface. There's nothing subtle from beginning to end – and that includes the disaffection that it expresses, which for all the pontificating about injustice of 'Their Law' is nothing more than that aforementioned "UGGGGGHHH" than any more sophisticated articulation of what it was to be alive in 1994.
All of which is precisely why it works. Nobody wanted political analysis or fine detail from Liam and his gang of dark clowns. We wanted to mosh. We wanted a racket that drowned out our tinnitus and picked us up in the same way that a bag of cheap speed did. And for all its negativity and steam-hammer unsubtelty, Music for the Jilted Generation created good times. The first time I ever saw The Prodigy live at a festival, I was in a bad mood. Darkly stoned and paranoid, I surrounded by a right old mix of people but notably a large contingent of football hooligans, banging back the lager, coke and GHB.
The minute 'Voodoo People' struck up though, something overwhelmingly joyful happened. Scowls turned to the kind of deranged grins you'd expect to see at a happy hardcore night, and everyone in the tent started pogoing and moshing like one big, friendly, sweat-soaked blob of undifferentiated tissue. Somehow, amongst all the "UGGGGHHH", we'd all found just a little bit of the rave spirit that we'd been missing. This spirit of dumb-fuck rock-raving goes nowhere but into the watered-down blokey-ness of big beat and eventually Kasabian, but back then? Good God, it felt like a relief”.
I will move on to a feature from CLASH. In 2019, around the time of its twenty-fifth anniversary of Music for the Jilted Generation, they looked at the genre-busting classic. I was ten when it came out. Although I was not really aware of it then, by the time I was in my final years of high school, I was hearing songs from it all the time. It would have been the time that the follow-up, Fat of the Land, was released. That came out in 1997:
“When the Prodigy’s Keith Flint passed away earlier this year, it felt like an era died with him. For many, Keith was the Prodigy: the firestarter igniting rave’s demonic silhouette at a global scale on 1996’s ‘The Fat Of The Land’. So it’s easy to forget that before Flint’s snarl ever made it to record, the Prodigy were already tearing at the edges of what rave could be.
When ‘Music For The Jilted Generation’ was released in 1994, UK rave’s heyday was already waning. While hardcore splintered into clubs and subgenres, ‘Jilted’ instead revisited and re-energised the sound’s origins in hip-hop and punk rock. Producer Liam Howlett and dancer-MCs Flint and Maxim Reality promised not a return to the underground but an unholy matrimony of rave’s anarchic spirit and, well, everything and the kitchen sink.
Over 13 wildly different tracks, ‘Jilted’ swerves between the cinematic (on adrenaline-infused chase sequence ‘Speedway’) and the stadium (on rock-rave manifestos ‘Their Law’ and ‘Voodoo People’). Elsewhere, its final, three-part ‘Narcotic Suite’ finds Howlett furthest from his comfort zone, stretching rave tropes to urbane electronica (‘3 Kilos’) and sci-fi mind-benders ‘Skylined’ and ‘Claustrophobic Sting’.
End to end, the record tests the limits both of hardcore experimentalism and its original CD format – Howlett himself later regretting its 78-minute running time. Ambitious, yes. Interesting throughout, absolutely – though judge the flute solos on ‘3 Kilos’ for yourself.
Really, the power of the record shone through not on these high-minded outliers but on its string of hits – arguably the Prodigy’s finest, where Howlett’s craft reached new heights. ‘Jilted’ was packed full of hooks, even though few of them were what you’d call melodic.
Sure, there are tunes: the pitched-up vocals on ‘Break And Enter’ and ‘No Good (Start The Dance)’, the stadium-worthy shredding on ‘Their Law’. But take standout ‘Voodoo People’ for example: borrowing a two-tone riff from Nirvana’s ‘Very Ape’, it barely shifts from one note, and is the better for it. Even its anthemic synth part is more squelch and distortion than melody, as can also be said for the chainsaw-synth on ‘Poison’ – a slow motion sledgehammer blow of a record that squeezes endless musicality from a juggernaut breakbeat chassis.
It’s this weird alchemy of muted melody, texture and production tricks that stick in the brain. The magic of the Prodigy lies in these staccato, concentrated bursts of noise and energy, neatly described by Maxim’s refrain on ‘Poison’: a “pulsating rhythmical remedy”. But a remedy for what? Who jilted this generation? Sharp as edges, this album undoubtedly deepened rave’s affinity to anti-authoritarian punk.
‘Their Law’ famously soundtracked the pushback against 1994’s anti-rave Criminal Justice and Public Order Act – the musical equivalent to its sleeve art’s notorious middle finger to the cops. And yet, as Howlett as insisted, this wasn’t politics; the Prodigy always embodied a feeling of lashing out, at whatever.
And perhaps that was both their deepest cynicism and most prodigal genius. After all, Keith Flint’s iconic status in pop culture rests on a similarly infectious kind of catch-all rebelliousness: just burn it all, and have a party while you’re at it.
Live, this was always the Prodigy's stock in trade, a terrifying euphoria that at any moment could switch either to utopia or apocalypse – and this formula found its purest expression in 1994. If Flint was the Prodigy’s devilish master of rave ceremonies, then ‘Jilted’ is its dark text”.
I know that there will be new pieces written about Music for the Jilted Generation ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 4th July. Many might say that their second album was a natural progression from 1992’s debut, Experience. So much more intense, different and layered was their sophomore album, it took a lot of people by surprise. Kerrang! noted this fact in 2019. The shockwaves that Music for the Jilted Generation caused in the music landscape back in 1994. Really nothing quite like it was right at the forefront:
“Of course, revisionist history will suggest that we all knew that when it came out, on July 4, 1994, but in reality, we didn't have a clue. Not the faintest. Indeed, The Prodigy's second album, Music For The Jilted Generation, emerged from so far out of the left-field that we didn't even see it coming. At least, not on the rock scene. The album debuted at Number One in the UK charts, but The Prodigy weren't even on our radar then. If anything, they were considered the enemy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is, quite frankly, talking out of their arse.
Rock music, you see, was pretty damn healthy in 1994, but it was evolving, as it always has. Around the mid-’80s the barriers between punk and metal came down, and thrash was born. Crossover, whatever the hell you want to call it. Two tribes that had previously been enemies in a very literal sense had come together, and by the ’90s more barriers were falling. The unthinkable was becoming, well, thinkable. This is especially true of the Judgment Night soundtrack of 1993, which saw such improbable collaborations as Slayer and Ice-T, Biohazard and Onyx, Faith No More and Boo-Ya T.R.I.B.E, Pearl Jam and Cypress Hill, metal and hip-hop colliding in the most unlikely ways, to result in something that was undeniably brilliant. Opening doors that were impossible to close again.
And then there was the dance/techno scene waaay off over there in a field of its own, perhaps best summed up by the cartoon in Viz magazine of Ravey Davey dancing around a car alarm. Granted, the field in which they resided was the cause of national headlines and moral outrage due to illegal raves, which ultimately led to the so-called Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, a knee-jerk reaction that prohibited such gatherings, restricting – among other things – the right to freedom of assembly, with bizarre references to 'repetitive beats'. But while this was a concern to any right-minded rock fan, the music was not.
The Prodigy, meanwhile, were massive on the dance scene. Their 1992 debut album Experience is considered a classic of the genre, but songwriter Liam Howlett, having conquered that scene, was growing bored with it and looking for fresh challenges. Due to the eclectic nature of European festivals, they had shared stages with the likes of Rage Against The Machine, Suicidal Tendencies, and Biohazard, and they wanted some of that energy. As MC Maxim Reality put it, “We're used to parties where kids get carried over the barrier now and again, but suddenly there's a sea of people jumping around and stage diving! It was unbelievable!”
So began the change to a heavier sound, Liam sampling rock guitars and recruiting guitarist Jim Davies, a Pantera fanatic who would beef up the live sound on tracks like Voodoo People and Their Law. But still the rock world was clueless. Maybe a handful of rock fans – literally a handful – were aware that something cool was going on, but to the rest The Prodigy were assumed to be little more than a joke, if we're completely honest.
That The Prodigy somehow ended up being championed by Kerrang! was almost entirely accidental. In June ’95, a full year after the release of Jilted Generation, I went to Glastonbury festival pretty much on a whim. It was hot and sunny that year. Skunk Anansie and the Black Crowes were playing... it seemed like a good idea at the time. By Friday night, having imbibed a few substances, my friends and I were in party mode. A couple of them wanted to check out The Prodigy and I didn't want to watch Oasis, so I went along with them. What I witnessed for the next hour was utterly mind-blowing!
In hindsight, The Prodigy were still very much a dance band, yet to make the full transition to rock, and Jilted Generation is a dance album, albeit a very good one, with just a couple of rock tracks. It's no wonder we got death threats for covering them. But, also in hindsight, there are elements here that are not too far from the trance vibe of Hawkwind, and, in some ways, it was inevitable that the energy of dance music would eventually seep into the rock scene. Killing Joke had flirted with dance beats on the Pandemonium album of ’94 and they were not alone. The big difference was that The Prodigy had the audacity to do it the other way around and to do so entirely on their own terms”.
I am going to end with an NME review of Music for the Jilted Generation published in 2000. Prior to coming to that, DJ wrote a feature in 2018 explaining how The Prodigy were the voice of youth. Following such a turbulent time in British politics, the Essex trio released an album that clearly resonated with so many people. Music for the Jilted Generation went to number one in the U.K. A truly remarkable feat for an album whose sounds and samples make it so arresting, fascinating and compelling:
“Speaking with Clash Magazine to mark the album's 20th anniversary, Liam Howlett, the master sampler and musician behind the music, stated that the now-famous picture was chosen before the Criminal Justice Bill was passed. Even if the album's mood wasn't intentionally reflective of the events surrounding the bill, the more personal reasons for The Prodigy's metamorphosis were still resonant.
"I remember standing on stage in Scotland, at a rave, and it just felt silly,” Howlett told Clash, adding that at one point the group had considered splitting up. “I was like: ‘What the fuck am I doing here? I’m not into this. It’s now so far from what it was.'” It's a sentiment that's many have echoed recently about the state of the current club scene.
The “Fuck them and their law” hook from 'Their Law', the album's second track, where Howlett defied expectation by teaming up with Brummie grebo rockers Pop Will Eat Itself, may have been as aimed at the conventions of the rave scene as it was the authorities shutting it down. Filled with grungy guitar lines and feedback, its acerbic, aggy energy coiled to less than 120bpm, it's about as far away from 'Experience' as it was possible to go. This uncoupling from the inanely happy sonics of hardcore they had begun with — keeping the breaks but adding a darker, gritter edge — also fuelled another iconic album track, 'Voodoo People'.
A reverence for live bands over the facelessness of techno helped steer The Prodigy to become festival headliners by the mid-'90s, including taking them to Glastonbury in 1994. It's a metamorphosis that happens before your eyes in the video to 'Poison', the album's last single. A slow acidic cut built around various funk breaks, a bare-chested Maxim Reality is recast as the group's lead singer with Liam playing drums, while Keith further develops the erratic dancing style that would eventually become his signature. Leeroy Thornhill, the band's long-limbed proto-shuffler who left in 2000, is already starting to look out of place in his baggy rave garb.
If there was a jilted generation in 1994, then there's another for whom this album still rings true today. Thanks to ever-tightening licensing laws and draconian legislation, councils are doing their best to shut down nightlife once again. The inevitable result is more free parties. After years of the corporatisation of clubbing, it's also finally getting its political bite back. Conversations about racism, sexism, homophobia and more have opened up not just political dialogue but also musical dialogue, with everything from EBM and industrial techno to jungle and gabber coming to the fore. For many, The Prodigy's marauding energy and no rules mindset were a gateway into this. With the world going to shit, it's time to restart the dance”.
I am going to end with this review from NME. Even if Music for the Jilted Generation leans less heavily on samples than Experience, I think the choices on their second album are more potent. A grubby and hard-hitting album, go and grab a copy if you do not own it. I think the album is relevant today. The fact that we are in another bleak time for British politics. Although we are not in a situation where rave culture is being cracked down on and there is this rebellion, one can look at society and culture and find workable comparisons. How we need an album that kicks and screams in the same way:
“LIAM HOWLETT is The Prodigy; young Essex bloke, mythmaker, monster raving loony and purveyor of some of the most life-affirming, computer-driven dance music of the '90s.
There is a cynical school of thought that questions the validity of his muse because he's actually managed to sell over a million records in Britain alone, but this is just the work of jealous scenemakers who would elevate 'intelligent', undanceable techno/ambient tracks made by cowboys over truly populist stuff.
What Liam Howlett has managed to do, with his second LP, is cut across entrenched class and racial barriers to soundtrack the lives of those left behind by the botch-up job of the Conservative economic 'miracle'. 'Music For The Jilted Generation' is a stormy requiem for those under siege by the heavy-handed, almost fascistic Criminal Justice Bill; for those outsiders about to be criminalised for enjoying themselves; and for those for whom life has become such a landslide they have to resort to stimulants for sustenance. It all starts with a voiceover from a harassed Hollywood gangster, cuts into the sampled crunch of breaking glass mixed with heavy beats, and ends, almost an hour later, with the voice of the Hal Computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey reporting a malfunction in its semi-human mind. In between, The Prodigy show that you don't need elaborate texts to send a message across, just hints by way of titles, sampled voices and dialogue, and a wide-ranging musical mood that fires the imagination. Far from being faceless and functional, there is a distinct identity here clarified by recurring motifs, juddering breakbeats, wild electronic noises and the actual 'shape' of the tunes.
'Break & Enter' suggests an amoral ambiguity at the heart of The Prodigy's ethos that only gets more pronounced as the LP progresses. Its theme of daylight robbery could be a metaphor for subverting the system or could just be a wanton celebration of criminality - the actual crushing dancetrack offers no clues. 'Speedway (Theme From Joyriders)' takes the irresponsibility a step further, and while you're not sure if Liam is castigating or condoning this dangerous bloodsport, the music definitely celebrates fast, uninhibited driving. To cap it all, the closing 'Narcotic Suite' offers three songs linked by a druggy theme - a tale of a deal that goes wrong - the anachronistic, flute-driven jazz-funk of '3 Kilos'; the orchestral, brooding 'Skylined'; and the computerised death-throes of 'Claustrophobic Sting'.
Elsewhere, there's no let-up on dance propulsion. 'Full Throttle' is literally just that - a junglist, beat-heavy construct taken at breakneck speed - whilst 'Voodoo People' likens the rave scenario to a black magic ritual. With The Prodigy as witchdoctor, of course.
And if it's obvious, screaming hit singles you're after, you can do a lot worse than soon-to-be-released anthem 'Their Law', wherein Liam Howlett meets Pop Will Eat Itself in a clash of wills, a battle between deep electronic bass and howling rifftastic perspective. The recent chartstorming 'No Good (Start The Dance)' is also included to show how much of a finger on the collective pulse this rave/pop star maintains.
When you hear 'The Heat (The Energy)' and a sound effect akin to someone saying "wanker, wanker", you know Liam Howlett doesn't always take himself seriously. He does not want to be a spokesman for his generation but, by default, he's ended up as a spokesman for degeneration - a frontline reporter sending eye-witness accounts from the war between the authorities and Britain's multi-hued youth. He's a Robocop and a modern-day Beethoven rolled into one.
9/10”.
On 4th July, The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation turns thirty. In some ways it is a product of the political times of 1994. In others, as I have said, it is as urgent and necessary today as ever. No artists like The Prodigy exists in modern music. I do feel we need something like Music for the Jilted Generation right now. Let’s hope that anniversary celebrations of a classic compel…
REBELLION and rising.