The Prodigy - 'Experience'
The Prodigy - 'Experience'
No. 18 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Experience. To live and observe. Ecstasy. To enter a state of overwhelming emotion. To enter a mystic or prophetic trance. To reach an epiphany. To stand outside oneself.
Falling roughly between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the Twin Towers, the rave decade was a pre-Internet mystery. It birthed future-shocking music made with the same technology that was changing everything — circuits, wires and microchips amplifying humanity’s inner chords. In 1992, a young crew who called themselves The Prodigy, hailing from working-class Essex just outside London, described that rush in the title of their debut album as an “Experience.”
Everyone had a different twist. The brainchild of Liam Howlett, The Prodigy’s blunt style appealed to those raised on punk and hip hop: ravers with attitude. At its core was the drum break, that stuttering crash of cymbals, high-hats, kicks, tom toms and snares. In the UK, DJs and artists weaved and dropped breakbeats over faster and faster rhythms.
That juxtaposition of “stop-time” over the four-to-the-floor beat was a paradox. Breaks were used as a “break” in jazz or rock. They were “breaks” in time; they broke up rhythm into polyrhythmic fragments held together by the human body; they transformed the one into many, and the many into one.
But with rave, the break took on far greater power. It was the electric current, crest and crash all in one, looped into wheels of centripetal and centrifugal force, opening and closing, accentuating the groove or breaking it down, accelerating dancers into frenzied movements or carrying them onto plateaus of contemplation, turning dance floors into panoramas of joyous mayhem.
Howlett was an ambitious lad who recognized deeper connections. He was classically trained on piano and had originally tried to break through as a hip hop producer as part of the group Cut 2 Kill. Because he was white, he reckoned, his forays were dismissed. So he moved to sleepier Braintree and bought a cheap Roland W-30 sampler with only eight outputs.
After seeing early rave acts N-Joi and Guru Josh perform on stage, he knew he could do the same. He cut a rough demo to tape and sent it to XL Recordings, who liked its grit. “I think that’s probably what attracted XL,” he told Future Music in 1992. “All the others were top quality demos, done in studios, and mine was raw and ropey, almost noisy.” Right off, he had a sound: rave-y, breakbeat-y and raw.
It wasn’t just that Howlett had an innate sense of rave bass and rave rhythm’s shock factor. It was also his deft touch with flashes of musical complexity, just enough to let you know all the bruising had a slick side — as in the “Trip Into Drum And Bass” album version of ‘Charly’ with its little ricochet beeps, taken from T La Rock’s ‘Breaking Bells’ — inspiring electronic breaks producers for years to come, showing up on records like DJ Voodoo & The Liquid Method’s 1994 breakbeat classic ‘Everybody Thinks I’m High And I Am.’
Two more things separated The Prodigy from the pack. First, was The Prodigy’s business sense. They signed to the right label and they knew that each success wasn’t a license to repeat. “If we’d tried to write another ‘Charly,’ it would have been the downfall for us,” Howlett told Future Music. “We’d have been labeled the cartoon samplers, the toy-town techno group.”
Second, was The Prodigy’s madcap attitude, which had its greatest expression in the band’s vocalists and dancers, especially Keith Flint, who would one day go on to front the band’s two biggest singles ever, ‘Firestarter’ and ‘Breathe’ from 1997’s Fat of the Land. Flint, and fellow performers MC Maxim and keyboardist Leeroy Thornhill, gave The Prodigy its unmistakable voice and manic moves.
Alex Garland’s illustrations of the four band members in the Experience album cover sleeve enshrines some of the same early ’90s tropes of the rave scene, as well as The Prodigy’s idiosyncrasies: they’re envisioned on an astral plane as sci-fi travelers on a psychographic interstellar journey. They have stats: “hypo-glocen” levels, “centunes” in decimals, and each with an “energy replacement” of “2000 KJ” per second.
There is Liam, the captain, with his tight body armor suit, slim frame, and long locks. Tall Leeroy in an astronaut suit, holding a helmet and wearing a reversed baseball cap. Maxim Reality, the “Rapid Orator,” in sleeve-less body-plated armor with a mohawk and sunglasses a la Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator.
And then, there’s Keith Flint: “Master of Footwork,” “Creator of Manic Velocity.” He’s long-haired like so many raver-hippies, hair over his eyes, a bit Tom Petty from ‘You Got Lucky,’ raver-style — Keith as the Bard of Moves — electrocuted by the future, the fire-starter. He’s got a top hat too, with a yellow feather, holding a staff, wearing a tattered pocketed fishing vest, bejeweled necklaces including a Christian cross, a utility belt and camouflage pants. Here’s the dancer as 21st century journeyman.
In other words, The Prodigy were total tripped-out misfits. They were like Dungeons & Dragons heroes eager to take rave worldwide. They weren’t the first — 808 State had paved the way — but they brought in a whole new crowd. In a word, mental. Rave was moving lightning fast in ’91 and ’92. It’s easy to forget and nearly impossible to fully comprehend for those who missed it or who came later. That speed is what makes Experience timeless as as an artifact of UK techno’s global rush.
Opener ‘Jericho’ repeats the line “The horns of Jericho!” in declaration of that mythic leap. It’s a fateful sample about the biblical story of the Israelites bringing down the walls of the city of Jericho on their march to the Promised Land. As Future Music’s David Robinson declared, the album was “mental-speed-techno-terror.” It was aggressive and determined.
The album rarely lets up in its nearly 60-minute assault of bleeps, hyperventilating organs, whiplash effects, bombastic breaks, and mind-warping synths, from melting analog ooze in ‘Music Reach (1/2/3/4)’ to the hip hop reggae mash-up of ‘Wind It Up’ — including a righteous sample of Don Carlos and Anthony Johnson’s ‘Equal Rights,’ from 1985. Fourth song ‘Your Love (Remix)’ seems to signal a chemical shift. It’s a thrilling mix of breakneck and slow-mo, its effusive keys balanced by harsh motor blasts and spacey twisting synth arcs followed by a sweet piano line.
The album’s core is comprised of an ambitious trio: ‘Hyperspeed (G-Force Part 2),’ ‘Charly (Trip Into Drum & Bass Version)’ and ‘Out of Space.’ The former hurtles you forward with frantic drums and synths scaling the stratosphere while ‘Trip’ re-invents ‘Charly’ to devastating effect, utterly transforming the original into something far more interesting, its explosive rhythms propelling the mind with kinesthetic zeal. Released the same year as A Guy Called Gerald’s seminal 28 Gun Bad Boy, both albums helped signal the mutation of hardcore techno into a shadow-verse of skittering time and bass — taking us deeper into the valley.
‘Out of Space,’ which alternates between sped-up chipmunk raps and the lullaby reggae of Max Romeo and the Upsetters — “I’m gonna send him to outta space, to find another race” — hikes up the peak of a tropical mountain. Marking the four a.m. hour, house’s xylophonic spirit comes forward with ‘Everybody In The Place (155 & Rising),’ bringing in an African lilting breeze. It’s also the one track to drill a hard, fast 4/4 beat. It’s that late late night push to the sunrise, which comes with ‘Weather Experience’ and its “good deal of sunshine” forecast sample.
Here, Howlett aligns with The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, which came out the year before. Pink Floyd were his favorite band, so it’s no wonder a psychedelic edge runs throughout. And so comes the album’s climax with ‘Fire (Sunrise Version),’ which declares “I’m the god of hellfire!” Again, it is reggae that provides ballast to the battering. It’s the third time that Jamaica, the former British slave colony, is given pride of place amid Howlett’s street techno sensibilities.
“When I was a youth I used to burn callay weed in a Rizzla” is sampled from Pablo Gad’s ‘Hard Times’ at hyper-speed to piano whirls and what sounds like tribalistic bird calls, leading perfectly into ‘Ruff In The Jungle Bizness,’ which sounds like its title. It’s at once militant, innovative and soulful. By 1992, just four years after the British acid house explosion, hardcore was already transforming into drum ‘n’ bass, and ‘Bizness’ is “jungle” inspired by reggae sound systems, dub sub-sonics, and Kingston town’s trans-Atlantic blues.
With that, Experience ends with a taste of The Prodigy’s live experience, ‘Death Of The Prodigy Dancers [Live].’ It’s no afterthought. It’s in fact one of the album’s most thrilling moments. You get the crowd whistles and frontman energy of the years to come. Up and down goes a plaintive synth — a touch of Depeche Mode à la Black Celebration — blazing with acid lines, call and response vocals and mic shouts.
It’s a bomb going off in your head — stabbing lasers, a blitzkrieg of synths, “They rock you!” and one last parting word, “Bass!” — as a slowing heartbeat trails off. ‘Death’ is their whole career summed up in under four minutes, including an eerie echo in the song’s title of Keith Flint’s tragic suicide almost 30 years later.
Experience was electro-punk courtesy of a youth growing up with the Sex Pistols, Run DMC and cartoon rave parties (cue ‘Charly’). There was Howlett’s first synthesizer, the Moog Prodigy, which gave the band its name. And there was Flint’s dark childhood in Braintree, Essex; the exchange of a mixtape from Howlett to Flint; the formation of a rave posse around Howlett’s DJing and productions.
The journalist Dom Phillips trashed The Prodigy in 1992 with a three-page screed in Mixmag. Howlett, he averred, was solely responsible for the death of rave, hyperbole designed to match hyperbole. “The Prodigy, the epitome of rave, overground Essex style, make simple, often obvious and always over the top rave tunes; rave tunes as pop tunes,” he wrote. “Made for rave kids by rave kids. A tight breakbeat, a slightly crass melody, one keyboard noise, a couple of crowd noises and maybe one good idea. In the rave world, where one good noise can spawn a hundred records…”
Mixmag’s August 1992 cover with Philips’ harsh judgment asked: “The Prodigy — did Charly kill rave?” Howlett literally chucked the issue into the fire in a music video after the article indicted him for single-handedly ushering in the “kiddie rave.” Already, this new world was splitting itself back into atoms. Thirteen months later, after Experience hit the public and The Prodigy aggressively toured, Mixmag asked a different question on their September 1993 cover: “The Prodigy — rave’s last hope?”
That turnabout sums up the contradictions at the heart of the band and rave culture itself, both the promise of a consciousness revolution as well as the reckless abandon of unfettered technology, and the love-hate they’ve both inspired since the beginning. In 1993, that same year, from January 14 to February 14, The Prodigy rode through North America on the Rave New World tour with Moby and Cybersonik.
“Texas — always are bang into it,” Howlett wrote for Street Sound’s tour log, making stops in Austin and Dallas, recognizing the rebel flame flickering at the heart of the Lone Star State, perhaps an echo of the tumults to come in the 2000s. On the road ahead, electronic music would wind down many strange paths. And at every fork, it would disintegrate and reintegrate just as fast, raising new doubts and questions.
But The Prodigy just kept banging on. Moby spent years in the ’90s disowning rave culture while Cybersonik’s Richie Hawtin would eventually abscond to Berlin for the techno cabaret lifestyle. The Prodigy upheld a different emotion. Not just ecstasy, but outrage at the system. They were barbarians coming to tear down all walls.
Now Rome — our digital Rome — burns. And what remains of early rave is grit. What remains of Flint is experience — the knowledge of just how we came into ruin while we commandeered the future. A future danced. But still unwritten.
Track Listing:
1. Jericho
2. Music Reach (1/2/3/4)
3. Wind It Up
4. Your Love (Remix)
5. Hyperspeed (G-Force Part 2)
6. Charly (Trip Into Drum & Bass Version)
7. Out of Space
8. Everybody In The Place (155 & Rising)
9. Weather Experience
10. Fire (Sunrise Version)
11. Ruff In The Jungle Bizness
12. Death Of The Prodigy Dancers [Live]