Big Beat: One Boy's Search for Energy

History Repeating

Each generation had its own way of discovering new music. Before the development of radio, your average person had only the options of live music and/or phonograph records. Both mediums limited the audience to hearing only what was being performed within driving distance, or which artists a store decided to stock. People weren’t likely to ask a record store owner if they could order something in particular. How could they know what else was out there unless they’d recently moved from another town/city? Magazines and newsletters hadn’t yet started reviewing records or live shows. After the advent of radio, people were exposed to quite a bit more, and could hear about new music via periodicals and, soon after, television. Record companies still held the strings, but every little bit helped. Budding musicians could be inspired by songs or pieces recorded in wholly different countries and, as a result, build, expand, and explore musically. Audio media would develop and change (LPs, 8 track cartridges, cassettes, CDs, etc.), but it would still be a while before the internet would make realized McLuhan’s Global Village, and flip the world on its back.

Learning Curve

I remember first getting into music whilst in a child seat in the back of my mom’s car. My mom would play The Time, Steve Winwood, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. I would bounce my back against my seat to the beat when something really got my toddler blood flowing. I remember my little brother copying me one child seat over. The first music I actually owned were soundtracks to movies I liked in third grade. I’d play the Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Last Action Hero soundtracks, respectively, in my little handheld tape player (which was also the first thing I recorded songs on; Interesting multitrack process using two tape decks on my mom‘s stereo, but that‘s for another day). My favorite song on each soundtrack were Megadeth songs, making them my favorite band. Each song gave me that energy. Beautiful music can give one goose bumps and make one tear up, but my earliest favorite aesthetic reaction was a rush. Blood flowing.

Middle of Nowhere

Just before the internet was anything more than Telenet with a GUI, I had just moved to a new house, in a new town, and was about to start fifth grade in a new school. I got my first boom box over the summer. It had a radio. I quickly found the radio station I liked the most, The New 104, on 104.1 FM. It had just changed format (I still have no idea what it was before) and would, within a year, change its name to “Radio 104”. They played what now might be called “alternative” rock. Anything that involved guitar, drums, and bass guitar was always (and kind of still is) “rock” to me, the way any genre of dance music might be called “techno” by someone else. I got my fill of Real McCoy and Ace of Base a few stations up on K104 (104.7, now an FM talk radio station. Radio 104 has since changed to 104one, a WBRU-esque mainstream station, sans local music coverage) but I never told anyone in my new fifth grade class that I actually dug it. We could bro down about Green Day, The Offspring, The Smashing Pumpkins, and The Cranberries and I could make friends, but the only time dance music was mentioned was when my guy friends would sing the diva parts in mocking falsetto to evoke a laugh.

By middle school, (same town, different school) I was discovering new music in new ways. Remember the BMG music club junk mail? Where one could get 15 or so CDs for a buck? Or was it a cent? Yes, you’d get a bill later, but ignoring it actually made it go away! Once you’d gotten all of the albums that you felt you needed to keep up around the lunch table, you could fill your remaining free-CD checks with… whatever! I was still a bit of a closet case as far as my love for electronic music went, so this created a perfect excuse for owning the Mortal Kombat soundtrack.

“Well, I only wanted these nine, so I just randomly picked albums. I’ll probably sell them anyway.”

As far as I was really concerned, nothing could fuck with Traci Lords’ track, “Control”, on that soundtrack. It pumped me up so much, especially when I first heard it in the actual movie. Liu Kang was fighting Reptile, and the combination of editing and choreography made it seem like a visceral dance. Blood flowing, the whole way through.

Then came 1-800-MUSICNOW, an MCI-run music store controlled by automated telephone prompts. They advertised on Radio 104 (and MTV, I think), so everyone knew about it. I would call all the time. Not to purchase any music, mind you. I obviously didn’t have a credit card. Once you were in their system, you could preview long snippets of any CD they were selling. Their selection was comparable to, say, what Amazon has today. Almost anything short of white labels and imports that existed around 1995 could be previewed at 11 kHz over the phone. Man, using my two thumbs, I could dial that number so FAST, I called so often. I would explore their system for hours sometimes, listening to bits and pieces of different albums and discovering new stuff left and right. I realized that there was much more dance music out there than was being played on the radio. My best friend and I would huddle around the phone, chuckling to The Jerky Boys’ ribald phone hijinks. The telephone was my first internet. I discovered new artists and bought their albums at local record stores. In a town as small as mine, it was an easy plant for the seed that would later become that hipster concept of “my music”. My music that no one else knows about.

Coming Out

No longer a slave to what the radio and kids at school would have me listen to, I started listening to music that I wanted to listen to. As much as 1-800-MUSICNOW offered myriad portals through which to find music that caused the rush that synthesizers brought about in my body, I still had no idea what was about to happen to mainstream music culture. No one did. My brother rented the movie Hackers one night, and the soundtrack blew me away. I watched that movie over and over. The late fee from the video store was considerable. Ever fast forward through the ending credits of a movie to where all the music from the film comes up? Where you find out that “Happy Birthday to You” isn’t open source? On our TV, the font below each song was so small and blurry that I had to rewind two or three times to read the artists’ names. Fucking analog. I discovered that the two songs used in Hackers that made me jack (it would be years before I discovered the term “jack”. To a seventh grader from Connecticut, it meant something entirely different) were both by a band called The Prodigy. “Voodoo People” and “One Love“, respectively. 1-800-MUSICNOW had died at that point (only existed for a year, apparently) and hitting up record stores was anything but an easy ordeal. I lived in a rural area, and at my age, I needed my mom or someone else’s parents to drive me to New Milford or Danbury before I could rip apart the “P” section of any record store in search of music by the band that gave me more energy than any previous music had in my life. During that year, my best friend and I went to another friend’s house to play video games. Wipeout XL had caught my attention in one of those video game magazines from the mid-nineties like “Game Pro” or “Game Player” that had all the codes and game reviews for Playstation 1 and Jaguar games. Remember: pre-internet. Wipeout XL had some kick ass music, and it would tell you the name of each song that was going to play at the beginning of each race. All small and blurry in the lower left-hand corner. Squinting seemed to go hand-in-hand with finding out the name of an artist who made a track you dug, at that time. “Firestarter” was one of the many songs I liked on the Wipeout XL soundtrack (the game contained the instrumental version. I had no idea what I was in for yet), and I was glad to have it reaffirmed in my mind that The Prodigy was my new favorite band, even though I’d only heard three of their songs. Next chance I had, I went out CD shopping and picked up the “Firestarter” EP and Music for the Jilted Generation. I was surprised by the amount of copies that were there. There was even a proper “Prodigy” labeled divider for their CDs. They weren’t lumped into the miscellaneous “P” section. Did other people know about this band? My music?

The Fire Starts

Growing up, our family sometimes had A TV, but never television. Channels. Commercials. None of that. Our mom didn’t believe in it. The TV was for watching movies. Rented VHS tapes from the library or video store. Novels as opposed to magazines. We got to watch television at friend’s houses, at our grandparents‘, and at hotels. One could pacify my brother and I for hours by simply turning on the tube. During one such instance at one of my mom’s friend’s houses, I was watching MTV and who should be the flavor of the week but my favorite band. What was only a picture on the back of the “Firestarter” EP was now a real, moving bunch of people, Keith Flint lip-synching the words I’d heard a trillion and a half times before. The “Block Rockin’ Beats” video followed. Who are the Chemical Brothers? Is everyone making music that I like now?

Big beat blew up like crazy all over the U.S. I was back to finding out about new acts the old way. Radio 104 started doing a Saturday night “electronica” program called The Electro Circus, with DJ Dave The Wave (who later went on to form Gabriel & Dresden with Josh Gabriel) with was my church throughout 8th grade. I would tape it every Saturday on my boom box, sometimes with the volume turned down (didn’t affect the recording) so I wouldn’t wake up the house. I’d throw on headphones and tune in on my Walkman and jump around in my bedroom all night. It was a live mix, broadcasted from a club in Hartford called The Brickyard. I’ve still never been there. I’d been buying up Big Beat/Electronica compilations everywhere I could find them as Big Beat took over car commercials, movie soundtracks, and magazine covers. Some of the stuff on The Electro Circus I knew, but most of it was new to me every week. Upon re-listening to my Saturday night recordings (I still have them today) I’d sometimes fast-forward with bated breath to the parts where Dave Dresden spoke and told me what songs he was playing. Through that night, I discovered how awesome remixes could be. Liam Howlett of The Prodigy had a habit of remixing his own songs as versions to be used on an EP (I had every Prodigy single at this point, UK and US versions) and I never liked the remixes by other artists as much as his. As far as the art of the remix goes, The Electro Circus showed me how much more of a landscape there was to explore. Up to that point, I’d only heard remixes of songs I already dug, because I’d only bought the singles of songs I’d already dug. A knowledgeable DJ would obviously have a music collection vast enough where they might say, “Welp, this song blows, but I’m glad I checked it out because the remixes are AWESOME!”. This feels like an old concept to me now, but it was exciting at the time. Dave Dresden knew his shit. Without that program, I wouldn’t have kept my edge. I’d have been swallowed up in it with everyone else. Car commercials. Movie previews. Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way Baby was the most whored out album ever, soon to be out whored by Moby’s Play. Who could see it all becoming so popular? Who could tell that it was all just a genre doing its flash in the pan? Having its fifteen. Grunge probably tapped it on the shoulder and gave it the “Oh, they all LOVE you now, but just you wait” speech, but electronica didn’t listen. It was just happy to be a genre option on Napster, right up there with polka.

Exit Planet Dust

Mainstream as it was, Big Beat, Breakbeat, Electronica, whatever the media decided to call it, was the music that fueled my fire. Somehow, after I graduated high school and moved out, I found a love for the “four-to-the-floor” dance beat. I’d previously skipped past those types of tracks on the compilations I’d buy.

“BOR-ING! Give me a BREAK! A complicated, scattershot Amen-meets-Dougie-Wright BREAK!”

Who knows what happened. I can still get into The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method, Expansion Union, and The Propellerheads without skipping a beat. I just don’t make that kind of stuff anymore. I gave up break dancing in favor of simply jumping up and down, as it were. Drones and simple 4/4 beats now seem to run my show. Big Beat has already reached the nostalgia factor in hipsters, as one can see by recent “Busy Child” remixes incited by the re-release of Vegas last year. “Smack My Bitch Up” over the last year or two, has made its way into the mixes of East Coast DJs because of that easy-to-mix-into breakdown in the middle with the pretty Shahin Badar vocals. Big beat artists have basically dropped off the map, scuttling to the corners of film and video game scores, or retiring completely with their gold records on the wall and a few stories to tell. That energy is being realized in other ways. Breakbeat is still a very potent scene in dance music. The energy in what the Ed Banger kids are doing seems to go for the same energy-based “umph” that big beat did, albeit with much more of an artsy (I hate that word but don’t want to invent a new one) twist. I’m happy for the time I spent with it, but I’ve moved on and found younger, hotter forms of music to keep my blood flowing.

Food for Thought

I originally wanted to smoosh these together into a DJ mix, but couldn’t find an aesthetically pleasing way of doing it. To explain; Big Beat songs are meant for mainstream radio play. Every moment has something going on, with no breaks where the instrumentation becomes sparse. When there aren’t vocals, there are heavy synth lines that aren’t meant to be ignored. Also, breakbeats are much more complicated than your average 4/4 house beats. Chances of the music, drums, and vocals allowing space for each other are slim. It’s hard to have any two songs going at once without it just sounding like a mess. I didn’t want to compromise and leave any of the songs out either. Here are a few of them. Maybe a better DJ can take a crack at making a listenable mix using these songs. Playing this kind of music at a party is only advisable is there’s a competent break dance team present. Otherwise… I dunno…

Freestylers - Check the Skillz

Überzone, Afrika Bambaataa, & Soul Sonic Force - 2 Kool 4 Skool

BT - The Hip Hop Phenomenon

The Light - Expand the Room

Squarepusher - Fat Controller

Here's one I did on a digital 8-track when I was a sophmore or junior in high school. I had no sense of song structure or matering at the time, but it's a fun example of a kid in the middle of rural Connecticut trying to illustrate to his friends what was going on in the world.

Martin van Etten - Untitled