Big beat's gonna work it out, maybe, perhaps not

From grunge to g-funk, from trip hop to Brit pop, there’s one thing you can be sure of about the 1990s: the one forgotten genre might be big beat.

Everyone knows the artists. The Chemical (Dust) Brothers blasted the roof off the place with Brother’s Gonna Work It Out, Fatboy Slim had a party in his head with Gangster Trippin and even if people don’t know the band name, they may well recognise Bentley Rhythm Ace (pictured).

But as a name, I reckon there’ll be a lot of younger people who don’t know “big beat”. The label kinda got swallowed up by the cool Britannia thing. Or perhaps it shed its identity when it went massively mainstream: see the Prodigy’s Firestarter or The Propellorheads’ History Repeating.

Maybe it just became known as video game music. Maybe, as Acid Ted suggests, it just got a bit embarrassing.

Not that labels matter that much, but big beat acted as a useful curatorial guide when picking tracks in my early DJing days. For example, there was a great block rockin’ underground in the shape of Brassic Beats and Heavenly Social, with the likes of Req, Cut La Roc, Monkey Mafia and the Skint Records founder Midfield General.

There’s a longer piece in this, and I may well pen something for Electronic Sound. In the meantime, to test my theory, I’m going to be shaking teenagers by the shoulders until they name all the 1990s music styles.

Who knew “let go of me, Fats, you idiot” was a genre?

Chosen Words: R is for Rhythm

Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Natter in the comments section on my previous post leads me nicely to a slightly important element of electronic music: rhythm.

Rhythm in music is probably the one thing that separates modern generations from those that lived through the age of the whinging crooner and all that screechy violin stuff they call "classical".

You can tell rhythm has become more popular from a simple statistic: there were more hit singles with 'rhythm' in the title in the 1990s than there had been in the entire history of chart music. The same is true for the words 'sexy', 'fat' and 'roland' (probably).

Drum machines helped bring repetitive beats to the forefront of modern music. A notable drum machine is the Rhythm Ace, which was distributed by Bentley pianos. The combination of Bentley and Rhythm Ace gave rise to an influential big beat collective called Midfield General. No. Fatboy Slim. Wait. Um... Chemical Brothers? I forget.

The Roland TR-808 was a crappy sounding drum machine that rose, Cinderella style, to claim an affectionate place in pumpkin-- er-- music history. Its fake, electronic sounds were as similar to real drums as Scouting For Girls are to real music.

The rise of the drum machine and the endless thirst for rhythm has lead to a two-word phrase that strikes fear in the heart of any responsible music fan: "more cowbell". You see? The 1994 Criminal Justice Bill was right after all.

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.