Raves against the machine: Mr C (and Octo Octa) lead the way

"Get up," said Bob Marley. "Stand up," added Bob Marley. "Stand up for your rights," Bob continued, really hammering his point home. The Bobster was onto something. Sometimes, we really do have to stand up and be counted.

You may have noticed that the political atmosphere has become increasingly febrile, a word that is only ever used for political atmospheres. The far right is on the rise, geopolitical tensions are at breaking point, and idiots have got their y-fronts in a twist about trans people and roundabouts.

Electronic music is political. There are a tonne of reasons for this, and there's a whole Substack long-read to be written about techno music, tribes and politics. However, this is not Substack. It is Blogger. So let's approach the subject in an utterly trite way.

Let's start an occasional blog series featuring political electronic music. Yay! Woo! Bleepy tracks that will have you dancing on your soapbox.

Each time I'll feature one particular political tune, with a couple of extras. Some tracks signal their politics with bright glow-sticks, while others will be more opaque. Either way, hopefully this will awaken the campaigner in us.

The Shamen: Fatman (1992)

The Shamen were a band in constant flux, moving from '80s electro pop to acid house freneticism to chippy chart pop to trippy introspection. I always felt that 1992's platinum Boss Drum album was an uneasy mix of a lot of these things.

Ebeneezer Goode was clearly making a point, vibing about the charts like no other track could. But it's album track Fatman that I want to focus on. It's a miserable tune, all minor chord and morose. The lyrics depict corporate fat cats as predators to be avoided – indeed, to be run away from. "Keep running," the song insists over a pensive Balaeric beat. 

"...The rich are getting richer / The poor destitute / Whilst the Fat Man, / He's got your loot."

The band's early work was political, taking on religious indoctrination in Jesus Loves America or a politician getting mashed on mescaline in Christopher Mayhew Says. Later on in their career, they seemed more concerned about the wonders of cannabis - tracks such as Sativa and the trippy Cannabeo being a case in point.

Fatman was proper politics. Like going to a rave and being battered around the head with a copy of Socialist Worker. It feels like the band was capturing a perfect balance between meaningful soapboxing and "coming on like a seventh sense" drug talk.

Last year, rapper rapscallion Mr C reposted Fatman to his socials, commenting "We needed change over three decades ago - we're desperate now." He's not wrong.

Octo Octa: Power To The People (2019)

The breezy breakbeat, the hyped-up crowd noises, the sheer joy of it all. This 2019 tune from US DJ Octo Octa (pictured above) is a cheery number, and a highlight from her Resonant Body album.

The crowd noise in this track is specifically political. The sample is taken from an ACT-UP meeting that was held in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS pandemic; ACT-UP stands for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. The sound was captured in David France's 2012 documentary How To Survive A Plague.

The group was preparing for a face-to-face with New York mayor Ed Koch: the words you can hear in the Octo Octa track are "Act up, stand tall, tomorrow morning at City Hall". When Koch met the campaigners, he defended his description of ACT-UP campaigners as fascists. Considering he was a New York Democrat, Koch would have fitted in petty well with the modern Republican party.

The rest of Octo Octa's discography is worth a rummage. 2017 album Where Are We Going? is a deep house joy, and has a real sense of celebration, it being her first album release since fully coming out as trans.

Orbital: Are We Here? (Criminal Justice Bill mix) (1994)

This Cage-esque silent track was Orbital's response to 1994's Criminal Justice Act that sought to ban repetitive beats and to shut down the UK's illegal rave scene. If you don't have a copy of this Criminal Justice Bill mix, you can recreate your own version by not playing it. Orbital are still protesting. Paul out of Orbital recently collaborated with Kneecap, and Orbital have recently been opening their own sets with the "peace or annihilation" challenge of Choice. I think the correct answer is peace: the other one sounds bad.

Further Fats: I have just burned down my local NHS hospital while listening to Phil Collins on my walkman (2010)

Further Fats: On my mind – the Guardian's 100 greatest UK No 1s (2020)

Crabby birthday: The Prodigy's Fat Of The Land turns 25

The Prodigy's Fat Of The Land was released 25 years ago today. It was the fastest selling UK album of all time, and propelled the Prodge to the top of the charts with Firestarter and Breathe.

The album cover featured a zoomed-in shot of gecarcinus lateralis, otherwise know as a Bermuda land crab. It's a species of crab that is quite happy to hang out on beaches without rock pools, as long as the sand is moist enough for its gills to operate. They tend to be vegetarian, but will chomp on animal matter if needs be. Crab facts!

I'd make a cake to celebrate this anniversary, but the Prodigy never struck me as a cake kind of band. They seemed to hang out in grotty basements while writhing in threatening ways. Feels like an unhealthy place for a cake.

Fat Of The Land was incendiary. The single Smack My Bitch Up attracted claims of misogyny. Yeah, the word bitch is ugly, but I betcha if the protagonist in the video hadn't been a woman, no-one would have batted an eyelid at the video's hellraising. They should have got me to star in it. I would have stayed in listening to Future Sound of London and playing Boggle.

The album also gave us Keith Flint, God rest his sausages. The pointy-haired bovver boy became the face of rebellion in the 1990s. Keith Flint was quite happy to hang out on beaches without rock pools, and would chomp on animal matter if needs be. Apparently, Keith used to go on motorcycle rides with the saxophonist of Madness. That's an actual fact and not some nonsense about crabs. Who knew.

Music for the Jilted Generation was a more artistically interesting album as it turned a band bordering on novelty rave into a serious act. But Fat Of The Land might the most important. Along with the Shamen, it thrust proper dance music into the uber-mainstream while, perhaps unlike the Shamen,  losing little of its musical power.

It didn't impress everyone. To finish off this short waffle, here are some reviewers who didn't get along with the fat, the land and everything between.

Leftin, Amazon
Sexist lyrics set to appalling neo-metal/house bilge. One star.

Anonymous review, Entertainment.ie
I didn't want to admit it. I refused to accept it. But somewhere in my brain, the honesty section probably, something was telling me that it was a piece of sh*t.

boogie woogie king, Amazon
ID RATHER HAVE CRABS THAN LISTEN TO THIS!!

ozzystylez, Rate Your Music
I listened to this in my car the other day. The bass kicks hard and my car has reasonably good speakers. But I found myself turning it down as I drove through areas with a lot of people on the road in case they laughed at me for listening to such a cheesy, dated and worn out record.

Carlos Mancilla, Amazon
The album arrived a little bent at the top corner leaving a wrinkle in the cardboard.

Peter Barczak, Amazon
Only bought cos it was a penny. Not played it yet. Three stars.

All of these reviewers need rock pools for survival, and so are limited in the range of beaches available to them. Happy birthday, Fat Of The Land.

Further Fats: A History Of The Prodigy For People That Can't Be Bothered Reading The Wikipedia Article (2009)

A Full On Guide to Full On: Orson Karte's Tonight

My deconstruction of the Deconstruction album Full On: Edition One continues. I realise this is niche, but it was a great compilation that deserves more attention. See all my Full On posts here.

The next track is Orson Karte's Tonight (Original Mix), a smooth-as-a-sausage progressive house track with sampled voices drifting loosely above warm ambient chords. It doesn't stay in the same place either, as it gets its head down for some skippy breakbeat action later in the track.

Have an ear-check here:

Let's have a bit of context. I'm about to throw a lot of information at you. If this following paragraph had a montage sequence, it would freeze at each person's face like a Guy Ritchie film to give you time to absorb all the names. 

Orson Karte was not a well-known act in itself, but its members Julian Dembinski and Lex Blackmore also recorded as Positive Science for Ascension Records, an offshoot of the legendary ambient label Rising High Records probably best known for releasing music by The Irresistible Force, A Homeboy, A Hippie & A Funki Dredd and Luke Vibert. In short: no-one's really heard of Orson Karte (terrible name) but they come with some considerable pedigree.

More interestingly, Alexis Blackmore – Lex to his nearest and dearest – is responsible for one of the most memorable top ten hits of all time.

"Which memorable top ten hit?" I hear you ask, as you gasp in awe at your computer screen. "Is it Vienna by Ultravox? Blue Monday by New Order? Lovin' Is Easy by Hear'Say?" If you can just shut up asking questions, I'll tell you.

Lex ploughed a furrow on the dance music scene touring with The Shamen, apparently contributing to the rap on the Mysterons-sampling Make It Mine. Following the untimely death of The Shamen's Will Sin, he moved to Glasgow and became... drum roll... Blue Boy.

"Who?" 

Who?! What do you MEAN "who"? You definitely know Blue Boy. They had one of the most memorable top ten hits of all time. Positively iconic. Here are the lyrics, which you definitely recognise:

Remember me?
I'm the one who had your babies
Remember me?
I'm the one who had your babies
Ging-giggaging giggigiggiging etc etc etc

Yeah, you know it. Incidentally, Remember Me sampled Marlena Shaw's 1973 live version of Woman Of The Ghetto, which is definitely worth a listen right here. The "babies" line later on in the song contains so much sorrow.

So here we have another insight into Full On. A relatively anonymous act called Orson Karte can be tracked to, five years later, a big stonking top ten single which went some way to defining a '90s 'sound'.

There is plenty more Full On analysis to come (see the track listing here), but it will all be a bit less interesting than this one.

"WHY won't it be interesting? I want everything to be interestiiiiing! Waaaaah!"

You're really starting to get on my nerves, imaginary reader's voice.

Read the Full On series in, er full.

Read the Full On introduction explaining what the heck this is all about.

On my mind: The Guardian's 100 greatest UK No 1s

The Guardian's 100 greatest UK No 1s had some pretty good selections. It's hard to go wrong when you're picking 100 highlights from fewer than 1,500 songs, most of which are hogwash. Take a random year as an example: 1999 number ones by Chef, The Offspring, Boyzone or the Mambo No 5 bloke were hardly going to trouble the list.

Pet Shop Boys' topped their poll, which is entirely the correct choice. Their take on Elvis's Always On My Mind has an incredible energy, like a firework exploding in the boot of a car – I've always considered this the best Christmas number one, so I'm happy to extend it to the best chart topper of all time. Sadly, the Guardian opted for West End Girls as the greatest number one; any fool knows that the other PSB number ones, Heart and It's A Sin, are better than 'Girls. Pfffrt. Just you wait till I get you home, The Guardian.

The Chemical Brothers were just inside their top 50, while the Prodigy soared into their top ten, troubling the likes of Michael Jackson and the Human League. Steve 'Silk' Hurley's Jack Your Body was also in the mix, with it being labelled as "the most minimal No 1 of all time". Black Box and Daft Punk were included, although the latter's only number one song is hardly their best.

Killer made it into their list, with the Guardian praising its perfect design, as did I just last week. Kraftwerk's The Model is also in there, with a welcome shout-out to its brilliant flip-side Computer Love. And while we're doing k-words, the KLF's 3am Eternal made it quite high up the list, proving the ancients of Mu-Mu still have some mojo. This made me sad that Last Train To Trancentral never got to number one. Still, all of these were great to see.

They chose Snap!'s Rhythm Is a Dancer, which I'm sure they were as serious as gout about, but I would have probably have gone for Snap!'s other number one, The Power. That track was so strange and discordant, confusing my head at the time before my heart fell in love with it. The Power knocked Beats International's Dub Be Good To Me off the top spot – another missed contender in this list.

They should have included Pump Up The Volume by MARRS, which incidentally stands for band members Martyn, Alex, Rudy, Russell and Steve. They're like ABBA but with less knitwear. The band didn't get on, and it was a miracle they ever released anything, never mind create a chart-topping acid house classic. And how on earth The Guardian missed The Shamen's Ebeneezer Goode, I have no idea.

There were some outsider choices I would have like to have seen, and would have no doubt made a top 200. For the 1990s, I love the indie spirit of White Town's pin-sharp Your Woman ("So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways, just use me up and then you walk away"), while I mourn the exclusion of Flat Beat by Mr Oizo, which was a blow to yellow puppets everywhere.

There are some 21st century outsiders I'd liked to have seen: Rihanna's Diamonds (they chose Umbrella); Duck Sauce's Barbra Streisand; David Guetta's epic Titanium; Tinie Tempah's Scunthorpe-namechecking Pass Out. Nothing much interesting to say about them – I just like the tunes, dammit.

Like I say, it's an easy list to generally get right, even for people like me who find it difficult to focus on anything before 1987. And not a single mention of Lou Bega's fifth Mambo, despite its remarkable lyric "It's all good, let me dump it, please set in the trumpet". Pardon?

Further Fats: Delirious' bid for number one: the rock delusion? (2010)

Whatever happened to the cheeky New Year number one? (2013)

Charts in crisis: here's why there are so few number one singles

There are no more UK number one singles left.

In 2016, there were only 11 UK number one singles. This equals the lowest record set in 1954 when Doris Day and Yorkshire warbler David Whitfield dominated the charts.

This is a huge drop off considering 2014 had 38 chart toppers. If this trend continues, in 2017 there will be -2 chart toppers. That's right. We'll go into the minuses. If they do another Top Of The Pops, it will simply be a video of antimatter.

To demonstrate this alarming statistic, I've made a graphic (above). This shows the number of separate number one singles over the past decade expressed in sizes of Drake. Drake is not a duck: he is a hugely successful music artist who enjoyed 15 weeks at number one last year. Drake should be used in all bar charts.

There can be only one explanation. It's upsetting, but I don't want to hide the truth from you.

ALL THE MUSIC STARS ARE DEAD. Let's face it: all the celebrities popped the bucket in 2016. Kicked their clogs. Maybe there was no-one left to have number one singles.

No, wait, hold on. That's not right.

The actual answer seems to be volume of weekly sales. There are two clues. 1992 and 2007.

In 1992, the year of Ebeneezer Goode (pictured) and Rhythm Is A Dancer, single sales tanked. There were only 12 number one singles that year. Likewise, in 2007, the CD collapsed as a format and single sales again fell: you could top the chart with a fraction of what you needed just a few years earlier. And as you can see in the chart above, in 2007 there were relatively few number ones.

By contrast, the measuring of downloads and streams saw single sales rocket at the start of this decade. So the opposite trend happened: as sales increased, we saw a big increase in the quantity of chart toppers in any one year.

Seems odd?

Nope. It's mathematics in action. Low weekly sales means a single's chart run is exhausted slowly. The songs then stick around like musical farts. Conversely, high weekly sales sees their sales potential exhausted in no time at all. Sometimes after just one week. Theoretically, a track with 200,000 sales could spend one week at number one in 2013 - or ten weeks at number one in 2007.

Which also reveals something else quite sobering.

There are certain totems that stick around at number one forever. In 1992, Whitney Houston spent 10 weeks at number one. In 2007, Rihanna spent 10 weeks at number one. In 2016, Drake spent 15 weeks at number one.

Notice something about those years? I bet the same is true for Bryan Adams and Wet Wet Wet too. Record-breaking chart toppers? Or merely mathematical musical farts?

Footnote: This is based on a theory once posited by James Masterton. Although the fart metaphor is my own, as is much of this analysis. Tell others: please tweet this article using the hashtag #musicalfarts.

If all that has left your head exploding, here's an old tune to lighten things up.



Further Fats: It's not a pie chart but I called it a Bri Chart because that was the only pun I could think of (2008)

Further Fats: Whatever happened to the cheeky New Year number one? (2013)

Chosen Words: B is for Boss Drum

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and associated "facts"

Boss Drum is term of worship for the transcendence achieved through the bass drum.

Repetiton and loops are important elements of dance music, and bands like The Shamen and Drum Club utilised hypnotic, rhythmic bass drums in their music.

The most famous loopy band, Orbital, named themselves after the M25. The M25 is the only motorway which forms a mobeus loop, much to the annoyance of those whose cars are unable to drive upside down and/or drive forever.

After the poll tax riots of 1990, the Conservative government tried to trap all the world's repetitive beats in the Tower Of London. Following protests from ravers, headed by bands like Orbital, Dreadzone and Phil Collins, the loathed Criminal Justice Bill became a firm act of law and everyone has been miserable since.

The boss drum is the most important button on a drum machine. All other drum noises are simply weak variations.

Top five most repetitive songs:

- Badger Badger Badger by Weebl
- Daft Punk's Around The World (man, it goes on forever)
- Doop by Doop
- I Know A Song That'll Get On Your Nerves
- There's a Hole in My Bucket

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