It isn't called "big beat" for nothing. On this first night of a handful of Stateside deejay gigs to promote his new You've Come A Long Way, Baby full-length, Fatboy Slim (a k a Norman Cook) pounded a Detroit audience with a three-hour set of tracks -- interestingly, few of them his -- showcasing the most commercially successful of all U.K. dance trends. That the audience at this otherwise techno-stronghold nightclub was made up more of alt-rock radio listeners than ravers didn't matter: Cook's deejaying embodies a kind of low-brow take on the Duke Ellington adage that there's only two kinds of music, that which can get even the whitest ass shaking, and everything else.
So named for its can't-miss use of time-honored break-beats usually taken from rock and hip-hop sources ranging from De La Soul to Led Zeppelin and dressed up with braggadocio vocal samples and rave-inspired frequency tweaks, big beat is everything great and terrible about sample-based dance music. With its emphasis on in-the-moment euphoria, it's appropriation of more stand-up genres like hip-hop and classic rock and its ultimate disposability, it takes the whole infinite-beat idealism revered in dance culture and reduces (or exults it, depending on your level of purism on the subject) to three-minute modern rock radio singles. Where, say, Detroit techno -- founded a decade ago while Cook was still playing bass with Brit-poppers the Housemartins -- looked toward the future of music, big beat, with its samples and tendency to bask in the reflective glory of borrowed material, looks unashamedly to its past.
As if to point this very fact out, near the end of his set, Cook played a remix of his current radio hit, "the Rockafeller Skank." The new version took the song's "Right about now" vocal -- itself a Lord Finesse sample -- and placed it over a loop of "that's what I said" from the Stones' "Satisfaction." More a cheerleader for his records than a heavy-handed mixer, Cook spent most of his time conducting the crowd with his arms, mouthing the words of the sampled hip-hop vocals. While his track selection was relentlessly funky, he let up after ninety minutes or so and broke out the recognizable fare: the Chemical's Brothers' 1995 "Leave Home," featuring the recognizable line "Brothers Gonna Work It Out;" a wonderfully funked-up remix of gauzy French electronic band Air's "Kelly Watch The Stars;" and, of course, his own Who's "Can't Explain"-sampling 1997 single, "Goin' Outta My Mind."
In his deejay-as-mascot position, Cook showed his genre's don't-take-yourself-too-seriously charm, playing an acid house remix of Prince's "When Doves Cry" and even laudably beginning his set with as-yet-unheard acetates of new, funkier British house music and old Roland synthesizer-tweaked acid house that pleased the sports bar crowd just as much as his final needle drop: Jimi Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic." But while Cook, himself a veteran house music producer under his Mighty Dub Katz moniker, is perhaps guilty of being one of those pioneers who spent three hours in a techno club playing music that sounded like Kraftwerk never happened, he showed that big beat, to quote a Detroit techno classic, is truly "big fun." No more, but, in its unstuffy way, no less either.
HOBEY ECHLIN