FEATURE:
Right Then, Right Now
Fatboy Slim’s You've Come a Long Way, Baby at Twenty-Five
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ONE of the most important and popular albums…
of the 1990s turns twenty-five on 19th October. A number one hit here and a big success in the U.S., Fatboy Slim’s (Norman Cook) second studio album, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, is one of those albums impossible to ignore. So epic and intricate, I love that there is bombast and House volume alongside intricate turns and twists. Details, colours and sensations mixing together in this feast for the senses! I want to highlight a couple of reviews to mark its upcoming, glorious twenty-fifth anniversary. I think that You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby is among the most celebrated albums of the 1990s. It arrived at a time when Big Beat music was ruling. Such an exciting time for British music, we had this incredible albums that were uniting people around clubs and dancefloors. Whilst some of the albums from that time sound dated, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby still seems fresh and interesting. We do not really hear too many albums that have that blend of accessible House, Big Beat epicness and Techno joy. If we do, it does not hit as hard and endure as long as Fatboy Slim’s gold! I want to come to an article from Udiscovermusic.com. Earlier this year, they spotlighted an album that arrived on 19th October, 1998 - and made this instant and emphatic impression on the musical landscape:
“In the mid-to-late-1990s, Big Beat was dominating UK dance music, thanks to The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, and a Brighton-bred producer named Fatboy Slim who had begun tantalizing audiences with his sample-heavy, bombastic debut Better Living Through Chemistry. Each of these artists brought a little bit something different to Big Beat – a twist on acid house, techno, and rap breakbeats crammed into a traditional pop structure. But it was Fatboy Slim’s 1998 album, the massive, groundbreaking, discourse-shifting You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, that cemented the sound as the world’s most exciting party.
With You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, Fatboy Slim – born Norman Quentin Cook – blended ecstatic build-ups of the rave scene with the “guess the sample” playfulness of 90s rap. (At the time of the album’s release, websites like WhoSampled were still years away.) Some of the samples were relatively obvious. (“Praise You” nicked a guitar from “It’s a Small World” and an electric piano from Steve Miller Band.) Others were more obscure. (The iconic “funk soul brother” Lord Finesse sample was from the only release that ever bore the artist name Vinyl Dogs.) What united it all, however, was the overarching sense that Fatboy Slim was having tons of fun putting all this stuff together.
That extended to the videos that were created as part of the album. The Spike Jonze-directed clip for “Praise You” likely made You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby even more of a success in the United States, due to its constant airing on MTV. The one line script for “Gangster Trippin’”? “Blow stuff up.” Director Roman Coppola was happy to oblige. European Fatboy fans got an extra treat with the video for “Right Here, Right Now,” which referenced a beloved French children’s show from the late 1970s. (Not that you needed to know much to enjoy its hilarious race from the Big Bang to 1998.)
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby was a hit in both the US and the UK, a huge step up in commercial success from Fatboy’s 1996 debut Better Living Through Chemistry. That 1996 album was more in thrall to dance music, with songs like “Everybody Needs a 303.” What made You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby such a different beast was the in-your-face vocal samples and a relentless focus on merging pop music and electronic music structures. It became a turning point for Fatboy and electronic music as a whole, culminating a few years later with an iconic 2002 concert in Brighton Beach, in which an estimated 250,000 fans came to see him spin records. You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, though, is where everything started”.
There are a few things I want to throw in. Apologies if there is any repetition or overlapping. The Student Playlist celebrated and dissected a '90s classic for a feature marking twenty years of You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby (in 2018). This is an album that was almost ubiquitous when it came out. Accessible and yet not too commercial, you can see why so many other artists were influenced by it:
“By the mid-Nineties, off the back of his success as a member of The Housemartins (the band that spawned The Beautiful South), Norman Cook was an important figure in British underground and chart music, but who was absolutely not a celebrity. He had been the brains behind smash hits by the likes of Freak Power and Beats International, and was a resident DJ at the popular Big Beat Boutique in Brighton. The success of those club nights had spawned the Skint Records label, and Cook was then responsible for one of the imprint’s earliest successes with his debut Fatboy Slim album Better Living Through Chemistry in 1996. Label boss Damian Harris presently asked Cook to make an album that sounded like the music he played at post-Boutique after-parties – as Harris put it, “hip-hop at the wrong speed”.
One breakthrough that had signified the future for Fatboy Slim had been Cook’s totally wired remix of Wildchild’s ‘Renegade Master’ in 1997, which transformed the old-skool leanings of the original into something distinctively ‘big beat’, bringing the breakbeats and crazy vocal modulations typical of the sub-genre into the mainstream for the first time. He had done the same to Cornershop’s ‘Brimful Of Asha’, sending it to number one in the UK in remixed form at the start of 1998.
The Fatboy Slim guise seemed to be the vehicle that most suited Cook, though – one which gave him the freedom of his extensive and eclectic record collection. Recorded entirely on a beaten-up Atari ST computer, with just Creator software and a mass of floppy disks, You’ve Come A Long Way Baby seemed to entirely sum up Cook’s carefree, fun and DIY approach to music. It also allowed his personality to shine through in a way that Better Living Through Chemistry hadn’t, for all its hard-hitting consistency.
SUBSTANCE
It’s Cook’s brilliant eye for sampling, picking sonic material that could be both humorous and poignant, that makes You’ve Come A Long Way Baby such a compelling and refreshing listen. Vocal snippets looped and swooped around cut-up portions of old, obscure records from hip-hop, soul, gospel, funk, surf-pop and rock to create a fun, slightly scruffier and more accessible variant on the techno of the likes of Underworld and Orbital from earlier in the decade, and one which could appeal to the rock and pop mainstream. Thereby, Cook had hit upon an album with universal attraction, one which would appear in record collections alongside Oasis or Madonna and still make sense.
Strangely, for a record compiled in end-of-the-century Brighton, You’ve Come A Long Way Baby evokes a timeless and distinctly American sense of cool. Everything you need to know about the album is referenced in its packaging. The image on the back of the CD cover is of a lonely American desert highway stretching into the horizon; the vast musical galaxy from which the album is stitched together is seen in the stacks upon stacks of dusty vinyl on the inside cover; and of course, the front cover image of the obese, carefree young man taken at the 1983 Fat People’s Festival in Danville, Virginia – whose identity has never been revealed, despite lots of enquiries.
The American fixations are immediately apparent in ‘The Rockafeller Skank’, the album’s lead single released at the height of the World Cup summer of 1998, was nothing short of the most memorable pop song of that year. Based on a Northern Soul guitar sample (Just Brothers’ ‘Sliced Tomatoes’) and a chopped-up B-boy vocal, with a slowed-down and sped-up beat bridge in the middle, it’s a party-starter that stands for raw, undistilled fun even two decades later. It reached no.6, but each of its three subsequent singles registered a higher position in the UK Singles Chart over the next 12 months, marking the start of the success of its parent album. The deliriously loose, wrong-speed hip-hop of ‘Gangster Trippin’ took Fatboy Slim into the Top Three as You’ve Come A Long Way Baby entered the British Albums Chart at no.2 in late October, but it would be the following single that took it to the summit and then into the stratosphere.
Released in early January 1999, the bewitching ‘Praise You’ became Fatboy Slim’s signature song when it hit no.1, coupled with a superb award-winning budget video by Spike Jonze. Based around an a-cappella sample of Camille Yarbrough’s spiritual anthem ‘Take Yo’ Praise’ and set to a soulful, uplifting and beautifully simple piano figure, it became a gold-selling single in its own right, selling 400,000 copies. Around the same time You’ve Come A Long Way Baby took off properly, staying near the top of the British charts for most of the rest of 1999, vastly exceeding even the most optimistic projections for it.
One more single was released for good measure, with the transcendental, sweeping sense of occasion of ‘Right Here, Right Now’ hitting no.2 in April 1999. In its context as You’ve Come A Long Way Baby’s album opener, it’s a low-key house classic that soars and glides in its intensity before its beat drops. The magic comes with its repeated chant, that makes it seem like a mass exhortation to bliss, propaganda rather than mere pop. The spoken word segue that links it to ‘The Rockafeller Skank’ is still enjoyably silly!
But You’ve Come A Long Way Baby doesn’t begin and end with its four smash singles. The rest of the album is populated with maddeningly infectious juxtapositions of genres. ‘Soul Surfing’ is a hedonistic party starter; ‘Love Island’ is a rubbery house banger; while ‘Kalifornia’ and ‘You’re Not From Brighton’ strut and peacock with a sense of purpose. The delightfully gratuitous obscenity of ‘Fucking In Heaven’ gave the album a frisson of transgression for us as 12 year old fans at school. Again, while this wasn’t strictly groundbreaking in originality terms (DJ Shadow had already done all this on the massively influential …..Endtroducing in 1996), that’s really not the point – it’s the structuring, and the forcefulness of its execution, that’s so revelatory here”.
There is a special reissue coming in October to mark twenty-five years of a classic. In 2018, Long Live Vinyl wrote about You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby when a BMG reissued it as part of its Art of the Album series. I wanted to share some extracts from the feature:
“take yo’ praise
While other Fatboy tracks ring out with the dislocated rhymes of B-boys, the single Praise You is a far more seductive affair. Starting out with the intimate tones of 70s soul singer Camille Yarbrough as she near enough sings the name of the album, the song is another example of the record’s wicked way with obscure sounds of yore. A bar-room piano gets paired with the vocals, as baggy beats help to create a sound described by Vibe Magazine as “Manchester shambledelia”. Arguably, it’s the British influence which made the Fatboy Slim sound unique, a fact that often gets lost amidst all the very American vocal samples used on the record. The sound of the UK can be heard all over …Baby, from the horn-led climax to Praise You, which sounds like a marching Lonely Hearts Club band parading its way down Brighton Pier, to the updated glam-rock stomp of Build It Up – Tear It Down, making its way even onto unclassifiable B-sides such as Sho Nuff, which is built entirely around the soft-rock prance of a British telly jingle, no less.
Perhaps because of its dual-audio heritage, or the song’s ‘big beat with a big heart’ appeal, Praise You ended up a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, helping the album to go platinum in the US.
“It’s one of those tunes I’ll always have an affection for,” Cook admitted in the DJ Mag interview. “It’s the fact that the lyrics are so timeless, and one lyric fits all.”
Music site Thump recently suggested that Praise You “marked the pinnacle of big beat’s American crossover, and the genre’s zenith before its swift decline.” But that would be forgetting the majesty of next single Right Here, Right Now, a tune which sounds as epic today as it did 20 years ago. Like Praise You, the album opener is an anomaly of sorts on the LP, riding as it does on a swell of melodramatic strings. Its closest counterpart is the instrumental Love Island, which swoons near the end of the album with easy-listening strings beamed in straight from the 1950s.
The magic of Right Here, Right Now lies in the chant of its title. Once again, Cook reduces the human voice to another cog in the mix, with one voice turned into an indecipherable breakbeat section, and the other sloganeering somewhere in that grey area between pop and propaganda. Things reach an epic crescendo, before ending with a real-life phone-in as a Fatboy fanboy begs a US radio station for some “Rockafeller Skank”. From reverence to more British irreverence, all in under seven minutes.
So Why Try Harder?
Reverence, though, should be paid to the album, no matter how tongue-in-cheek things get. Consider its influence over the years, inspiring the likes of The Chemical Brothers to add more whimsy to their beats, and Basement Jaxx more unusual and in-your-face samples (as on 2001 single Where’s Your Head At). Newbies such as Mylo soon debuted with the cheeky house subversion of Destroy Rock & Roll, whose hit title track sampled an American preacher denouncing the 80s pop scene. Norman Cook no doubt approved.
Sample culture really did get a major boost from You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby, with fans taking as much delight in tracking down samples as from hearing them in the first place. Acts such as The Avalanches hit fame through such fervour, with their classic debut in 2000 not being a million miles away from the Fatboy sound. More recent counterparts, meanwhile, include acts such as Major Lazer, Duck Sauce and Skrillex, who raised similarly boisterous flags high on the 2010s dancefloor”.
I shall come to some reviews now. The vast majority of the ones I have come across are glowing. I want to begin with Entertainment Weekly’s take on You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. They reviewed the album when it came out in 1998.
“What exactly is a DJ in 1998? Someone who spins at clubs and weddings – or an electronica act that stitches together bits of vintage records to form a new collage, which may be danceable? To Norman Cook, the British club-scene veteran who now records as Fatboy Slim, both definitions blend into an animated whole. “The Rockafeller Skank” – the Fatboy single released this summer and now on his second album, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” – is Cook’s masterstroke of big-beat DJ culture. Underneath a looped vocal snippet from a rap record by Lord Finesse, Cook concocts a constantly morphing undercurrent – from spy-movie guitar to Zeppy drums to an eardrum-piercing squeal. It’s a block-rocking beat that deliciously subverts pop formula, in which lyrics change while the music remains the same.
Little on “Baby” is as extraordinary as that single, but it’s not as if Cook doesn’t try. Even on routine tracks, Cook adds splashy samples of rock guitars, electro-funk synths, or reggae licks – anything he can to pump…you…up. “Praise You,” the album’s other outright gem, lifts a languid snippet of soul-gospel singer (and kids’-book author) Camille Yarborough’s “Take Yo Praise” and makes it a techno mantra – Des’ree for the ecstasy crowd. Cook also loves to work soul oldies into his computer-generated raves: The riotous “Soul Surfing” is like a visit to a chitlin-circuit roadhouse along the Information Superhighway.
Other than the way it deftly blends obscure records, there’s nothing subtle about Fatboy Slim. “Baby” is clever, hectic, relentless – and very of its time. It’s music desperate to be noticed above the din of TV, movies, the Net, and the zillions of other records out there. Pop culture, meet your needy spawn”.
Similarly, NME had their say in 1998. I remember when You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby was released. I was in high school, and we all knew it was a big moment for music. Singles like The Rockerfella Skank and Right Here, Right Now were huge. There was this genuine feeling that music had peaked. Like something life-changing was with us. Of course, that might be the hyperbole that comes with youth. There is no denying the fact You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby was a hugely important release:
“A few short years ago, Quentin 'Norman' Cook was staring poverty, divorce and imminent nervous breakdown in the face. Despite a string of inspired chart-pop identities, the former Housemartin was out of luck and out of fashion. The solution, audaciously enough, was to reinvent himself once more, this time as the Noel Gallagher of '90s dance music.
No, really, hear me out. Both Norm and Noel share a Midas-like gift for populist sing-along anthems which tap directly into the national psyche. Both are bright sparks who have built their kingdoms on shamelessy dumb, angst-free hedonism. Take the analogy one step further and this second Fatboy album is surely the '(What's The Story) Morning Glory?' of big beat, right? Well, arguably, yes. After all, this is the huge, throbbing, timely pinnacle of a style which Cook himself pioneered and which can probably progress no further without imploding into self-parody.
It also contains at least two definitive late-'90s pop milestones - 'The Rockafeller Skank' and imminent 'Gangster Trippin' - plus a smattering of equally brazen candidates for immortality. Of course, the true test is what Cook delivers in addition to these platinum-plated hits. Even the Fatboy himself admits to being a singles specialist who generally loses it over the long haul. But here, for maybe the first time, he demonstrates commendable stamina. The best tracks don't aim to emulate the crowd-pleasers but veer off on their own tangents, like the belting '60s-meets-'90s rare groove of 'Soul Surfing' or the beatific 'Praise You', a melding of dreamy gospel and piano-powered beats with a warm 'Screamadelica' vibe. Magnificent.
Sure, there are throwaway one-liners like 'Fucking In Heaven' (loads of juvenile swearing set to a funky beat - genius!) plus functional club tracks like 'Build It Up, Tear It Down' (anyone remember SAW's 'Roadblock'?) but most are redeemed by Cook's saucy cheek and undeniable affection for his vintage source material. Crucially, there is an unforced and easy-going love of soul music evident here which contrasts starkly with the po-faced, anally 'authentic' checklist of cool references underpinning more 'serious' dance projects - the UNKLE album, say.
Ironically, the Fatboy even employs a DJ Shadow sample at one point, but he's equally likely to namecheck Pinky & Perky. This is not an album for old-skool trainerspotters. So has Norman Cook really made the '...Morning Glory' of big beat? He almost certainly doesn't care either way, which is entirely fitting, but you can't help suspecting he's too sussed to record a 'Be Here Now' for breakbeat kids. And even if the tides of fashion turn against his cheap-and-cheerful party style next week, you can be sure the Fatboy has the limitless joie de vivre and barefaced cheek to reinvent himself yet again, somewhere down the line. He's come a long way already, and this mighty album is his career peak to date. Check it out. Now.
8/10”.
I am going to wrap up with a 2010 review from the BBC. Not just a smash in its time, the magnificent You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby has inspired so many other artists and very much kept it alive. Songs from the album are played all across radio. It is a work of brilliance that will never lose any of its relevance and brilliance:
“Twelve years on from the release of this second album, some things have inevitably changed. A lifetime away from hard-partying origins, Norman Cook’s raised two kids, celebrated a celebrity marriage, reconciled a celebrity marriage, hit the bottle, beat the bottle and, when he had the time, released heady collections of genre-defining anthems. At times, Cook’s life has played out replete with typical DJ clichés. But his place in the dance music annals as Fatboy Slim has long been confirmed.
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby set the quintessential tone for Fatboy’s future; an album rich with the booming, easy-on-the-ear potential that would soundtrack dancefloors for over a decade. Packing in rave reminiscences, loops, breaks and an endless array of choice samples, the formula wasn’t a complicated one, but it was one used to superlative effect.
Take the rabid commercial success of The Rockafeller Skank, the uplifting gospel-tinged Praise You and the explosive Gangster Trippin’ (each ably supported by memorable videos), and the Fatboy blueprint is clear. And the holy trinity can be seen as the catalyst for a career of stellar success. By hook (and it was often an incessantly catchy one) or design, this was also an album that lit the torch paper for Cook’s biggest criticism: that he was merely a musical magpie, pilfering the shiniest, choice cuts to make his own creations glisten.
Attempts to relegate Cook to a petty music thief was always a disrespectful low blow, and one that looked to undermine, instead of celebrate, a penchant for recycling and absorbing a glut of disparate styles under the inimitable (at the time) Fatboy banner. But with the benefit of retrospect, it’s clear You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby wasn’t an album in the collective sense, more of a sparkling showcase; a flattering production line of instant, accessible songs that delivered almost every time.
It’s easy to overlook the hedonistic energy of Love Island; the expletive-ridden simplicity of F***ing in Heaven – which delighted a generation of potty-mouthed teenagers – and the bristling, adrenalin drip of Right Here, Right Now, simply because there was always the potential and intent for each track to usurp what preceded.
Undeniably this is an album that’s aged, but it reflects the buoyant excitement of pre-millennial times. Whether it’s held up as a contemporary guilty pleasure or an increasingly fond classic, or whatever the context, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby has never failed to immediately delight”.
On 19th October, we will celebrate twenty-five years of a classic. I am as fond of You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby now than I was when it came out and I was fifteen. Even though Fatboy Slim did not reach the same heights on subsequent albums, that is not to take anything away from the importance and legacy of his remarkable second album. Rather than cast our minds back and talk about You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby as a thing of the past or relevant to its time, we need to realise how important it is to this day. We need to embrace and salute this album…
RIGHT here, right now.