“Destroy all rock”: The band Dave Grohl wanted to take over the world
No matter how many blokes from Surrey in pork-pie hats and pristine Pretty Green T-shirts tell you that Noel Gallagher is, was, and forever will be the “authentic voice of the working class”, actual working-class music from the 1990s had precisely nothing to do with guitars.
If Britpop had anything to do with providing a voice for the voiceless, it stopped being that pretty soon after Blur showed up. Instead, if you want to look at working-class music, especially from the 1990s, look no further than dance music, especially The Prodigy.
During the decade of centre partings and spelling the word ‘extreme’ with fewer vowels, dance music actually had a fairly similar breakout to guitar music. Except instead of the genre’s leading lights getting invited to Downing Street to drink champers with the literal prime minister, it was being legislated against by those very same suits that wouldn’t know culture if it went to Harrow with them. Outside of the interminable world of politics, though, dance music’s decade was, fittingly enough for the 1990s, blockbuster.
Like Britpop, it built on a legacy that had been steadily bubbling in alternative and underground circles the decade before. It all came bursting into the mainstream in a way that the music industry was barely ready for. Trance, acid house, rave, and jungle music became as popular as music genres as they were as tabloid fodder.
Leading the crossover charge was a band that started life as most dance acts do: a semi-anonymous producer making what look like one-off hits that you’ll never see again. Then Liam Howlett was joined first by MC Maxim Reality, and then vocalist Keith Flint for a duo of absolute classic albums: 1994’s Music For the Jilted Generation and 1997’s The Fat of the Land.
Where the Prodigy were strictly a rave concern for their early records, Maxim and Flint’s arrival coincided with their music taking on influences from hip-hop, techno and punk. Those records weren’t crossing over just with a mainstream crowd, they were crossing over with everyone. No less an authority than Dave Grohl talked about this in an interview with Melody Maker in 1997.
“Seeing The Prodigy was an experience,” he said, “To see 60,000 people – the kids with the Alanis Morissette t-shirts, the kids with the Hawkwind t-shirts, the kids with the Therapy? t-shirts – rockin’ to The Prodigy was quite an experience.” The Prodigy had that touch that you only see in soul music, where everyone, no matter their music taste, has time for them. It’s just as well, too, because their classics are classics for a reason.
That they didn’t become a worldwide concern was a near miss. Many people were tipping them to break America, and while they kind of did, they never got anywhere near the paradigm-defining figure in dance music that they were in their home country. This is a shame because just over a decade later, the likes of Skrillex and Rusko were selling a weaksauce vision of The Prodigy’s dance-rock vision to America and becoming one of the world’s most infamous acts as a result.
Grohl even tips this to happen in the interview, saying, “I want to see The Prodigy take over the world. I’d love to see The Prodigy come to America and destroy all guitar-based, fucking alternative bullshit, rock.” If only the states themselves were ready for it. Still, they disrupted the entire music scene in the UK and became one of the most beloved bands of their generation off the back of it.
