The Fatboy Slim song Noel Gallagher hates: “The most annoying song”
The good old 1990s: a decade when the pot was well and truly melting. A decade when the tracksuit-clad Liam Gallagher could enter a party alongside the grunge-inspired supermodels of the decade and no one would bat an eyelid. Art, in Britain especially, was as open-minded and accepting as it ever had been.
Sure, you’re probably going to throw the freethinking 1960s at me, but nothing was quite as diverse as the ‘90s. We had rock gods to rival decades past, but the burgeoning world of electronic music, the one that had been threatening to explode throughout the 1980s, had finally emerged as a world force.
Underground club nights, free parties and a healthy rave scene all thrived in the decade’s flourishing sense of liberalism, and perhaps most surprising, was its universal acceptance. Unlike the warring days of rock and disco in the 1970s, artists of different disciplines all stood side by side, supporting and influencing one another.
Oasis’ famous 1996 Knebworth residency was as good a reflection of this new attitude as any other. The Prodigy’s Keith Flint stood alongside Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, who stood alongside Kate Moss, as all the realms of modern music came together to celebrate music being showcased at such a phenomenal level. It wasn’t about what you were playing, it was about how you were playing it and how it affected culture. Guitars and electronic drum kits were as welcome as each other, as long as they were treated with authenticity.
Of course, Oasis had it slightly easier than the DJs of the era. The appetite for raucous, punk-infused rock music was evidently there, as it always had been in the spectrum of alternative music. But DJs had more to prove. That was at least until Fatboy Slim came along.
Fatboy Slim, aka Norman Cook, combined the underground beats of hidden rave cultures with pop tropes, cutting them with vocal adlibs and hooks that made them genuine chart successes. In doing so, he smashed down the door for future electronic music to flourish and played a large part in the 1990s music landscape, becoming more diverse and open-minded.
He was so influential in that era that he surprisingly won over the respect of the Gallagher brothers, who, if anyone, were going to be the suspects for shutting such a musical revolution down. But they didn’t, they acutely understood the importance Cook played in fuelling a wider counterculture that helped everyone flourish.
You could safely consider them fans, except for one song, “Fatboy Slim’s ‘Rockafeller Skank’ was a top record, but ‘Gangster Trippin” was the most annoying song I’ve heard in my whole fucking life,” Noel Gallagher stated.
The track was an integral part of Cook’s seminal 1998 record You’ve Come A Long Way Baby, and in many ways, was a quintessential example of Cook’s style. Choppy sampling laid over big beats was exactly the sort of style he became famous for, and ‘Gangster Trippin” symbolised that. But by now, Cook knows, that if Noel Gallagher is talking about you either way, he’s interested.
