The strange triumph of electronic music

Wed, 19 Jun 2002 19:00:00 +0000

In 1997, at the height of the so-called big beat invasion, I walked into a Foot Locker store in Beverly Hills to buy a new pair of shoes. I may have been looking for some Air Max 95s. At some point, house music came thundering over the in-store sound system and strobes began to flash. I dropped whatever sneaker I was holding and waited for smoke to billow into the room while everyone pumped their fists in the air and danced.

Instead, everyone kept shopping.

Five years later, the big beat invasion is a distant, failed media meme. As exemplified in the work of Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers, big beat was electronic music squeezed into the familiar, easily digestible song structures of rock music. The DJs knew how to party and some of them even looked like rock stars, like Keith Flint from the Prodigy (you know, the "Firestarter guy," the one with the weird mohawk?).

Salon.com > Andrew John Ignatius Vontz

The strange triumph of electronic music