leonid

a very reductive and somewhat sad view you have of music. technical mastery is just one component of artistic creation, not even the most important one; otherwise, everyone would be venerating, I don't know, a Malmsteen, who nobody really pays attention to. it's true that you don't write the Divine Comedy with a vocabulary of 100 words, but it’s also true that the DC isn't even the work of art that everyone aspires to create, and that the breadth of vocabulary is just one of its components. there are bluesmen who have rewritten the same song for thirty years without losing an ounce of impact. Homer used a rather limited vocabulary and made extensive use of recurring formulas because of his expressive urgency and because it helped memorize long passages. in short, it saddens me a bit to see all this exaltation of technicalities, as if the value of a song were proportional to the complexity of performance. take Satie and his gymnopédies, they're just four scattered notes thrown in there, yet it's extraordinary music. intuition, genius, talent; if you have them, it’s not the executional shortcomings that will hold you back.

Yes, very rare pieces found on vinyl in little shops... but please.

in my opinion, a useless record, not beautiful and made only to exploit the commercial moment of grace following tfotl. moreover, the tracks are largely of a devastating banality.

if you say it so confidently, I believe you... but I'll listen to it again and let you know... I even bought the single CD. I wonder why since the song wasn't that great for me. maybe I was in that phase where I needed to have everything related to Lee Scratch Perry. obsessions. one last thing about Critical Beatdown: in my opinion, the most hideous cover of all time.

chase the devil... you know, I wouldn't be that sure if I were you? I think the first version is by Lee Perry & the Upsetters, then given to Max Romeo. Not infrequently, by the way, at Black Ark Studios, the pieces were written by Scratch and then handed over to the vocalists for interpretation. Anyway, the voice in the sample of Out of Space is Scratch's. No, no, no, I misspoke. The collage album I was referring to is The Dirtchamber Sessions Vol. 1, the one with ten thousand mixed tracks from various groups. It was released under the name Prodigy, but I think in the end it’s more of a creation by Howlett.

and then, forgive me, but root down is rather from ill communication

in my opinion it says "I'll take your brain to another dimension"

Yeah, and the other sample out of space is from Lee Scratch Perry - Chase the Devil. Overall, you can't say they have bad taste, even if the collage record they made with all their influences is pretty mediocre.

I’ve seen them live many, too many, countless times, dragged along by the incompetence of my ex-wife. I’ve had to endure them in the car until I became sick of them for the same reason. I must have heard “ninnananna” a billion times, and now as soon as I hear the first note, I have to immediately blast “man is the bastard” for at least four hours, otherwise I become irritable. We are in the presence of a shit band, but that smoldering shit, with its acrid smell that never leaves your nostrils.

Great album. Not a masterpiece but nice. Remarkable is the tribute that The Prodigy pay to the Ultramagnetic MC's in Critical Beatdown (the seminal group of Kool Keith and Tim Dog). Not only the phrase "smack my bitch up" is directly taken from a track on that album - I think it was "give the drummer some" - but also the sounds and the timings of the drum programming are quite similar. Try a "comparative" listen, it will surprise you.