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THE PRODIGAL SON.
Liam Howlett says: "It took a long time for me to work on this album... I had a sort of artist's block. I had always worked in the same room for years; I was practically trapped in there. Then I bought the program 'Reason' and I figured out how to get out of it. That's how 'Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned' was born" (from FREEQUENCY February 2006).
Oh hell, I think as I read this giant slalom of bullshit comfortably seated on my Ikea chair on the terrace, if these are the results, it's better this idiot goes back to that damn room.
"Punny, the turkey's ready," says my wife while I bluntly dismiss her: she knows that when there’s shitty music or vomit-worthy discs involved, she shouldn't bother me with her desperate housewife antics. I get up, take off my glasses, hurl the plate down from the 2nd floor, and push aside my wife, who kneels in front of the wardrobe.
"But Punny, the plate will get cold…please,"
"Move away and don't bother, I'll eat later... now I've got to take care of a little matter..."
While I put on my executioner suit and grab the bag with my arsenal, the woman clings to my feet begging "Punnyyy please, no one's asking you, and no one wants you to do this… you're only getting criticism and threats and you're not even getting paid… stop with this obsession of having to beat up everyone..." The bitch can't even finish the sentence before her two incisors get lodged between two rubber treads of my boots. Wives, pah! One way or another, they always find a way to piss us off.
I arrive at my studio and shoot straight into the time machine. (What, time machine? the usual pedantics will say... WHO CARES ABOUT THE TIME MACHINE! I'm here making it all up from scratch without asking anyone and I'm supposed to have qualms about logic, truth, and coherence?!)
Three farts later, I find myself in 2003, searching for the "lost sheep" or if you will, the "prodigal son" to recover.
Well look here, I'm casually in London, right in front of the entrance of that half-junkie Liam's room. I ascend the stairs four steps at a time. The porter tries to stop me, raising his finger with a "Pardòn," but I swiftly snip the finger with the number 10 pliers I always carry under my coat for emergencies or when I'm in a hurry and don't want to argue.
In front of room 907, I see the tag "Please do not disturb".
I open the sack and pull out my Black & Decker Deep Forest chainsaw, which never lets me down for these little jobs.
Indeed, it starts on the first try and I rip open the door with a tight blow from the thing-shredding machine, raising a tsunami of splinters, shavings, dust, and various excrescences. Liam is there, half-naked, amidst lines of coke, glues, and unclassifiable acids, looking at me with bogged eyes, only managing to breathe out a weak and pestilential "U ar iu?".
On a table marked Harrods, I see that damn "Reason", a damn device that managed to make a damn album like this from someone who only 7 years before had given us "The Fat of the Land" or another one, "Music for the Jilted Generation". Remarkable in their mighty genius, unlike this SHIT without a shred of idea!
Damn.
Holy shit, I take that reason and smash it to the ground, jumping on it with my entire 100 kg, reducing that technological sow to an amorphous pulp of transistors, filaments, and proto-diarrhea.
"Uai?!" the idiot mumbles, immobilized with the crack pipe half-hooked to his lips.
I grab his face and press it against the still-running chainsaw, resting temporarily on the ground.
"Fuck you... you'll live the 'UAI', you drug-addled pill-popper... instead of making this poor-quality album, without a riff, without a cool sound, without meaning... wouldn't it have been better to call back those other two idiots and REALLY GET TO WORK?! Damn, you made billions with just 2 albums, and instead of thanking me and all the millions of people who believed in your work, what did you do... huh? You come out with such a useless disc for a trendy club that can't even be listened to once, I MEAN ONCE, because it sucks so much?!"
The guy starts whining like a baby and clearly doesn’t understand my words (firstly because in 2003 the album is yet to be released and for secondis, because he doesn't understand Italian, like 99% of the English!).
Having turned that damn reason into primordial soup, I pull out of my bag my turbo-compression soldering iron and anchor the reckless one to the table in front of a damn Packard Bell Easy Note R4635, welding his ankles and torso directly to the table amidst screams and tears, in a tangle of flesh and iron that would make David Cronenberg ejaculate instantly.
"Ai chent ius it," he says in tears, but I silence him with a tsunami-like spit: "Do whatever the hell you want, use a bass, a Bontempi, use a pen, do it with your mouth... in short, do as you used to with the other two, but if you don't churn out an album comparable to the other two, I’ll go back in time and melt your scrotum like the balls of Giò Pomodoro," and I brandish the smoking soldering iron like an inquisitive index finger.
Exiting, I seal the door with steel bars resting on the staircase railing. I leave just a slit for food; screw it. I greet the porter, all busy with adhesive tape reattaching his finger in a carmine pool, and off I go.
I stroll through London and read from the corner of my eye the 2003 music magazines: the White Stripes, Eric Clapton, Elton John, the New Order are at work... oh well, I close and bite my tongue to curb the nausea on the banks of the Thames.
I return to the time machine and end up in 1995. Damn, Punny made a mistake, my little detractors will say, but no, you donkey heads you are: I specifically chose 1995! In a year, I would marry the girl I've known for a few months. Those were some rides!! The rule of the first five albums applies perfectly to the first 5 years of marriage: the first 5 years there’s love, expressive urgency, art, then it becomes craftsmanship, trade, and most of the time boredom!
In the case of The Prodigy, the albums could've easily stopped at three...
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