The Prodigy
Music For The Jilted Generation

If I may, I would like to debunk the overly hyped modern myth of the good Prodigy being skilled & innovative and the good Keith Flint being a genius & in good faith. Nothing could be further from the truth. Oh well, I don't own The Fat of the Land, their globally acclaimed album, as it was deleted from my PC following reformatting, but having listened to it as well, trust me when I say that the "Prodigy formula" is fully encapsulated and perfectly synthesized in this album, which many say is "their masterpiece" (oh dear...).

In the present album, released around '94 if I'm not mistaken, there occurs the rock caricaturization that will be crucial in the subsequent "Fat..." for tracks like "Firestarter" or "Breathe", and it's here, indeed, that would derive the fateful sentence of "innovative techno", as there is absolutely nothing innovative about it inasmuch as the techno-rock dynamics are rendered with far more skill in that masterpiece (yes, that one) that is Underworld's "Dubnobasswithmyheadman", released a full two years before the Prodigy album. Not only that, the technique of our dear Prodigy is almost next to nothing when compared to that of their "Big Beat brothers", their majesties the Chemical Brothers, or even compared to Leftfield and Fluke, who, while producing more progressive techno than Prodigy, prove to be much more inspired... the musical character of the Prodigy is indeed the most folksy the electronic genre can express: take a base, loop it for 10 minutes along with a breakbeat (break & enter), some cartoon effects (poison), and a vocal that could be tolerated only in a dance setting (in no good-start the dance it is simply annoying) and you will have the intact "Prodigy formula" as we all know it. It seems a bit of a nonsense as a formula to me. Not that the Prodigy posed as punk rockers using the unprecedented solution of electronics, does it mean their music is then as communicative as they would make it seem.
Good tracks like Poison, Their Law (with that rock-metal guitar sampling), or Claustrophobic Sting are dragged on endlessly and give the impression of being nothing but good ideas diluted and stretched with lots of water exactly like one does with wine.

Believe me, techno has much more to offer and if you really want some healthy big beat, look to the early Chemical Brothers' albums which completely demolish "Music for the Jilted Generation". Best wishes to Keith Flint (who will have gotten very rich in the meantime) and to those who had the courage or the audacity to read the review.