TAKING IT FURTHER
Big beat music got mainstream in the late 1990s/early 2000s, with artists like The Chemical Brothers, Junkie XL, The Crystal Method, and of course Fatboy Slim – the genre is even named after a Brighton club night that he used to run. Big beat producers made full use of contemporary sampling technology, with breaks and other loops (often contained within an Akai S-series hardware sampler) playing alongside sampled vocals, and programmed beats, such as might be created on a Roland TR-909. As with hip-hop music previously, sample selection was everything, especially with the all-important breaks or beats that were the foundations of these new productions, and no vinyl stone was left unturned in the search, sometimes using quite unexpected material – see Fatboy Slim’s use of Ashes The Rain And I from 1970’s album James Gang Rides Again, for his hit Right Here, Right Now. The James Gang is Joe Walsh pre-Eagles, once again showing us that classic rock has some very usable intros and breaks – the most obvious examples must be Aerosmith’s Walk This Way, or Billy Squier’s The Big Beat… hmm, wonder if that’s where Fatboy Slim got his club name from?