He didn’t know You’ve Come a Lengthy Means, Child was a slogan for an American cigarette model. He’d typically declare to pay America little thoughts. However he may hardly have made a dance album higher suited to the Yanks. Fatboy Slim was tonally in contrast to the opposite big-beat acts starting to cross over: The Chemical Brothers had been mad scientists splicing the distinct highs of psychedelia and headrush techno; the Prodigy had been punkish provocateurs, sidechaining dynamite to their breaks. Deliberately or not, these teams made electronica for an alt-rock viewers—a godsend for Hollywood music supervisors whose understanding of membership music ended with industrial. However the vibe of You’ve Come a Lengthy Means, Child was pure pop. It was much less a membership evening than a boardwalk arcade: a boozy, manic romp previous a thousand blaring audio system.
The primary single confirmed how a lot he had altered the preliminary formulation. “The Rockafeller Skank” put Northern soul on a longboard and shot it by way of the curl. It was a guitar overload: Prepare dinner used the Simply Brothers’ uneven riff because the spine, including surfy twang from Duane Eddy, the Tremeloes, and a forgotten John Barry soundtrack. With its builds, drop-outs, and beat switches, the only was tailored for the pop listener with one hand on the radio dial. At one level, Prepare dinner begins pinging wildly between samples and channels: All of the guitars at his disposal blur right into a single cartoon character, ricocheting across the display screen. The crowning contact got here from an instrumental LP from Vinyl Canines, a New Jersey label identified for its compilations of alternative breaks. Prepare dinner ignored the music, fixating on the tossed-off intro from heavyweight rap producer Lord Finesse. He chopped it into its part syllables, fed them right into a MIDI keyboard, and tapped out an all-time earworm: “Proper about now, the funk soul brother/Test it out now, the funk soul brother…”
On either side of the Atlantic, “The Rockafeller Skank” and its maker had been praised with faint damnation. Billboard known as it “an organically easy masterpiece.” The Guardian conceded that “Norman appears to have discovered his area of interest, slapping collectively massive, catchy, brilliantly dumb breakbeat numbers.” And Q assured readers that You’ve Come a Lengthy Means, Child was “easy, unsubtle, soaraway stuff with a sell-by date that most likely gained’t be troublesome to learn for for much longer.” In a 1999 Rolling Stone article titled “Fatboy Slim: Funk Offered Brother,” Marc Weingarten detailed all of the licensing offers that Astralwerks, Fatboy Slim’s American label, had struck: commercials for Air Jordans, Oldsmobile, and Surge soda; soundtracks and trailers for Go, Workplace Area, Ten Issues I Hate About You, and Merciless Intentions. He quoted a shrugging Prepare dinner: “I make a sure form of instrumental music they like utilizing. You may hear 15 seconds of my stuff and it makes full sense.”
