I'm going to go out on a limb here and advance the oft-debated contention that if there were devised a grand artistic sequence of musical deeds that needed to be accomplished, remaking Steve Miller's surreal anthem "The Joker" as a hip, psuedo-dance song would not have been scheduled in the year 2004. Just maybe this will be permissible after Mr. Miller's remains have sufficiently putrefied, but not now.
It's not that I have anything against space cowboys, gangsters of love, Maurice or the pompatus of love. (What is the pompatus of love? The jury's still out on this one, or if they returned a verdict, no one has yet gotten around to reading it.) After all, this rhapsodic oeuvre may very well be the keystone of the Western canon.
But consider the cover, concocted by none other than Fatboy Slim, who, for a while, was about as mainstream as a non-hip-hop DJ can get. That it contains the line "fo' shizzle dizzle my nizzle fizzle bizzle" does not quite merit it eternal damnation. However, the aforementioned iniquity taken with the completely unnecessary background vocals, silly synthesizer and unfocused arrangement does indeed relegate this ditty to the ash heap of Steve Miller cover song history.
Also, Bootsy Collins (the guest singer, formerly of Funkadelic) tries to add a sexy tinge to his voice, all the while never realizing that Steve Miller's slightly bored singing voice lets the lyrics of this modern day sonnet do the work for him. After all, who could resist when Steve expressed his desire to "shake your tree?" With Steve at the helm, sirs and madams, not I.
I'll plead synecdoche in defense of my harangue against Fatboy's "Joker" incident: this cover, the last track of his new album, "Palookaville," is a microcosm of the blemishes that stain a fair proportion of the songs on the record. But before we get mired in the content of the actual compact disc you have the option of buying (or stealing, if you want to slim Fatboy's wallet), perhaps it's worth delving into this jockey's genesis. It kind of helps you see what's unfortunately missing.
Fatboy Slim, the musical alias of Norman Cook, formerly bassist for the Housemartins, as well as a DJ in the bands Beats International and Pizzaman, rose to his place in the collective consciousness of American youth through his use of unusual, and sometimes innocuous, sounding samples in such singles as "Praise You," the mosh-inducing "The Rockafeller Skank" and "Weapon of Choice."
Having Spike Jonze direct the videos for "Praise You" (the one with the dance troupe at the theater) and "Weapon of Choice" (the one with Christopher Walken dancing through a hotel and then flying) added to his mysterious allure, as if Cook let his audience know that he too was in on the joke of his tongue-in-cheek, sample-based music.
By crafting danceable, relatively radio-friendly tunes, he earned a degree of commercial success not often bestowed upon slightly balding Brits targeting American markets. His last album, "Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars," sold 2 million copies. Since, he has turned to producing, most notably on two tracks on "Think Tank," Blur's newest album.
But now, Cook feels that he wants to be a true musician, or at least surround himself with them. "Being around Blur reminded me that sometimes, all you need is humans," he recently philosophized. Agreed, Norm. But what hath this inspiring platitude wrought? According to the main man himself, it yielded a movement away from samples and toward a more traditionally structured music.
Indeed it has, but the information you're missing is that "Palookaville" sports some atrocious songs, mostly mediocre ones and a few that are truly good. The kicker is that fairly consistently, the good ones rely heavily on samples and the bad ones strive to amalgamate the traditional verse-chorus structure with some chill electronic backgrounds, usually by "featuring" some guest to sing the song.
Take "Put it Back Together," which wastes the vocal talents of Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz) mostly by making him sing a poorly composed song, but also by combining it with an incessant background chorus singing "doo doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo."
"Long Way from Home," featuring Johnny Quality, is plodding and minimalist in a way that sounds strangely inadvertent, as if he hadn't though it through. "The Journey" features a rap that is unconventional, though also annoying. "Push and Shove" (featuring Justin Robertson) sounds like Lenny Kravitz in several decades.
But a few are good. "Wonderful Night," featuring rapper Lateef (who sang on "Weapon of Choice"), is undeniably catchy with some samples (and, yes, some newly recorded material) that don't take themselves too seriously. "Don't Let the Man" should please hippies and hipsters alike. "North West Tree" is a personal favorite, ethereal and nostalgic. Norman Cook has treaded on this territory before. So why did he decide to abandon it largely?
Does he feel he's doing penance for the sin of profiting by sampling other songs? Under that dictum, P. Diddy should be penning his third concerto by now. After all, there's nothing inherently crooked about sampling, so long as you do something original, which Fatboy Slim has done on many occasions before and a few times on "Palookaville."
