One of the strangest aspects of recent years – and there’s been competition – has been seeing the world we were born into slowly dying off. Bowie. Prince. Aretha Franklin. Karl Lagerfeld. These were faces people of all ages felt they knew, who made life colourful while our parents and grandparents were young, free and on the verge of willing us into existence. My grandmother died just over ten years ago, at just 54. I find it unspeakably sad that the culture she knew doesn’t really exist anymore. But as a child of the '90s, it had never occurred to me that the world I and my fellow Millennials grew up in will also disappear, one day. Which is why the death, this week, of The Prodigy’s front man Keith Flint came as such a shock.
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Nineties icons aren’t supposed to die. They’re supposed to look and sound good – to pop up on Saturday Night Live, where Jennifer Aniston recently made fun of the role that made her a household name in Friends. The news that Flint – not even 50 – was dead, was so unexpected. As tributes poured in on social media, what struck me most was the way so many people seemed to preface their praise by saying: “I’m no dance music fan but The Prodigy were great.” At first glance, this seemed like the ultimate compliment – “You were so good you transcended categories”. But the sheer number of people qualifying their tributes left me wondering if the compliment was ever so slightly backhanded, albeit inadvertently. Did I detect a whiff of music snobbery?
Because here’s the thing: I do love dance music. It’s been the soundtrack to my life. And I didn’t love The Prodigy in spite of the genre, or for transcending it. I loved them because of it. And, in fact, The Prodigy are one of the main reasons I fell in love with dance in the first place.
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Growing up in an ex-mining town in Nottinghamshire, a queer kid on a council estate, wasn’t a barrel of laughs. I was bullied mercilessly at school for being different. People didn’t want to sit next to me in class, lest they be singled out by the bullies too. They didn’t want to walk home with me and they didn’t want to eat their lunch with me. When I got home, I’d get a clip round the earhole for “talking like a poofter”. Every day I received the message that I was less than other people: perverted, pathetic, deluded, a freak. I was desperate to escape.
One night, I did.
My father used to keep a wad of cash stashed in a waistcoat pocket hanging in this wardrobe. It was a clever hiding place, but while potential burglars may have been thrown off the scent, he hadn’t counted on his nosy teenager finding his hidden £2,000. I helped myself to a crumpled twenty pound note with which to escape one night and snuck on a bus into Nottingham city centre. Making my way down the stairs had been a true ballet – every step had a creaky spot, and I knew exactly where to tread to descend without waking my father.
I was tall, and precocious, and if the bouncers knew I was fourteen years old, they never questioned me. And it was there, in a nightclub, I found myself transformed.
Dancing on a podium to The Prodigy’s "Outta Space" – blue lipstick and dressed like a cyber goth – I wasn’t the freak from school. I was a raver. People wanted to dance with me. Drink with me. Embrace me. To them, my difference was a positive – something to be celebrated, not an overcoat of shame. It was a revelation. The Prodigy’s early singles were already well over a decade old by that point, but it was still played in clubs in the mid 2000s, just as they will continue to be played at all good house parties for decades to come. I felt free for the first time.
Of course, I was also far too young and far too wild. I don’t recommend my delinquent phase to anyone today. I found myself mixing with increasingly bad crowds, and had got myself into more than a spot of trouble by the time I’d turned 18. There is always a comedown. But while I’ve graduated from the seedier elements of the party scene, my love of dance music remains.
The power of dance to bring people together is documented in Matthew Collin’s book Altered State, in which he describes the magic of football hooligans – who’d spent the best part of the '80s trying to batter each other – coming together to hug on the dancefloor, to Altern 8 and Utah Saints. I missed out on the '90s party – we were well into funky house and electro by the time I hit the clubs – but there were still plenty of old ravers hanging about with tales of the “good old days”, when a feather boa and a whistle was de riguer party wear. All you’ve got to do is read the comments under old house tracks on YouTube to know that something very special happened in the '90s.
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While electronic dance music has evolved, the spirit of inclusion endures. Clubs have always been one of the few spaces where misfits have felt free to express themselves, a heritage that lives on in the skill and creativity of the Vogue Ball scene – my favourite Instagram hashtag. Dance, with its female-led vocals and spirit of showing off, is its life-blood. And I can’t help feeling that the feminine and working class sensibilities of much dance music, championed by gay and trans people of colour, feeds into why so many people are seemingly reluctant to acknowledge it as a serious genre – the way women’s fiction is routinely dismissed as chick lit.
I’ll save talk of breakbeats and samples for the music critics, but no one disagrees that The Prodigy were ground-breaking. But I find it curious that some people praise bands like Kraftwerk for being influential yet look down on everything they’ve influenced. Dance is a wonderfully rich and diverse genre with something for every scenario – from the haunting synths of Olive’s "You’re Not Alone", the sweaty hypnosis of Gui Boratto’s remix of Massive Attack’s "Paradise Circus", to the sophisticated retro-futurism of Parisian artist collective L'ordre. The final episode of Sex and The City is one of the best TV denouements in history – unlike many hit shows, they quit while they were ahead. Would it have had the same emotional impact without the Source Featuring Candi Staton’s "You’ve Got The Love" kicking in as Carrie checks that flip-phone? No.
So rediscover The Prodigy on Spotify – love them despite them being a dance act, if you like. I love them because they were. I was mesmerised when I watched "Firestarter" video as a child, and I still am twenty years on. It’s one of the most iconic and enduring images of the decade. Like Frankie Knuckles, Flint can go into another room, but he will never leave the party. His legacy – and that of dance music in all its forms – lives on.
