Fatboy Slim's Right Here, Right Now

Is it the most important piece of political art of the 21st century?

Norman Quentin Cook is massively popular. As a producer, he’s had multiple hits with outfits such as Beats International, Freak Power, Pizzaman, Might Dub Katz, and perhaps his greatest incarnation, Fatboy Slim. He is a famously fun DJ, able to work the most implacable of crowds into grinning loons. His work showcases his two greatest loves: music and people having a good time.

And yet for all his acclaim, he’s not perceived as being a serious artist. His work is frivolous at best. There’s nothing here worth sustained attention. Over the next few paragraphs, I want to argue that nothing could be further from the truth.

Firstly, his music is deceptively simple. Rather than just a couple of samples nailed together by a bodge it and scarper tradie, he is a sampledelic maestro on a par with Prince Paul, The Bomb Squad, or Goldie. Microsamples have been painstakingly stitched together to present a seamless rhythmic and melodic whole. But this is art that hides art. His fealty is to the dancefloor and the punters havin’ it, not some chin-stroking academic.

His masterpiece and Gesamtkunstwerk is Right Here, Right Now. You have heard this song. You may well be sick of this song. But I urge you to hear it anew, with fresh ears.

Cook has said that he read a poll that stated the best dance track ever was Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy. So he decided to make his own version of a string-driven epic. Now, obviously, Unfinished Sympathy sounds nothing like RHRN. Like all of Massive’s work, there’s an intimacy and an emotional complexity to it. Shara Nelson’s vocals bring the soul, the yearning. RHRN has none of that. It is bombastic. Crass even. There’s a reason that this has become a jock jam. And yet.

The strings are largely sampled from a tiny fragment of "Ashes, the Rain & I" - a haunting acoustic track at the end of the second album of 60/70s Ohio rockers James Gang. To be clear, RHRN sounds nothing like its source material. But Cook takes those few seconds of foreboding and turns them into storm clouds over a stadium. The tension builds and builds as Cook adds other samples and sounds to this vortex of unease for over a minute - i.e. more than a quarter of the song. Such is his confidence at keeping the listener engaged, making the dancer wait for the payoff. Then the vocal sample comes and the beats kick in.

The core sample is Angela Bassett from forgotten 90s cyberpunk thriller Strange Days. Her character is berating a friend who has lost himself in technology, in digital recordings of the lives of others, in a metaverse that is not so much virtual as a disconnected simulcra of human experience. She is yanking him away from his machines and into the present.

And that’s was this track does. It yanks you into the present. Right here, right now, in this body, listening to this music. It is less an argument for connection and being present than it is an engine to make that happen. It is a technology, It is magic. I would rather have 3 minutes 48 seconds of this piece of music than all the books of mindfulness and presencing that clog up Amazon.

It is also a political statement. Perhaps the most important of the 21st century. Right here, right now. So many slogans pull us into the past: Make America Great Again, Take Back Control. One reaction(ary) to the unbearable present is try to escape into an imagined and utopian history. This temptation is poison. The past wasn’t what we remember.

The other response is to imagine a utopian future, perhaps a techno-singularity where we shed the gooey bonds of the flesh and ascend with our machines into paradise. All we need to do is to give absolute power to a small group of untrustworthy and out of touch self-proclaimed geniuses. What could possibly go wrong?

Fatboy Slim pulls us into the present and Norman Cook makes it bearable for us. When he remixes the track with Greta Thunberg’s UN speech, that is not a novelty stunt, it is an honest recognition of the power of this track and shared sense of urgency for the now.

Here we all are. Right here. Right now.