Prodigy, "The Fat of the Land"

This is one of those unfortunate cases where I end up defending music that I was never a big fan of to begin with.  But Jesse Dorris' retrospective review is a sad example of reflexive political correctness in contemporary music criticism.  He might as well have written GOTCHA at the end of every paragraph, as he tries desperately to point fingers at 90's fans and critics who bought into the supposed scam. 

The intended centerpiece is the "Smack My Bitch Up" controversy.  The misogyny in the song was most certainly NOT accepted at the time, so sorry, there are no MeToo revelations to be found here.  That's not to say that there weren't arguments made on both sides of the issue (e.g. "it's just a sample" so Prodigy technically didn't say these things), but point being that the review doesn't touch on anything new about 90's masculinity.

Elsewhere, the Prodigy should apparently be scorned by thinking people in 2018 because they were too male and too white and catered to white male audiences.  The fact that half of the group members were black and their US label boss was a woman and a feminist icon somehow doesn't fit into the argument.  Dorris goes on about macho-ness and male-ness and somehow missed the entire post-1994 "smash the system" ethos of Prodigy. This was intersectionality long before its time, and could have never been born out of a 90's "rock" genre. 

Aretha Franklin RIP

More than any other "genre pioneer" that I can recall, her death truly feels like the end of an era.  Many rock pioneers have passed away in recent years, but rock has evolved so much since the 50's and 60's and its current incarnations would have been inconceivable to the giants of the past.  But everything Aretha touched still feels fresh, current, and vital.  The famous Kennedy Center performance of "(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman" proved that she still had no equals even a few short years ago.  Not to mention that the R&B superstars who have dominated the pop charts in this generation (Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Brandy, Beyonce, and dozens of others) clearly owe a lot to Aretha Franklin, and that influence shows little signs of fading.  

I thought about George Michael, who duetted with Franklin in a pairing that seemed far from obvious at the time.  The British teen pop star with the American soul legend twenty years her senior?  Their voices compliment each other perfectly on "I Knew You Were Waiting", which was a transatlantic number one hit.  And yet I can't help but feel that it would have been Boyz II Men/Mariah Carey levels of huge had it been released ten years later.  I also realized for the first time that Michael's "One More Try" is an Aretha Franklin song in style and spirit.