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.