He didn't know You've come a long way, baby was a slogan for an American brand of cigarettes. He often claimed to give America some brains. But he could hardly have made a dance album more fitting for the Yanks. Fatboy Slim was tonally unlike the other big-beats that began to intersect: The Chemical Brothers were mad scientists who combined the distinct highs of psychedelia and headrush techno. the Prodigy were punk provocateurs, tying dynamite to their steps. Intentionally or not, these groups made electronica for an alt-rock audience – a godsend for Hollywood music supervisors whose understanding of club music ended with industrial. But its atmosphere You've come a long way, baby it was pure pop. It was less a club night than a boardwalk arcade: a sly, manic rumble over a thousand speakers.
The first single showed how much he had changed the original formula. “The Rockafeller Skank” put Northern soul on a longboard and launched it through the curl. It was a guitar overload: Cook used the choppy Just Brothers riff as a backbone, adding surfy twang from Duane Eddy, the Tremeloes and a forgotten John Barry soundtrack. With its builds, dropouts and beat switches, the single was tailored to the pop listener with one hand on the radio dial. At one point, Cooke starts flipping wildly between samples and channels: All the guitars at his disposal blur into a single cartoon character, spinning around the screen. The finishing touch came from an instrumental LP from Vinyl Dogs, a New Jersey label known for its compilations of fine breaks. Cook ignored the music, fixated on the successful introduction by rap heavyweight producer Lord Finesse. He cut it down to its recommended syllables, put them on a MIDI keyboard and hit an all-time earworm: “Right now, funk soul brother/Take a look now, funk soul brother…”
On both sides of the Atlantic, “The Rockafeller Skank” and its maker were praised with faint condemnation. Bulletin board he called it “an organically simple masterpiece”. THE Guardian admitted that “Norman seems to have found his niche, putting together big, catchy, super-dumb breakbeat numbers.” And Q assured readers that You've come a long way, baby it was “plain, subtle, long sell-by-date stuff that probably won't be hard to read for much longer.” In 1999 Rolling Stone article entitled “Fatboy Slim: Funk Sold Brother”, Marc Weingarten detailed all the licensing deals that Astralwerks, the US company Fatboy Slim had: ads for Air Jordans, Oldsmobile and Surge soda. soundtrack and trailer for Go, Office space, Ten things I hate about youand Hard Intentions. He quoted a chef who shrugged, “I make a certain kind of instrumental music that they like to use. You can listen to 15 seconds of my stuff and it makes perfect sense.”
