Rating:
Genre:
Electronica
Release Date: 01/30/2007
In between his late-'80s gig with
the Housemartins and his late-'90s gig as
Fatboy Slim, reigning avatar of big beat, bassist and DJ
Norman Cook made two albums under the name
Beats International. On both albums the concept was the same: steal musical snippets as blatantly as possible from as many different sources as possible and recombine them into frothy, funky, and irresistibly hooky slabs of
dance-pop. Does
"Dub Be Good to Me" sound familiar? It should -- that's the bassline from
the Clash's
"Guns of Brixton" churning underneath an otherwise relatively faithful rendition of
the SOS Band's
"Just Be Good to Me." Whose atonal guitar riff is that on
"I Won't Talk About It?" Why,
Billy Bragg's! (That's apparently his tortured falsetto, too). And there's more -- cribbed snippets of
Delta blues, what sound very much like samples of
Fela Ransome-Kuti -- all kinds of interesting and obscure stuff. One could probably get all offended by this sort of bald-faced thievery, but that would just spoil the fun.
Cook isn't pretending to be original here; he's just showing how much fun you can have with a sampler and flawless taste in beats. [A 12-track
Collector's Choice edition was released in 2006.]
~Rick Anderson, All Music Guide
;)
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