The Fatboy Cometh to New York City

The night was meant as a simple celebration, held in honor of Fatboy Slim's new album, Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars. But when the British DJ/producer hit the decks for a special appearance at the Virgin Megastore in New York's Union Square, he aimed for more than just a mere record release party: He strove to give his fans a complete Fatboy Slim show.

Appearing on the eve of his album's release, Slim (a.k.a. Norman Cook) spun for ninety minutes, ending right when the clocks struck midnight on Nov. 7 (and his CD officially went on sale). The performance, engineered by Windows Media, Virgin Megastore and Fatboy's label, Astralwerks, served as a CD promotion of sorts: The store allowed 300 fans, who had to preorder Halfway Between . . . three days before its release, access to its lower level, where Slim's decks were set up. Still, the night -- which also marked the beginning of Slim's brief U.S. tour -- gave the DJ the chance to reach an inestimable number of ears beyond the crowd clustered around his impromptu stage and the fans lined up three rows' deep on the level above, as the set was broadcast live over the Web, as well as beamed via satellite to every Virgin Megastore in America.

In testament to the crossover success Fatboy Slim achieved with the big-beat anthems of 1998's You've Come a Long Way, Baby, the crowd crammed into the store was an eclectic one: clean-cut college students stood next to men sporting fluorescent yellow hair, while a pack of teenage club kids danced next to a couple old enough to be their parents. Both the crowd and Slim endeavored to transform the store into a club. But despite concerted efforts by both parties -- as well as the red and green lights that flashed at the edge of the stage like a stoplight on the fritz -- the set was ultimately an unsatisfactory live experience. After all, how can you cut loose on the dance floor, when that same dance floor is flanked by imposing racks of CDs?

Though the store setting acted like an energy vacuum at times, its intimate environment did provide an opportunity perhaps lost in a larger, more exuberant setting: the chance to observe how Fatboy Slim approaches the creation of his music. With Slim, there are no fixed rules regarding what sounds and styles go together. This fact is already evident on his albums; on Halfway Between . . ., for instance, an inspirational speech by Rev. W. Leo Daniels becomes the basis for the hard-hitting "Drop the Hate." Live, his genre-blurring tendencies became even more apparent, as he spliced the infamous vocal loop from Groove Armada's "I See You Baby" (which, incidentally, Slim remixed) onto the melody of the Beatles' "Daytripper," or Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra" onto booming house beats. He even pasted the line "Fatboy Slim is fucking in heaven," from You've Come a Long Way, Baby's "In Heaven," into "Ya Mama," from his new album.

It's this very ability to see common threads between dissimilar sounds that has made Slim such a hit in the mainstream: His smash singles like "The Rockafeller Skank" imbued dance music's enthusiasm with rock's guitar-driven edge, gaining him a wide-ranging audience in the process. While his selections this night tended more toward house music, his stage presence was as in-your-face as any of his big-beat hits. Wearing a Hawaiian print shirt over a smiley-face-emblazoned T-shirt, jeans and a goofy grin, Slim would jut his head forward in time to the beats, mouthing the words to his own sampled lyrics. At times he lapsed into a few self-indulgent moments befitting a rock star -- wanking on the cross-faders rather than a guitar.

Slim remained joyful throughout his set, punching his arm into the air every time he introduced a song he especially liked. It was hard to tell whether some of these transitions went over well with the crowd, or whether he cared. Enjoying himself right up 'til the end, he closed with a funkified cover of Cream 's "Sunshine of Your Love." The song summed up Slim's musical M.O.: To seek the limits of music's potential for change -- and to celebrate it.

NINA PEARLMAN
(November 7, 2000)