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Prodigy's spring fashion fling at Avalon

by Matt Ashare

A heavy smoke screen descended on the capacity crowd at Avalon last Monday night, just minutes before England's Prodigy made one of their first eagerly awaited, post-"Firestarter" sensory assaults on an American audience. With a barrage of techno-beats pumping through the sound system, laser lights cutting random tracer-bullet paths through the fog, and the pulses of a thousand techno-teens quickening, the scene resembled nothing so much as the beginnings of a covert military action at the site of a rave -- something the Tories in Britain might have been considering before they were thrown out of office. Then a taunting voice broke the tension with an announcement: "Listen up lowlife, punk rockers, pill poppers . . . here's Prodigy." All I could think was, damn, someone finally gave Cosmo Vinyl his job back.

Well, maybe it wasn't Cosmo. I couldn't really tell through all the smoke and the lights. But it was definitely the same punk-rock carnival-barker routine that Vinyl once used to rile up crowds at the start of Clash concerts almost two decades ago. Only now it was followed by the sight of a lone techno-dweeb coaxing a gentle drone from a rack of synthesizers, not a gang of punk outlaws firing off the staccato opening salvo of "London Calling."

Bizarre and often confounding juxtapositions like that are part of what's made Prodigy the one emerging electronica outfit worth watching instead of just listening to. With Moby now doing a rock-guitar thing, the new techno scene is dominated by singer-less groups like the Chemical Brothers, Orbital, and the Orb. And as cool as the sounds they generate may be, it's still been a tough sell on the mass market, where audiences are used to taking their cues from a frontperson. Prodigy haven't just solved the front-guy problem -- they've eliminated it with extreme prejudice by employing not just one but two rabble-rousing cheerleaders as well as a small yet effective rotating cast of extras to keep the attention of the crowd from straying too far from the stage.

Here's how it works: while one guy stands at the control panel pushing the buttons that unleash the pummeling digitized dance beats, two microphone-wielding dudes spar with the crowd and each other. One's a white guy dressed like a cross between Johnny Rotten and the punk loser from the '80s British comedy series The Young Ones, with bright dyed hair, carefully torn jeans, and "Prodigy" tattoo'd across his stomach. The other's a black guy with a Jamaican-tinged British accent who was outfitted first in a gray and then a yellow-and-black tartan kilt. They interact like a hip-hop tag team (think Chuck D. and Flavor Flav), though you could probably trace their routine back to the integrated British Two-Tone movement that launched the Specials and the English Beat in the early '80s. The cast was rounded out by a young heavy-metal guitarist wearing the ragged uniform of a skate punk, and a tall and lanky free-form male dancer dressed like an off-duty NBA player (golf shirt, slacks, athletic shoes). Add a cowboy and a construction worker to the mix and you'd have an update of the Village People.

The result was a dizzying techno-punk/hip-hop postmodern burlesque. It was as if Prodigy had somehow figured out a way to feed genre signifiers -- like the punk haircut and the wide-legged stance of the heavy-metal guitarist -- into a sampler to be spit back randomly at the audience. The sight of the crowd pogoing punk-style to a synthesized dance beat while a guy in a kilt rapped "I roll and rock and rock and roll," a skateboard dude played headbanging powerchords, and a Johnny Rotten character sneered with mock loathing at the kids up front was the pop equivalent of seeing the Red Sox march straight-faced into Fenway Park wearing hockey uniforms.

So, yeah, it was funny. Very, very funny. And it was engaging in a way that few if any contemporary electronica outfits have yet managed. The guy in the kilt may have overdone it a bit in the audience-baiting department by challenging the crowd with banter like "I can't hear you Boston" and "I want to see you representing Boston" and "We're playing in New York tomorrow night and I don't want them to be louder than you." But it worked.

The irony, though, is that Prodigy are trying to spearhead the techno revolution by doing away with most of what makes techno revolutionary: from the endless linear progressions of beats to the faceless presentation of sample-collaged compositions. Prodigy performed 13 distinct songs, with beginnings, endings, verses, and choruses, in 75 minutes at Avalon. When the smoke cleared, it was easy to think of them as just another flashy dance-pop band who, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood or the more obscure and less successful Sigue Sigue Sputnik, have merely placed themselves on the cutting edge of a fashion trend.