the prodigy kind of hit be my surprise in 1997. i don't know if the kids realize it, but 1997 was the year that techno really broke. there was that huge daft punk record. the chemical brothers. and, the fat of the land.
i was veering in this direction, but i was following more of an underground path, through offshoots of 80s industrial, which i'd been set on by a mild obsession with a couple of nine inch nails remix discs released before 1996, and a beginning exploration of the warp records catalog. research was largely done over the internet, and through conversations with people 5-10 years older than i was. i was aware of the raver kids around me, but i didn't really understand what they were. my intuition was that a rave was really just another kind of high school dance, and my punk instincts put me squarely against it as a consequence of it. looking back, i regret keeping an arm's distance from it - in hindsight, i understand that this was a very wrong perspective and that the truth is that if i was looking for punks in the mid to late 90s then the place i'd be most likely to find them at was actually a rave. i never really came face-to-face with the prodigy until they were roaring at me over muchmusic.
this isn't a record i've come back to much over the years. the fact that i was exploring much more abstract types of electronic music should say a little bit about where my head was always really at in relation to the genre, and what i'm really looking for; even jilted doesn't really hold up well, despite it's importance. but, the fact that something comparable to what i was searching out over usenet was coming at me from mainstream media was exciting to me for a little while, and it coerced me into biting into this disc pretty hard, for a little while. you can hear little bits of it all over the discography.
(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, evil is a human construction, subtle nods elsewhere)
