Fatboy Slim Hits
Fatboy Slim
Why Try Harder: The Greatest Hits
(Astralwerks)
Still a weapon of choice for countless sports arenas and TV producers, Fatboy Slim will go down as having produced some of the most marketable music of the past decade.
What that says about the durability of his ubiquitous “dance” hits (“Praise You,” “Right Here, Right Now,” “Rockafeller Skank,” “Weapon Of Choice”) is debatable. Always listenable and replayable, returning to Norman Cook’s potpurri of ideas reminds one of how nice it was to have that time away. Much like Moby’s *Play, there came a point where Fatboy Slim tracks had utterly saturated life’s many soundtracks, and there came a point when we just didn’t need to hear anymore. As pop craft, there’s no doubting the success of most of Why Try Harder‘s 18 tracks (including remixes of Groove Armada’s “I See You Baby” and Cornershop’s “Brimful Of Asha”); Cook can make you bob your head. Yet whether it was through overexposure or complete lack of depth, listening to “Gangster Trippin” for the zillionth time has no value. No one will ever forget “Right about now: the funk soul brother,” but it’s hard to have any specific memories of it, either.
— Steve Forstneger
