Fatboy Slim

Norman Cook didn’t just wake up and decide to be a superstar DJ. He was a bass player for The Housemartins, grinding out jangle-pop on the UK charts before the 1988 acid house explosion turned his brain inside out. He spent years as a studio rat in Brighton, working under a.k.a. 'London-by-the-Sea,' messing around with Beats International and Freak Power, trying to find a way to make hip-hop breaks work for a dancefloor full of people who just wanted to sweat. It wasn't about prestige—it was about the Akai S950 sampler and a crate of dusty vinyl. By the time he donned the Fatboy Slim moniker in '96, he was basically the king of the 'Big Beat' sound, which was really just a polite way of saying he sampled the hell out of everything from James Brown to psychedelic rock. The label Skint Records became the epicenter for this chaos. He took the snobbery out of electronic music and replaced it with a shit-ton of distorted 303 basslines and vocal hooks stolen from old blues records. It’s loud, it’s compressed to hell, and it’s designed to be played in a field at 3 AM. He hit a wall when the celebrity thing got too big, but the early run of records is a masterclass in making a sampler scream.

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