Prodigy
At a central Illinois truck stop I recently picked up a tape by a man named Larry Pierce. Over slick, bland modern-country stylings, Pierce sings lines like “Corn was made to shuck / And girls were made to fuck” and “If you want me back, we’ll get back in the sack / Roll over and I’ll fuck you in the rear.” The album, Songs for Studs, is on Laughing Hyena, a small Kansas label whose biggest claim to fame is having distributed the first recordings of comedian Jeff “You might be a redneck if…” Foxworthy. Given that context, I suppose it’s possible that Pierce considers himself not a misogynist bumpkin but a brilliant parodist of misogynist bumpkins. But since the tape comes to us quietly, without driving Sinead O’Connor off Saturday Night Live or raising Andrea Dworkin’s hackles, we’ll probably never know.
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But no matter which message Pierce is trying to get out, he could take a few PR lessons from a group whose latest “controversial” work is actually far less offensive than his: the Prodigy. Last year the Prodigy was signed to a much-publicized megabuck contract with Maverick, the vanity label Madonna runs under the Warner Brothers umbrella. The group was supposed to be a Trojan horse for bringing electronic dance music into the mainstream, and indeed, its brightly colored freak show has distracted plenty of folks from its hollow center. Perhaps the most extreme example is the third video from the Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land, “Smack My Bitch Up,” which debuted on MTV in December. Within the week the National Organization for Women protested, criticizing what it characterized as a glamorization of violence against women, and shortly thereafter the clip was yanked off the air.
MTV has gained extensive experience with spinning controversy since then, and was ready to steer the certain hoopla the Prodigy clip would bring. While touting every airing as a full-scale media event, the network simultaneously distanced itself from the content, running a series of “candid” interviews with people like born-again Christian disco godfather Moby, professional critic masturbators Cornershop, and anarchist frat-party heroes Chumbawamba, whose very denouncements of the video imbued it with a Genuine Sense of Importance. Even Kurt Loder recorded a disclaimer, which he issued menacingly from in front of the trademark MTV News globe, looking for all the world like some dwarfish intergalactic overlord.
