Fatboy Slim - Right Here, Right Now (1998)
Let the music keep you here.
The year was 2006, and this video was playing on VH1 in India. I would watch the music videos at 7 AM, paused with a toothbrush in my mouth. This video stands out from the rabble, iconic for its attempt at cataloguing 350 billions of human evolution into 3:50 minutes. I remember thinking I was learning something scientific, and being a little off put, but turns out I was actually learning about the big, big beat.
I would argue electronic music has the best music videos, maybe because there’s not always a lyric or personality to organize the visual around and so the director has to get creative with what the rhythm and beat are saying. Fatboy Slim, or Norman Cook’s, music videos are famously some of the best electronic music videos that exist, but having already done a Spike Jonze feature in this newsletter recently, I didn’t want to focus on ‘Praise You’ here (which was voted the no.1 of the 100 best music videos of all time, in a poll to mark the 20th anniversary of MTV). But we’ll come back to it.
Listening to ‘Right Here, Right Now’ you definitely get the sense of dramatically escalating and rolling towards something. Hammer & Tongs, the British director and producer duo Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, clearly tapped into that sonic sensibility when they created this video — adapted from the opening sequence of French educational show Il était une fois...(Once Upon A Time…). The video starts “with a single-celled eukaryote in the ocean transforming into a jellyfish, an aquatic worm-like creature, a pipefish, a pufferfish, and then a barracuda-like fish” then becomes an amphibian, then alligator, then chimpanzee, gorilla, and ultimately, human. And then (with a questionable fatphobic turn) ultimately from a thin human to a fat one. He “sits down on a bench as night falls, then smiles and leans back to look up as the human star constellation of Orion appears above.”
Despite it’s seemingly cynical ending, the video is meant to be an appeal to be in the present, without erasing the context of history. A reminder that we are still evolving and changing. In recent years, Fatboy Slim has mixed the song with Greta Thunberg’s ‘Right Here, Right Now’ speech from the UN Climate Summit in 2019 where she urges that there be immediate global responses to climate collapse.
Matt of Lost Tempo writes, “That’s was this track does. It yanks you into the present. Right here, right now, in this body, listening to this music. It is less an argument for connection and being present than it is an engine to make that happen. It is a technology, It is magic.
Taken altogether, the music video is less a facetious take on evolution and more a political statement about the need to be attentive to the present.
Interesting