The Prodigy was one of two bands who ushered me into this sort of music in the year 1997. The other was The Chemical Brothers. I still love both bands dearly, and I'm glad to say I got to see both of them at the same Coachella in 2005. (And Daft Punk a year later, in what is supposed to be one of their greatest live shows ever.) Sadly, The Prodigy (sometimes known as just "Prodigy") lost frontman Keith Flint about five years ago, but Wikipedia tells me they still exist and are still touring.
We know Matthew Vaughn really digs The Prodigy. He includes not one, but two songs from their 2009 album Invaders Must Die, "Omen" and "Stand Up," in Kick-Ass, released only the next year. When you take one song from an album, that's affection for the band, but you can't read that much more into it. When you take two, it means you think that band slays, and you might just be a stalker.
While "Stand Up" is among the cheerier songs The Prodigy has ever written, a lyrics-free banger that might be at home in the set of a marching band playing a college football game, "Omen" is more typically frenzied and insidious. And of course, it plays while the title character is making his first attempt at fighting -- and having his ass handed to him. (Though he survives the beating, and ends up scaring off the attackers through the certainty of his convictions.)
Of course, Vaughn wasn't new to identifying the combative electricity in The Prodigy's music. McG got there first ten years earlier in Charlie's Angels, where he used the then three-year-old "Smack My Bitch Up" -- released in the aforementioned year of my electronica conversion, 1997 -- heavily. He only uses it in one scene, but it essentially plays out in total -- all 5:45 of it -- or at least enough repeated bits of the same song for 5:45 worth of screen time. And yes, this is during an extended chase and fight scene between the three leads and the weirdo played by Crispin Glover. (Did Crispin Glover ever not play a weirdo? Discuss.)
The almost instantly problematic title of that song probably prevented Vaughn from going to that well in Kick-Ass, but he had a brand new album of kinetic Prodigy bangers to choose from.
And the combative energy of their music was certainly what drew me to it. Not that I am particularly combative, but my love of Nine Inch Nails should tell you that I'm down with getting in touch with my inner rage through a song. And The Prodigy's first album that I knew, The Fat of the Land, did that and then some.
In fact, when I made my friend who doesn't ordinarily like this type of music -- our main music connection is Phish -- a mix that included this sort of music, I called it "In Touch With Your Inner Punch Dance," because his joke was that you had to punch-dance to songs like this. The mix included the likes of Rob Zombie, Filter, Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails, Lo Fidelity Allstars, and yes, The Prodigy, which I then called just Prodigy -- "Smack My Bitch Up," no less.
I'm sure Matthew Vaughn and McG were not the only ones to think The Prodigy would kick ass as the score for some bone-crunching fisticuffs, but I'm not going to go down an internet rabbit hole to find the others right now.
Though if the next movie I rewatch features someone kicking someone else's ass to the tune of Keith Flint et al, I will be quite surprised.
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