Beats International - Dub Be Good To Me
“A new decade”, sang The Verve, curiously waiting until it was halfway over before calling it, “the radio plays the sounds we made, and everything seems to feel just right”. Perhaps they’d forgotten by then that when the ball dropped for 90 New Kids On The Block were Hangin’ Tough at number one. Or that Timmy Mallet topped the chart that summer. Or even that Hale And Pace would spend a week at number one the following year with a track so unutterably awful it almost destroys all the Comic Relief goodwill. Almost.
I’m fond of pointing out that decades tend to bleed into each other rather than flipping from one aesthetic to the next, but then a track like this comes along about five seconds into the 90s and the last ten years are blitzed. Not that this feels especially 90s, either, mind. Actually I don’t really know where it’s coming from, but maybe that’s because it’s a layer cake from 68, 79, 83: The Guns of Brixton by The Clash in a tag-team with Charles Bronson’s harmonica motif from Once Upon A Time In The West sung to the tune of the S.O.S Band’s Just Be Good To Me.
Altogether now - tank, fly, boss walk…