Meat Beat Manifesto
Pioneering Techno Troublemakers By T. Cole RachelThe genre-hopping cut-and-paste forebears nudged open the door for a wide variety of like-minded electronic acts.
Meat Beat Manifesto are somehow both highly influential and criminally underrated. Led by production wiz Jack Dangers, the band brought a kind of hybridized dance music to the public's attention, only to see a bevy of other acts take the formula and use it to become much more famous. The band got its start in 1987 with the release of singles like "I Got the Fear" and "Strap Down," which employed a cut-and-paste sampling approach. While many of the band's contemporaries employed a more single-minded approach to making dance music, MBM combined elements of dub, hip hop, and jungle into its musical stew. Because several of their early releases were on Chicago's Wax Trax! label (home to Ministry, Front 242, and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult), it was difficult for Dangers and company to shake the "industrial" label, which was actually a total misnomer. Meat Beat Manifesto would release many great singles over the years ("Psyche Out," "Radio Babylon," "Helter Skelter"), but lineup changes and label-hopping has kept the band from reaching a larger level of success, even as the sound they pioneered made bands like Nine Inch Nails household names.
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