Keith Flint, Prodigy front man, dead at 49 | Hacker News Reader

Keith Flint, Prodigy front man, dead at 49

edition-m.cnn.com

86 pointsadamnemecek19 comments

I discovered The Prodigy in an odd way. I was walking down the sidewalk in 2003 in northern Utah. and a car drove past me on the road. They hit a pot-hole really hard. So hard that it caused a CD in their visor-cd-holder-thing to shoot out of the open car window. It was an unlabeled burned CD that landed darn near my feet. I took it home and popped it in my CD player. It was Fat of the Land.

This feels like the right way to discover new music. Wow.

Music for the Jilted Generation is one of the best electronic albums I've ever heard. Not sure how much Keith contributed to that particular album (at the time I think it was mainly Liam Howlett's project) but certainly Fat of the Land is a seminal electronic album as well, and Keith was a very visible part of that act.

spent my early days locked up in my room learning C to this album. it's light on lyrics which makes it (for me) perfect for development work. later his music helped me stay motivated and push my personal limits when running. "Breathe" [1] was on my ipod when I crossed the finish line of my first marathon.

some years later I was lucky to see them live on their Omen tour ... incredible on stage performance.

so much of their music helped me get over things and stay on track. I respect his choice which is as good as any way to exit this fucking world. Still I'm devastated.

Keith was a big part of the live shows for the Jilted Generation tour. he also appears on the music videos for "No Good" and "Poison" IIRC.

The Prodigy was coolest group I went to hear. They had so much energy. I was lucky as the time my girlfriend could get us box seats through her work. We were right in front of the walkway between the sections of the covered area.

Keith was bouncing around on stage, and then all of a sudden he jumps off and starts to run down the walk way at high speed. You could see the overweight security guards freak out and start to try and follow him to make sure he didn't get hurt. He runs within like 2 feet of us and makes his way back on stage. After a couple of minutes, he then proceeds to do it again causing the crowd in there to go nuts. They were so much fun to watch.

RIP Loved this guy and his band

Some cool old interviews and articles

http://www.nekozine.co.uk/prodigy/media.html

Very sad news. The Fat of the Land was the first "alternative" music I'd heard as a 12 year old. As others have said, their live energy is incredible and Keith Flint's vocals and stage antics were a big part of making it happen.

I'm honestly really sad about this. This band were iconic for me growing up. A true pioneer has left us.

Loved - The Trick, its so perfect in a endless loop.

> Flint's distinctive appearance, vocals and dancing made him one of the most recognizable figures on the British techno scene

> Keith Flint, singer on hits like ‘Firestarter’ for British electro-pop pioneers The Prodigy, has died aged 49

CNN shows again its ignorance, The Prodigy is not techno and not electro-pop.

eh, fighting about musical genre is like arguing tabs and spaces. I often call Prodigy "techno" to people who don't closely follow electronic music, as it gets the point across. And certainly you could make an argument that some of their music was "electro-pop" depending on how you define it, as it hit pop radio stations for a time, and was predominately electronic...

Shouldn't you be off correcting their Wikipedia entry, or something?

Pretty much all electronic is "techno" to people who are unfamiliar. Like metal, the genre is just too diverse to try and be specific for the average reader.

Fat of the Land album hit #1 in the US at a time when "techno" was absolutely the catch-all term used to describe dance-oriented rock/electronic music. Chemical Brothers, Crystal Method, Prodigy, Moby all fell under this moniker in the popular press, but so did Madonna, U2, and David Bowie, who had also released electronic-tinged albums at the time.

Lots of '90s bands labeled as "grunge", "shoegaze" or "Britpop" weren't any of those things, but for the benefit of the reading public, it was easier to connect them to a "scene" using those terms.

While personally saddened by this loss, I don't think this post "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I only clicked because the first thing that came to mind was the online service, the age did confuse me.

As yet another high profile suicide I think that sadly it is noteworthy. (Source: The BBC article quotes Liam Howlett on the subject).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47442312

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