Best National Turntables Act

Fatboy Slim

The dawn of the second great age of the turntable has brought with it two distinct types of turntable masters. There are the turntablists -- guys like Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, DJ Shadow, and Kid Koala, plus the X-ecutioners and Invisibl Skratch Picklz crews. They're the ones with the turntable skills, the crab-handed deck acrobats who can make whole songs out of stray vinyl refuse using nothing more than two turntables and no microphone. They're the flashy yet anonymous ones, the guys whose faces you rarely see because when their heads aren't buried in record crates they've got big old headphones hanging around their heads.

Fatboy Slim is the epitome of the other kind of turntable titan. He doesn't really have any physical skills -- mostly he just puts a record on the turntable, places the stylus in the right place, and lets go. His job is to mix and match single songs, to cobble together a set of tunes that will keep the dance floor hopping, to cut one track into the next so as to create a möbius strip of music with one song folding over into the next, and so on, and so on . . . This type of turntable master is a direct descendant from back in the day when DJs, rather than program directors, picked the tunes. And the artist formerly known as Norman Cook (a/k/a Fatboy Slim) has proved that he's the man with taste that counts; he's brought dance music back to the realm of pop music and helped to make dance music -- which was getting increasingly insular and, well, difficult thanks to the hard-to-find grooves of drum 'n' bass, the nonexistent grooves of chill-out trance music, and the rapid-fire drum barrages of speed garage -- fun again, not just with his own big beat studio creations like "The Rockefeller Skank," but at his DJ appearances and on DJ mixes like the new On the Floor at the Boutique (Astralwerks).

-- Matt Ashare