Out & About

Right about now, the joke’s getting old. That’s the unfortunate reality for Norman Cook, who spent the ’80s as a Housemartin and the ’90s as a household name, famous for bringing big beat to America’s alternative nation and for that horrendous line-dancing scene in that one Freddy Prinze Jr. movie that no one really liked. You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, the album that housed “The Rockafeller Skank,” made a true-blue pop star out of Cook (well, except for the fact that he’s bald and nobody really knows what he looks like), selling a gazillion copies and guaranteeing the DJ carte blanche for his next album, the recent Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars. It’s a less party-hearty platter than Long Way, and that’s the funk-soul problem: With the exception of the Chemical Brothers’ sublimely psychedelic Surrender, big beat wasn’t born to do much but up jump the boogie, and definitely not resurrect Jim Morrison of all people, as Cook does on Halfway’s lead single, the plodding “Sunset (Bird of Prey).”

But Fatboy seems intent on legitimizing the form, evidently envious of the critical respect equally frivolous auteurs like MJ Cole, whose album Sincere is spearheading the British two-step invasion of the United States, get heaped upon them for concocting pretty vacant R&B/drum ‘n’ bass cocktails. Which is why Cook invited boho freakazoid Macy Gray (who’s looking more and more like Bootsy Collins with every awards show) to scat her raspy ass onto a couple of his more funked-up new numbers.

Obviously, it doesn’t work well enough to save Slim from his own inertia–would you count on Scooby Doo if you needed a dog to save you from a quickly approaching train when you’re tied to the tracks, even if he was wearing spectacles and a blazer?–and that’s the sad truism at the heart of Cook’s pickle of an artistic crisis: People don’t change, trends do. Even truer, and even sadder: Trends don’t change, their names do. Fatboy’s just caught in the middle, waving his hands in the air, trying too hard to care.