With the distorted perspective that Jonas Åkerlund would end up unwittingly commercializing in the video for Madonna’s “Ray of Light” in 1998, he implemented on a more subversive level this notion of how to inflict a certain trompe l’oeil on his viewers with The Prodigy (incestuously linked to, again, Madonna as a result of being signed to her then active label Maverick Records). Specifically with the visual accompaniment to “Smack My Bitch Up,” their final single from 1997’s The Fat of the Land (the third record from The Prodigy and the first to feature vocals from Keith Flint on it, who would become their most recognizable member as a result of the “Firestarter” video).
Although the track didn’t find as much success as “Firestarter” or “Breathe,” the song would develop a cult following in part due to its controversial (even still) video. Told through the ocular perspective of someone going out for a seemingly garden variety night on the London town, the violence, rage and sexual bender of the narrative escalates as the song progresses–ranging from grabbing at women’s body parts indiscernibly to choking other men out on the dance floor to fucking with a DJ’s records to interrupting a couple going at it in a public bathroom to bringing a stripper back home. All behavior that is, historically (or per society hitting us all over the head with it in every facet of culture), male.
And yet, with the simple twist of showing us in the mirror at the very end of the video who–or rather, what gender–is behind all of this formerly only accepted as “laddish” behavior, we are forced to question the very fiber of our being in terms of what we deem “expected” from men versus women. Whereas this sort of boorish, abusive jag would be entirely unsurprising from a bloke, it becomes somehow shocking when a woman vomits in public or grabs a woman’s tits or goes to a strip club or shoots up heroin. Not quite kosher, as it were.
But while, on the one hand, The Prodigy challenges our frame of reference on what a woman should and should not be “allowed” to do by societal standards, it also posits that women are capable of just as much–if not even more–debauchery than men. And as such, they should not be given “a pass” on the basis of being assumed to be too dainty to engage in or absorb such things as drugs and fucking, activities that have somehow been preordained as reserved for hetero males, humanity’s mascots of depravity and sin. Yet here, as the twentieth century was coming to a close, The Prodigy demanded us all to take a close, harsh look in our own mirror and realize that our attitudes on gender roles and expectations had (and have) little changed since the Middle Ages (where you would never catch a lady carousing with a mug of beer or a chicken leg in hand–or is that just an outing to Medieval Times one is thinking of?).
Although we might tout phrases like “fluidity,” “pansexual” and “polyamory” with more gusto than ever in the present, it doesn’t change just how much the “Smack My Bitch Up” video still strikes a chord for somehow being shocking as a result of the perpetrator of these acts being female. And maybe it wasn’t until Charlize Theron brought to life Aileen Wuornos’ story (reminding audiences that women can be serial killers too and that, in fact, it’s amazing there aren’t more of them based on how far off the rails they’re driven) in 2003’s Monster that society truly had to take pause once more to remember that hell hath no fury like a woman who does whatever the fuck she wants or, to put it differently, lives like a man.
