Right Here, Right Now (This Is Your Life, Lenny!)

"Right Here, Right Now" by Fatboy Slim (otherwise known as Norman Cook) is a curious artefact of the big beat era. The track, which pivots on a string sample from "Ashes, the Rain & I" by James Gang and a micro-snippet of dialogue spoken by Angela Bassett (she was on everyone's social media radar earlier this month for some reason, but life moves on fast) in the 1995 film Strange Days, is arguably Fatboy Slim's most iconic. It captures the urgency and euphoria of merely being alive in the present, with a combative energy that accounts for its enduring popularity as a sports anthem. Mixmag, who proclaimed it the 10th best dance track of all-time in a 2013 article, described it as "a universal anthem of strident empowerment". Here's the thing, though...it is kind of a haunted track, is it not? It's about the omnipresent threat of the apocalypse and our persistent failure to take corrective action. Really, it is.

"Right Here, Right Now" was released as a single in 1999, and I'd like to think it's not such a coincidence that Strange Days itself takes place in a hypothetical version of 1999, specifically in the last two days before the new millennium. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and taken from a script by James Cameron, the cyberpunk thriller presented a more technologically alluring vision of the then-near future than the 1999 we shortly wound up with, but one that nevertheless sought to cater to contemporary anxieties as we approached the Y2K - the sense that, whether it stemmed from concerns about the Millennium Bug, religious prophecies or anything else, it signified the end of a particular era in human history, and the dawning of a new age of uncertainty. In Strange Days, our dependence on technology is depicted not as facilitating our salvation, but as symptomatic of our civilisation being in decline. Lenny, the characteristically shady noir protagonist played by Ralph Fiennes, deals in a form escapism that is designed to disconnect participants from the present moment at every conceivable sensory angle; he is a peddler of SQUID (otherwise known as the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), an illegal contraption that records human memories and all of their associated physical sensations onto Minidiscs and enables third parties to experience them first-hand, via "playback", as if they were their own. Lenny affirms that these vicarious thrills are not to be mistaken for "TV-only-better...it's a piece of somebody's life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex" - although it does encompass much the same function as television, in enabling viewers to get tantalisingly close to the kinds of salacious shit they presumably wouldn't touch in real life. As with television, there's the question as to whether the viewer's spectatorship makes them complicit. Friction between reality and fantasy is at the heart of the picture, and becomes particularly explicit during a scene in which Bassett's character, Mason, stresses to Lenny that: "This is your life! Right here, right now! It's real time, you hear me? Real time! Time to get real, not playback!" For context, Mason is telling Lenny to get over his ex, Faith (Juliette Lewis), hence her subsequent insistence that, "Memories were meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason." Faith gets to weigh in with her own wry observations on the matter when she tells Lenny why the cinematic experience will forever have the edge on playback: "The music comes up, there’s credits, and you always know when it’s over." With or without the aid of playback, Lenny's attachment to Faith keeps him stranded in an inferior non-reality, but there is a more dangerous element to this desire to disconnect from the present, if it means indifference to its social ills. Mason's statement "Right here, right now!" is itself an echo of the rallying cries of another character, Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), a rapper whose outspoken criticisms of the LAPD inevitably make him a victim of police corruption. Before his untimely demise, Jeriko proclaims that the day of reckoning is coming, bringing the people the opportunity to tear down the corrupted present and reclaim it as their own. "History begins and ends again right here, right now!" All of this is set against the backdrop of one heck of a gargantuan party taking place upon the streets of Los Angeles, as flocks of people gather in an attempt to seize that specific moment in which The End and The Beginning seem to intertwine. (Was December 31st 1999 really anything like that epic for anybody who lived through it? It certainly wasn't for me. I watched the movie Tron on TV and then went out with my parents to a nearby party, of which I have precisely one surviving memory - an older guest questioning if Wilson Pickett's "In The Midnight Hour" was appropriate background music to have on when there were kids around. That's all!)

The counterpoint to the high emotions surrounding the Y2K, and everything it threatens or promises, is the suggestion forwarded by private investigator Max (Tom Sizemore) that The End of Things, when it comes, will arise not from some apocalyptic bang, but from the whimper of stagnation: "Everything's been done, every kind of music's been tried, every government's been tried, you know? Every fucking hairstyle, fucking bubble gum flavours, you know, breakfast cereal, every type of fucking. What are we gonna do? How we gonna make it another thousand years, for Christ's sake?" In Max's words, civilisation is doomed because it's already expended all of its avenues and has no further space in which to adapt and move forward.

This ability to keep moving forward was imperative to the accompanying music video for "Right Here, Right Now", which was created by Hammer & Tongs (the pseudonym of director/producer duo of Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith) and depicts the world in a constant state of upheaval, its occupants always having to stay mobile in order to get to what's next down the line. Like Strange Days, it's concerned with a countdown, but one spanning 350 billion years, a concept that seems to slyly echo the title of the track's album of origin, You've Come A Long Way Baby (itself taken from an advertising slogan for Virginia Slims cigarettes, which speaks ironically to humankind's appetite for self-destruction over self-preservation). Taking its cue from the opening sequence to the 1978 French animated series, Il était une fois... l'homme, it follows the course of human evolution in less than four minutes, its rapid visual momentum giving the illusion of a single entity continuously morphing and adapting over time, pressing ever onward as if driven by the urge that there's always somewhere else it has to be.

The critical moment of the sequence occurs at 1:03, when our protagonist, in fish form, exits the ocean and becomes stationary for just a moment, as if the viability of its selected evolutionary trajectory is in doubt. At first, the fish can only squirm helplessly on its new terrain. To its left, off in the distance, stands the silhouette of a mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex. To its right, just out of reach, is a small mantis, which gives the fish the incentive it needs to keep going. The camera pans to the back-end of the fish as its fins morph into legs, while just above the outline of that T-Rex looms marginally closer; it's here that our attentions are momentarily split between two parallel narratives, although one of them is already at a dead-end. The sun is setting on the time of the dinosaurs - we all know how things ultimately went down for them - and it is our intrepid piscine who shoulders the future. This all coincides, incidentally, with the first occurrence of Angela Bassett's sample, which kicks in just as the fish leaves the water, throwing itself into a situation where its only options are either to adapt or perish. Now perfectly suited to terrestrial life, it keeps moving in the same direction, devouring the mantis and leaving behind the immobile T-Rex in the midst of volcanic eruption. The fish then becomes a crocodilian, scales ever further up the evolutionary ladder and emerges in the form of a mammal, specifically a primate. From here it's on the fast track to learning to walk upright, shedding the bulk of its body hair and gaining sapience - the appearance of an "End School Zone" sign acts as our segue into this bold new world of knowledge and civilisation, but conversely suggests that things are only going to get more precarious from this point on. Something well-covered by Il était une fois... l'homme (and also the Simpsons couch gag that paid homage to it) that the "Right Here, Right Now" video seems almost humorously indifferent toward is the course of human history, with our homo sapien strolling pretty much directly into a contemporary city. The process of evolution becomes a shaggy dog story, to which human civilisation acts as an almost gleefully frivolous punchline - the video ends by poking fun at Fatboy Slim's own iconography, as the homo sapien dons a shirt that reads, "I'm #1 So Why Try Harder", the very slogan brandished by the (still unidentified) figure on the You've Come A Long Way Baby album cover, who then shows up to finish off the video. This positing of Cook (or a shorthand thereof) as the pinnacle of human evolution is a gloriously tongue-in-cheek gag, but one that feels cut from the same sardonic cloth as Max's warning in Strange Days that humankind has already reached its zenith. If our moment as #1 has been and gone, how confident can we feel about where we're going from here?

What makes "Right Here, Right Now" such a haunting track is that, while the titular sample might be rooted in the apocalyptic anxieties of a bygone age, speaking to a moment that has long since passed (Strange Days was, after all, a picture that superficially dated itself almost instantly by choosing such an imminent date for its setting), the apocalyptic anxieties themselves haven't gone away. If anything, Strange Days was to prove distressingly prescient in terms of the challenges society would face going forth into the 21st century. The technology itself wasn't so far off - it might not might not have reached the lurid heights of SQUID, yet the availability of camera technology and rise of YouTube has made the kinds of point-of-view films depicted therein accessible at the touch of a button, while the growth of social media offers its own immersion in a technological world as an alternative to flesh-and-blood interaction. Meanwhile, the murder of Jeriko One and the central theme of police brutality were themselves timely explorations of tensions surrounding the beating of Rodney King, the aquittal of the four police officers charged with using excessive force, which was captured on video tape, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but that's a tension that has merely persisted and remains as relevant as ever with the murder of George Floyd and the resulting fall-out in 2020. The contemporary problems of climate change, pandemic, political extremism and the ever-persistent nuclear threat are indicative of an impending boiling point - the sense that, more than ever, our society is on the escalating collision course for disaster. Ostensibly an ode to the present moment, there's a level on which Bassett's resounding battle cries speak specifically to a lost moment, a time for action that was already squandered, an apocalyptic warning that we did not heed. They serve as chilling reminders that we are basically fish who made our way up onto dry land and then didn't budge an inch. The time for action (both collective and individual) is still upon us, just as it was almost a quarter-century ago when we entered the new millennium, just as it was 28 years ago when Strange Days debuted. The "Right Here, Right Now" is a celebration of a specific moment, but it is a prospective moment that humankind has yet to seize and capitalise on. Mason was imploring Lenny to wake up to what was happening in the present and, thanks to the enduring popularity of Fatboy Slim's sound collage, she's had the opportunity to keep belting it out at all of us for 24 years. By now that mantis will have certainly scarpered, but if we get our fish fins into gear there's a chance we can still avoid going down with that dinosaur.