Music for the Jilted Generation

Music for the Jilted Generation is an album by British band The Prodigy. The album was released through XL Recordings in July 1994. The album was re-released in 2008 as More Music for the Jilted Generation. The re-release includes remastered and bonus tracks.

It is largely a response to the corruption of the rave scene in England by its mainstream status as well as Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which effectively criminalised raves, rave culture, and by implication, rave music itself. The latter is exemplified in the song “Their Law” (predominant lyric: “Fuck ‘em and their law”), and the spoken word intro, which paraphrases a quote from The Lawnmower Man.

When Liam Howlett came to the cutting room for the final phase in the album production he realized that all the tracks he had originally planned for wouldn’t fit onto a CD so One Love had to be edited, The Heat (The Energy) was slightly cut and the track called “We Eat Rhythm” was left out. “We Eat Rhythm” was later released on a free cassette with Select Magazine in October ‘94 entitled ‘Select Future Tracks’.

The cover of the inner artwork of the record was analysed in an article published in 2008 in the techno underground Magazine Datacide. The author compares the picture with a persiflage which was published in 2003 on the Kid606 album Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You. The article not only describes the representation of Raves in graphic artwork but also describes the marketing strategy of the band with the album and criticises it from a pretentious point of view: