131: Loose!

Come (1994)
Once upon a time, poodle-haired lizards with loud guitars roamed the charts. Then God said “let there be rave” and the immaculately-coiffed dinosaurs were hit by an MDMA meteor of electro energy. Those least able to adapt were wiped out by the yellow smiley-faced fireball but the resilient absorbed the blast and mutated into something bigger, faster, stronger than they were before. Loose! was once a heavy rock number soundtracking Hades in Prince’s dance production of The Odyssey. It wasn’t terrible but probably best left in the Land of the Dead. A year later Prince reworked it into a pandemonium of hoover synths, industrial guitar and rave abandon – music for the jilted generation – and outlines of its impact can still be found scorched onto walls in Pompeii. A choir-sampling dub version called Get Loose turned up on Crystal Ball five years later – a leftover from a Loose! single that never happened (So Dark also comes from this non-release). Despite its screamed obscenities and Prodigy-style “let’s go!” samples it had its Day-Glo battery acid drained. Come’s version still sounds as devastating as the day it hit Earth.