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13. The Chemical Brothers, “Setting Sun” (1996) Everybody’s favorite song in the fall of 1996, uniting rockers, ravers, clubbers, druggers, all factions of the pop massive. The Chemical Brothers turn “Tomorrow Never Knows” into a banging techno loop, warping Ringo’s block-rocking beats into something new. “Setting Sun” is unaccountably obscure these days, considering what a fact of life it was for a year or so, but it’s a song that accurately predicted the future. There was nothing retro about it; instead of capitulating to the past, the Chemicals complimented it enough to ransack it. In this song, the Beatles aren’t legends or saints or icons—they’re a nasty drum break. The vocals were by Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, then Britannia’s biggest rock star, yet he sounded more antique than Ringo’s drums did. It was the ultimate Nineties statement of the Beatles as a right-now thing as opposed to a good-old-days thing.
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Rob Sheffield (Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World)