It was one of those fantastic ruptures in the creative continuum. A goofy yellow puppet, a dissociative atmosphere, a walloping analogue bassline, all beamed into millions of living rooms thanks to a mega corporation. 20 years ago, "Flat Beat" was inescapable, thanks to the track and the Flat Eric puppet—both created by Quentin Dupieux, AKA Mr Oizo—featuring on a Levi's advert. It was one of those lovely moments for dance music lovers: to see a bit of our culture in the mainstream, to see people nonplussed by or even enjoying a proper bit of weird electronic sound and offkey raver humour. It didn't seem to be anything more than that—at least at first. Really, we thought, it was a small curio, a fleeting moment of fun.

We didn't know how powerful the track would prove to be. Somehow, "Flat Beat" escaped novelty status, becoming not only a staple for house, breakbeat and UK garage DJs of the time, but an influence on almost every major club sound that followed. Dubstep, grime, electroclash, electro house, EDM and other modern hybrids all have a little bit of "Flat Beat" in them. Somehow, in its basicness and no-frills foolishness, it boiled down some essential dance floor energy into a form that would remain relevant through the decades that followed.

Dupieux had no idea of the monster he'd created, but he did have an inkling of the track's perfect functionality. "'Flat Beat' was recorded to make Flat Eric dance in the Levi's spot," he says. "I had no idea it was going to be a classic, of course, but I knew it was the perfect tune to make Eric dance. As easy as that." At the time he wasn't even a clubber in any serious sense. "I only knew the big names like Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Aphex Twin," he says. "I wasn't connected to any scene, the track wasn't a reaction to anything, it was just an attempt to make 'dance music'."

Maybe, I suggest to him, that explains its universality? "Yes," he says, "'Flat Beat' was not 'house' or 'techno' or 'trance' or whatever. It's just... something. That's why it was OK for many different DJs to play it."

That's an understatement. "Flat Beat" got everywhere. Tommie Sunshine remembers it as "a Chicago staple.... Derrick Carter bumped that record for a solid year." It was played in the techno scene, too. One of the quirkier side stories of the track's life is that the Chilean-German-British producer Cristian Vogel would get asked for it constantly. People assumed he'd made it because "Vogel" in German translates to "bird," or "Oiseau" in French.

"Flat Beat" also became a staple among the hip-hop, ska and other sounds that made up the big beat scene in the UK. Big Beat Boutique and Skint Records founder Damien Harris (AKA Midfield General) remembers both himself and Fatboy Slim rinsing it endlessly. "It was almost the perfect Big Beat Boutique record," he says. That connection went stateside, too. "Every breakbeat DJ in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest played that track," says Brian "Gunjack" Gibbs, at the time a techno artist in California, now a conceptual artist in Chile. And it was huge on the UK garage scene: Mark Hill, then of Artful Dodger, remembers: "It kind of bridged that two-step and speed garage vibe. The nice thing about garage raves at that time was the fact that you could get away with playing any records that had a big bass sound."

All of this was only the beginning. Tommie Sunshine says Carter's support of the tune "helped give it a sense of permanence," but it was Sunshine himself who carried it forward. He saw its no-nonsense, no-genre punkiness as fitting perfectly with the European electro he'd already been spinning through 1998—"Gigolo Records, Adult., DMX Krew, Anthony Rother"—and so it became an integral part of what emerged as electroclash a couple of years later. When electroclash peaked in 2003, he was still battering it. "It's arguably among the best electroclash anthems," he says. As such, it would be a keystone in electroclash's influence on nu rave, electro house and all the other sounds that followed through the noughts.

"Flat Beat" reverberated onwards from the breakbeat scene as well. "That song in particular was sort of the missing link between Dust Brothers, later Chemical Brothers, Crystal Method type stuff and that newer sort of post block rocking banging universal techno house thing," says Gunjack. "Which then in turn got fed by Ed Banger, Justice, Daft Punk and eventually became EDM."

But it was garage where "Flat Beat" arguably had its most drastic effect. "Flat Eric was a real game changer," says Noodles, then producing as Groove Chronicles with El-B. "After that advert, it was, 'Need to get that yellow puppet tune!' It just worked in a club with that grinding melodic bassline." Groove Chronicles' own wobble-bass "Black Puppet" was a nod to "the yellow puppet tune," and multiple garage bootlegs of "Flat Beat" emerged.

This was exactly the time that other big bassline tunes were causing a schism in garage. DJ Deekline's "I Don't Smoke" and DJ Zinc's "138 Trek" were both released the following year. It got the younger generation hyped as hell, but royally pissed off the older crowd who thought garage should stick to its soulful roots, hence the "garage committee," set up by Jason Kaye, Norris "Da Boss" Windross and friends, which tried to ban the big bassline tunes from garage sets. But those younger kids took the bass and ran with it. Groove Chronicles and Zed Bias are often cited as making the first proto-dubstep tunes, but "Flat Beat" itself deserves its place in the story.

"I loved that tune," says Skream. "I was a huge fan actually." When I interviewed Coki, the original king of wobble bass, and asked him what kind of rave music he liked as a kid, the very first track he mentioned was: "What was that guy, Mr Wunzo... Mr Oinzo?" Mr Oizo? "Yeah! [sings] 'wum-wum-wum-wuwum wum-wum-wum-wuwum' hahaha! The kind of sound it was, the mid-range in it, I thought yeah, this is crazy shit, this is the kind of thing I like. People would ask: 'How can you be into this kind of stuff?' But I'd just go, 'Listen to it! Listen to the sound, you can dance to this! This fuckin' groove, it's, like, party time!'"

As dubstep's first cousin, grime wasn't immune to that wum-wum-wum either. Mark Hill says that in the garage scene, "MCs just loved that track, they loved how stripped down it was." Scratcha DVA, who would go on to participate in grime, funky and then experimental club music, says, "Now I think about it, that tune was played a lot. EZ played it on Deja [Deja Vu FM, the pirate that vied with Rinse to be the dominant station in the proto-grime days]—mans would spin that in a set with MCs. It was 100% influential."

DJ Oneman remembers it from his childhood in South London. "It was massive in the playgrounds for the garage pirate radio kids. We all thought it was a proper dark tune, it fit straight in with our tastes, kids that were feeling '138 Trek' all buzzed off of 'Flat Beat'. Kids would spit over 'Flat Beat.' Before speakers for your phone and shit, polyphonic ringtone times, kids would beat box the bassline and others would spit over the beatbox. [So Solid Crew's] 'Dilemma' and [Musical Mob's] 'Pulse X' were other big beatboxable garage-grime tunes. And, yeah, 'Flat Beat'!"

From the moment of its release, the DNA of "Flat Beat," a tune without genre, made its way into underground and overground sounds across the world, and has never gone away. That wobble became one of the defining tropes of much of 21st century dance music so far. The punky simplicity of it, right at a time when DJ culture was becoming overblown, resonated with everyone from the grime kids of London to international electroclash decadents. That ability for a perfect bassline to cross over across scenes harked back to rave era tracks like "Energy Flash" and "LFO," and has rarely been repeated since. "Doom's Night" a year later managed something similar, and when dubstep broke out tracks like Skream's "Midnight Request Line," Coki & Benga's "Night" and Shackleton's "Blood On My Hands" traversed scene boundaries too, rewiring the structure of club culture in the process.

Mr Oizo, of course, went on to do plenty of other great things. He says he didn't feel shackled by the tune. "My goal has never been to make hits, so I did not suffer from this success, really... I just had to record a very aggressive album [Analog Worms Attack] to flush the success, that's all." He would sign to Ed Banger in 2007, a label to which he recently returned for an EP inspired by "Flat Beat," reinterpreting the track in various tempos and styles, but with the simple funk and Korg MS-10 synth riffs keeping the same raw appeal.

Even now, "Flat Beat" remains a powerful DJ tool. "It was a get out of jail card at one point," says Scratcha DVA. "Still can be, you know? It's one of them ones—no one's gonna be mad if it comes up in a bouncy club set really... I heard someone play a bootleg of it just a couple of weeks back in fact."

Sometimes it really does come down to a track being, as Dupieux himself puts it, "not over produced, simple and funky." From James Brown, through the birth of house and rave, to dubstep and beyond, many classics have arisen from this principle. And it's good to be reminded of these root principles of dance music—of what moves bodies—again and again.

Damien Harris sums it up perfectly: "I was insanely jealous of 'Flat Beat'—both as a producer and label runner. I just loved the arrogance of it. You can spend your whole career trying to find a beat and a bassline so perfect, and then to have the confidence to say, 'There you go—that’s it.' Brilliant."