I had a good time watching this one. The editing is excellent. Basically it’s the Sesame Street crew reenacting Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” It’s stupid-fun.
The mashup is by Adam Schleichkorn and you can follow him on Facebook and Twitter to see more videos like this.
via Nerdcore
The Björk skateboard deck from Girl. Part of a new series featuring photographs taken by Spike Jonze. Available here.
So far there are five different skate deck designs that are a part of a Photos by Spike collaboration between skateboard company Girl and director Spike Jonze. The boards feature the beyond cool shot of Björk (seen above) taken by Jonze, and another that pays homage to the Beastie Boys who appear in character as seen in the 1994 “Sabotage” video (directed by Jonze) that is forever burnt into our collective consciousness.
All of the decks in the group are quite different looking. Both the Sonic Youth and Nirvana decks utilize black and white photos, while the image of Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs lounging on the bottom of her deck is vibrantly colorful as is the yellow skate deck itself. Jonze’s relationship with Girl goes back to at least 2007 when he co-directed a film on the company, Yeah Right. However, the director’s love of skateboarding goes even further back than that as his very first film, Video Days was about, you guessed it,skateboarding. Each sweet deck will run you about $50. I’ve posted photos of all the decks below for you to see below as well as some footage from Video Days.
The Sabotage deck.
Sonic Youth.
More after the jump…
In the 1990s, from certain corners of the indie music landscape writ large, there cropped up a strange little genre we’ll just call “shitty country”: country music done without really the slightest attempt to carry it off properly, executed of course with a good dose of irony and, yes, condescension.
In 1996, for instance, Ween unexpectedly put out an album called 12 Golden Country Greats (which of course had 10 tracks on it). Ween went to the trouble of hiring a bunch of experienced Nashville session musicians to lay down the tracks, without ever telling them that the album was a bit of a put-on—my understanding is that the session guys got all pissed off when they heard the final product, which from the Ween fans’ perspective makes the whole escapade all the better. That album is both a put-on and an honest showcase of outstanding country musicianship.
Four years later, the Beastie Boys spent an afternoon in the studio (I’m guessing) and emerged with a Christmas present for a few hundred of their closest friends. For the recording it was necessary to create a quasi-fictional character known as “Country Mike,” a signal that Mike D. would be handling most of the vocals. The album was called Country Mike’s Greatest Hits, and it featured a baker’s dozen of half-assed and wildly entertaining country ditties.
Every recipient of the album also got this Christmas card
The initial pressing probably numbered about a thousand copies—if that many. Recipients received a Christmas card in a rustic style. Because of the private nature of the enterprise, scoring copies for regular fans has become difficult indeed. An original black vinyl pressing will run you $250 on Discogs, and the red vinyl pressing is available for $400. The situation at Amazon is similar. Fortunately, there’s an unofficial British release from last year which is priced in the same range as any other new LP.
More after the jump…
Ad-Rock as John, the over enthusiastic audience member at a juice extractor demonstration.
I was up late one San Fernando valley evening in 1998, channel surfing through cable television when I happened upon a very bizarre infomercial advertising a product called “Sure Shine.” It caught my attention and I immediately stopped flipping: the commercial boasted that this multi-use product could wash your hair, polish your car, clean your kitchen counter, AND be used in the bedroom, as a spermicide. The number to call on the screen was 1-888-711-BSTE. This had to be some kind of hoax! It wasn’t exactly a hoax, rather, an ingenious marketing tactic used to promote the Beastie Boys highly anticipated Hello Nasty album on the hip hop groups’ own record label Grand Royal.
Calling the 1-888 number that flashed on the screen throughout the half-hour parody led viewers to where they could pre-order Hello Nasty and have it delivered to their doorstep on July 14, the ad also included the URL for Grand Royal’s newly launched website. The low-budget infomercial was directed by none other than Tamra Davis, wife of Beastie Boy Mike D, whose impressive credits include music videos for N.W.A., Sonic Youth, as well as major Hollywood studio films like CB4 and Billy Madison. It ran for several weeks on cable stations in Northern New Jersey, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Manhattan, N.Y., Cleveland, Portland, Philadelphia, Houston, and Washington, D.C.
A disclaimer scrolled over the fake products that read “If you order NOW, you will not receive any car care products, but you can order the record, CD, or cassette of the new Beastie Boys album ‘Hello Nasty’”
This incredibly amusing advertising concept starred the Beastie Boys themselves: Mike D (a.k.a. Mike Diamond), MCA (a.k.a. Adam Yauch) Ad-Rock (a.k.a. Adam Horovitz), who, in the name of sketch comedy, slapped on fake wigs, phony moustaches, ponytails, and took on various roles to sell fake get-rich-quick scams, psychic hotlines, and even a food processor that played beats from Hello Nasty. The Beasties comedy chops hold up strong, with a parody style well ahead of its time pre-dating Adult Swim, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, and so many others who a decade later would become popular parodying public-access television with bizarre faux-infomercials in a very similar fashion.
Director Tamra Davis spoke with me about how using a Home Shopping Network style approach to sell Hello Nasty came about: “Ian Rodgers (Grand Royal’s president of new media) was working with the Beasties on how to direct sell and market using the internet. This was all super new and I definitely remember us all thinking about how crazy it would be if you were at home watching TV in the middle of the night and this came on. We thought it would be hilarious.” This wasn’t Ian Rodgers’ first innovative approach to marketing in new media. After he wowed the Beastie Boys by giving a demonstration of the internet in 1994 (they hadn’t heard of it yet!) he created an (unreleased) CD-ROM entitled Don’t Mosh in the Ramen Shop, and in 1998 became one of the very first people to use MP3 technology to upload live recordings to the net while on the road with the group during the Hello Nasty tour.
The late-night infomercial was incredibly effective, with phone lines lighting up and pre-orders filing in whenever and wherever it aired. A Grand Royal telephone operator explained that a few viewers called in just to ask if the ad was real or not. “Some people have been like ‘Are you just going to go out and charge up my credit card?’ And I’ve just been telling them, ‘No, this is legit.’” Greg Pond, a cable programming coordinator at TCI San Francisco said, “This isn’t the first time that our cable systems local-access channels have been used to promote a well-known group of musicians. We aired half-hour spots for Tricky and Pulp, but those were just videos and information about the artists. They were nothing like the infomercial the Beastie Boys produced.”
Beastie Boys fans will be thrilled to see Ad-Rock as John, the over enthusiastic audience member in a juice extractor demonstration. Mike D as exercise guru Jack Freeweather in the “8 Minute Workout” that promises amazing results. “Whatever you’ve been doing in the past, you’ve been doing it wrong. Let Jack make it right.” Mike D returns later as thick-accented “Miklious Toukas” of CEO GR International. In my favorite segment, MCA plays a get-rich-quick character named Bill Swenson, a.k.a. “The Money Man.” A perfectly straight-faced MCA wearing thick, dark-rimmed glasses and a pink sweater around his neck expresses: “Money makes you feel good, money is so underestimated in our society, money is the thing that everyone needs to feel great and be who they are.” Tamra explains there was never a script for the infomercial, “We had all the ideas of the characters and what would happen but it was all improvised as far as what they said or what the guests would say. Some things they did were such inside jokes that if only five of us got it, it was worth it.”
MCA as Bill Swenson, a.k.a. “The Money Man.”
Mike D as thick-accented “Mikilous Toukas” of CEO GR International.
Extras casting helped fill out the traditional studio audience when they taped the ad in New York City, as well as friends, family, fellow Grand Royal labelmates, and even some real people like the Beasties stylist Tara Chaney and Tamra and Mike D’s doorman Joe. E.Z. Mike (a.k.a. Michael Simpson) from the Dust Brothers can be seen in the crowd applauding next to none other than record producer and studio engineer legend Mario Caldato Jr. Any Beastie Boys fan knows him as Mario C. by his frequent shout-outs in lyrics such as “That’s a record ‘cause of Mario” on the song “Root Down” and “Mario C likes to keep it clean!” on “Intergalactic.” Matthew Horovitz (Ad-Rock’s brother) plays Kenny Star of “Hollywood Psychics,” and Ad-Rock’s best friend from elementary school, working actress Nadia Dajani, plays Peg of “The Juice Ladies.” Actor Russell Steinberg (son-in-law of Diane von Fürstenberg) and DJ Frankie Inglese appear as Mike Lathers and Graham Noodledish of “Fantastic Finds,” showing off a miracle cleaning product that can only be applied using a compact disc.
Keep reading after the jump…
Toronto-based musician Coins has an admirably succinct self-description on his Bandcamp page: “Coins makes dance music.”
For my part I’m not one to dance much, but he makes electronic music quite ably. He favors the thick, sproingy analog sounds of electro and classic Acid House, but what concerns us today is a project from two and a half years ago that just came to our attention via Metafilter: “Daft Science,” a Beastie Boys/Daft Punk mashup project that floats the Beasties’ a capella tracks over music beds made up entirely of Daft Punk samples. It’s really good, exactly the kind of transformation of both sources that a band vs band mashup should be. The entire album is available for free download here, but we’ll share a few tracks below, of course. He seems to have posted no new projects since September of 2014, so it’s unclear what, if anything, he’s up to currently. I’m also unable to locate an online tip jar for those who’d wish to support further music from him, which seems odd for someone NAMED “Coins,” but so it goes.
Enjoy Coins’ transformations of “Sure Shot,” “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” and “Body Movin’”.
More ‘Daft Science’ after the jump…
MCA in costume as a deviled egg
The Beastie Boys had a thing for eggs. Their first release, 1982’s Polly Wog Stew EP, concluded with “Egg Raid on Mojo,” a hardcore blast about getting revenge on the doorman at a NYC club by unloading a few cartons of eggs on his person. But as the Reagan/Bush years wore on and anomie set in, the Beasties’ use of eggs became less judicious. During the sessions for Paul’s Boutique, the trio egged hapless pedestrians from windows: those of Ad-Rock’s Manhattan apartment, their rooms at LA’s Mondrian Hotel, and MCA’s “macked-out” car. They also infamously egged the heavily-hyped British “supergroup” Sigue Sigue Sputnik during their big US debut on Halloween night of 1986. (Mike D: “We threw eggs at them when they were at the New York Palladium, it was the least we could do.”)
If you think the Beasties’ random eggings were bad, they were nothing compared to the doomsday device of mischief the band was sitting on which, had they unleashed it, would have made childhood and adolescence a lot more interesting for me and a number of DM’s readers. The line “Put him in check correct with my egg gun,” from “Egg Man,” described a Beastie Boys business venture that could have turned the world’s major cities into slimy, shell-specked hellscapes. From Dan LeRoy’s excellent 33⅓ book on Paul’s Boutique, which just reached its tenth anniversary (and spawned a worthy sequel):
[T]he egg gun mentioned in the song was more than just a rhetorical device. [Dust Brother] Mike Simpson recalls the band “actually employed some toy designers—maybe they were from Hasbro?—to come up with a Beastie Boys egg gun. And I believe there were a couple of prototypes, which Yauch probably still has.”
[Mike D], however, says the prototypes came tantalizingly close to being developed, yet were never completed. “But imagine if we had,” he muses. “The egg business would have blown up. Chicken farmers would be like oilmen today.”
But Simpson, who mentioned the egg gun in an interview about Paul’s Boutique with Seattle’s KEXP recorded last July, maintains the designers did make some kind of visual representation of the finished product:
Yauch took it so far as to hire toy designers from Mattel to come up with prototypes for the Beastie Boys Egg Gun. Somewhere in the world, there are these amazing renderings of these potential egg guns with the Beastie Boys brand on it, which is hilarious.
Can we get the Beastie Boys Egg Gun in stores, please, or at least in my hands? Isn’t this what crowdfunding was invented for?
Keep reading after the jump…
“Ziggy Stardust” as a vintage comic
Chris Sims of the website, Comics Alliance came up with the idea to mashup some old comic book covers with popular songs by David Bowie, The Flaming Lips, Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, just to name a few.
Beastie Boys’ 1986 anthem, “Brass Monkey”
Public Enemy’s “S1W’s”
The Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.”
Parliament’s “Dr. Funkenstein.”
More after the jump…
“Shadrach,” from the Beastie Boys’ psychedelic collage masterpiece Paul’s Boutique, should have been a hit. The band made a gorgeous rotoscope video for the song and featured the tune prominently on the EP An Exciting Evening at Home with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, but “Shadrach,” with its sample from Sly and the Family Stone’s “Loose Booty,” its mystical wisdom, and its defiant tone, proved just too stupid fresh for the suits at Capitol to get behind.
When the Beasties paid their second and last visit to Soul Train (see their first appearance here), they wanted to perform “Shadrach” live, but host Don Cornelius said no. From Dan LeRoy’s book on Paul’s Boutique (my favorite number in the 33 1/3 series, which last year spawned a sequel co-authored by the excellent Peter Relic):
The Beasties got revenge, says [their friend] Max Perlich, by preparing a special version of “Shadrach,” which included the soundbite, “Do the Don Cornelius.” “He freaked on the spot, because he thought it was live,” remembers Perlich. “And he stopped the taping. But they said, ‘No, this is on the record.’ So they got away with it.”
In other words, forced to mime their mighty jam on TV, these world-class practical jokers modified “Shadrach” (doesn’t it almost rhyme with “Ad-Rock”?) to at once sound live and to poke fun at Cornelius, who was left believing that the Beastie Boys’ latest single paid him tribute. At least, I think he was; he seems a little confused during the interview that follows the song, which departs a little more from the recorded version than LeRoy suggests. You’ll see. It’s nuts.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering why the Beasties are rapping about three characters from the Book of Daniel, LeRoy says that their split with Def Jam is not so neatly identifiable with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego’s righteous refusal to bow down before the image of Nebuchadnezzar as you, or they, might be tempted to think; he also reports that Adam Yauch “was then spending lots of time ‘taking acid and reading the Bible,’ according to his girlfriend, Lisa Ann Cabasa.” I wish he was still around.
KEXP steps inside Paul’s Boutique, June 24th, 2015
Independent Seattle radio station, KEXP will be digging deep into the Beastie Boys celebrated 1989 record, Paul’s Boutique during a marathon twelve-hour broadcast on Friday, July 24th.
The broadcast starts bright and early at 6:00 AM PST with the much loved KEXP morning DJ, John Richards who will start the Beastie Ball rolling with the first few tracks from Paul’s Boutique, as well as some of the 100+ songs that were sampled on the record. The meticulously curated broadcast will continue until 6:00 PM, running through both KEXP’s Mid-Day and Afternoon shows.
During the course of the broadcast KEXP will air brand new interviews with the co-producers of Paul’s Boutique, The Dust Brothers (John King and Mike Simpson), as well as exclusive archival chat with the Beastie Boys. KEXP has really been hyping this broadcast, and it’s not hard to understand why. I spoke to John Richards via email and asked him some questions about the Beasties, and the experience of pulling the twelve-hour marathon together.
John Richards - Morning Show Host & Associate Program Director of KEXP
Dangerous Minds: KEXP is known for its massive music library and I know that DJ’s routinely bring their own records in to play on their shows. Given the depth of musical knowledge that KEXP collectively possesses, how difficult was it to track down all the music that was sampled in Paul’s Boutique for the show?
John Richards: There are some specific songs that have been a challenge for sure but I’d say between KEXP’s amazing library and DJ’s libraries that 90% of it was found in the early planning of the show. After that we were able to get the other 10% within a few days. Our goal was to play as much in its original form as well so for sure you’ll be hearing the snap crackle and pop of vinyl on Friday. KEXP on a daily basis will play vinyl, CDs, streams, wave files, mp3s in any given show. I’ve had to mix a YouTube stream with a record into a mp3. I’m surprised we don’t mix reel to reel and cassettes while we’re at it.
What were your first impressions of Paul’s Boutique back in 1989?
John Richards: Like a lot of people they discovered the Beastie Boys first when “Fight For Your Right…” came out. I remember getting the tape at a very young age based on that song and it putting in the rest of the songs on there blew my mind. It was nothing like that novelty song and really was a gateway to me for them, for sampling, even hip hop. So when I got Paul’s Boutique it made sense to me listening to the other songs from the debut that this was the next step for them. I didn’t know sampling like this was new as it was just new to me at the time. It was radically different then anything I had heard and really those first two albums were “where were you when you first heard them” releases. In both cases I was walking through the soccer field next to my house studying the liner notes, art work and song titles and thinking I was the only person on earth listening to this right now. It was one of those rare moments when a release changes your entire thinking about music and how its made.
While you were culling artifacts for this incredible undertaking (such as interviews, sound-clips, etc), did you discover anything about the record that as a fan, was new to you?
John Richards: I learned a lot talking to The Dust Brothers about the record. One thing was that they were really trying to make a hit with the Beastie Boys (and said they easily could have) but that the Beasties were against it, they wanted a cool record that people would discover years from when it was made. Turns out, that’s exactly what happened and continues to happen. Maybe not in crates but for sure on stations like KEXP.
Paul’s Boutique mural at the corner of Rivington and Ludlow on the Lower East Side of Manhattan by Danielle Mastrion
There are not many artists who inspire the nearly universal reverence and adoration from music fans that the Beastie Boys do. Headbangers, alt-rock kids, electronica geeks, classic rock relics; you name the genre of choice, and I guarantee that the vast majority of the people who cling to them will also be fans of the Beasties. Perhaps nothing speaks better to this point than the huge assortment of diverse samples the Beastie Boys used in the recording process for Paul’s Boutique.
From the score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, to music from the 1974 film Deliverance (not to mention the dozens of pop-culture references mentioned throughout the record including a hilarious and timely swipe at Donald Trump on the track “Johnny Ryall”), if it appears on Paul’s Boutique , you will hear it during KEXP’s broadcast.
If you’re not in Seattle, don’t worry. You can stream the broadcast live via your mobile device or computer. KEXP also archives its wide variety of content, so if you miss any part of the broadcast on Friday, you can come back and stream it whenever you want. And I for one can’t think of a better way to spend a few (or twelve) hours than listening to a magical record that almost killed the Beastie Boys’ career back in 1989.
It’s going to be tastier than a “5-Piece Chicken Dinner.”
“Ain’t it Funky” James Brown (from Ain’t it Funky, 1970). One of the 100+ samples on Paul’s Boutique
H/T: KEXP and John Richards
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul’s Boutique’ remixed and re-imagined from all the original samples
Beastie Boys compare ‘Paul’s Boutique’ to Beethoven’s Ninth, 1989
Famous Beastie Boys sample revealed!
Beastie Boys: ‘Paul’s Boutique’ record release party, 1989
The Beastie Boys when they actually *were* boys (and a girl) on cable access TV, 1984
The story behind The Beastie Boys’ ‘Egg Raid On Mojo’
Over the weekend I was hanging out with a few friends (including DM’s own Ron Kretsch) playing Left Center Right and someone put on Check Your Head and then Paul’s Boutique. Those two albums hold up as well today as they ever did, I tell you.
Check Your Head is swell, but Paul’s Boutique is the masterpiece IMO. I went looking for some info about the album and found this great clip in which the Beastie Boys are being interviewed by a German-speaking crew—an off-camera voice says something about “die Fotos will er haben” (“he wants the photos”) after zooming in on MCA holding up two Polaroids; the first words out of any Beastie’s mouth is “Lederhosen.”
The setting is Los Angeles, the date September 1, 1989. The trio are in high horseshit mode, selling the interviews an elaborate picture of the role of “Paul” in the “neighborhood”: “He does a lot of stuff in the community, so we figured ... help him out, you know?” says Ad-Rock. Then MCA pipes up that “Adam used to go out with Janice—Janice, she’s the manager. Paul doesn’t even hang out at the place too much. He like—he’s maybe like the financier.” Of course, there never was any Paul’s Boutique, not on Manhattan’s Ludlow Street, where the album cover was shot, and not “in Brooklyn,” you can’t call 718-498-ten-something and “ask for Janice.” Paul’s Boutique exists only in your mind and mine. [Oooops. Turns out there once was a Paul’s Boutique in Brooklyn, at 758 Linden Blvd. We can only guess if Adam ever dated Janice, or if there ever was a Janice.]
When the interviewer innocuously inquires about “B-Boy Bouillabaisse,” the twelve-plus-minute “medley” at the end of the album, the gang improvs an elaborate comparison to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—after all, Beethoven was deaf when he composed that, whereas the Beastie Boys are merely “stupid.” Ad-Rock pulls a Tufnel when he insists that Ludwig could have skipped the Ninth altogether and just composed the Tenth, while MCA riffs, “Just imagine if my man Beethoven had a fuckin’ sampler!” In no time flat they’re referencing Walter Murphy’s disco-tastic “A Fifth of Beethoven.”
I don’t think I can embed it, or else I would, but if you haven’t seen the marvelous “Paul’s Boutique: A Visual Companion,” you really need to check that out too, it’s a kind of album-length compilation designed to give every song on the album its own visual montage.
Here’s the interview.
Mass culture machines love the status quo—a salesman, after all, is fattest and happiest when he knows what’ll sell and how to sell it. So when a sudden zeitgeist shift catches them with their pants down, it can be illuminating to watch them try to pull them back up. When the reset button got pushed in the early ‘90s and cult figures whose worldviews revolved around aggressive abnormality suddenly became the new rock royalty, things could get pretty damn funny.
One noteworthy moment was when Sonic Youth‘s Thurston Moore guest hosted MTV’s late night alternaghetto 120 Minutes. In the 1980s, that show featured some legitimately outré artists, but by 1994 watching that show was no longer significantly different from listening to commercial radio. Because of Moore’s untouchable underground bona fides, featuring him injected a fresh dose of off-the-path credibility into that show, and his interview with the then newly-rising Beck was pretty hilarious. Watch it here, it’s worth a few minutes of your life.
But weirder still is this bit of insanity from the same broadcast—Moore, Beck, and the Beastie Boys’ Mike D collaborating on a noise jam. This is what happens when you let the freakshow into the big tent—Dada in mass media. Rigoddamndiculous.
Hat-tip to Mr. Rob Galo for this find.
Ah, 1984, back when hardly anyone knew who the Beastie Boys and the Butthole Surfers were, and even a lowly New York City cable access show like The Scott and Gary Show could snag them—because nobody else was booking them yet! This is some kind of retrospective episode of the show (lasting about 30 minutes) in which Scott Lewis and Gary Winter reminisce about some of the show’s most memorable moments. The Beasties appeared in January 1984, not long after their pranky single “Cooky Puss” had made the rounds, and the Buttholes’ appearance dates from October 1984—their first visit to New York. (They popped up on MTV the next day.)
The Beastie Boys were two solid years away from the release of Licensed to Ill, and if I understand their history correctly, they hadn’t really considered doing rap in any serious way yet. Meanwhile, the Butthole Surfers had a single solitary EP to their name when they appeared on the show.
The Beastie Boys are frankly pretty terrible, prompting the thought that a lateral shift from feckless hardcore to feckless rap was a pretty good career move! Mike D. is in charge of the vocals, Ad-Rock is on the guitar, and MCA gamely tries to keep up on the bass. The drummer is Kate Schellenbach, who would later be in Luscious Jackson. Actually, Schellenbach probably has the best moves of anyone here.
How did I miss what an incredible ham/camera-hog Mike D. is? I don’t think I knew that before, I always thought that Ad-Rock was the hammy one. Well, there’s a reason that Mike D. has the mic here, and in the interview portion afterwards, he obstinately refuses to cede control to Scott, forgetting that he’s supposed to speak into the mic he’s clutching for it to function properly. (Side note: It was interesting to hear Mike D. confess that he attended Vassar briefly. I went to Vassar a few years later, and we would whisper this “rumor” that one of the Beasties had dropped out of Vassar…. this was all a couple years before Paul’s Boutique came out.)
The best adjective for the Butthole Surfers segment is “sweaty.” The Buttholes’ segment is a salutary reminder of the effectiveness of using two drummers—man, that shit works really good. If you have two drummers going at it balls-out, you can flail around on the guitar and throw yourself all over the stage, and it’s going to sound good. (I think Kid Millions has already figured this out.) Also, disrobing is a viable strategy. Gibby has spectacular polka-dotted boxers, and supports someone named Gilbert A. Rodriguez for county treasurer. By the time they’d gotten to October, Scott and Gary had figured out how to superimpose images, so sometimes the footage of the band will fade to an image of a mushroom cloud or something, it’s all pretty rad. Afterwards, Scott asks the audience, “Where else are you gonna see the Butthole Surfers?” and receives the reply “Uganda,” in return.
The commonality between the two clips is obviously Scott’s lack of authority as the host, which is actually kind of charming.
Saturday was the third annual MCA Day in New York City, a day of remembrance for the most enlightened Beastie Boy, Adam Yauch, who succumbed to a three-year battle with cancer on May 4, 2012, at the age of 47. A group of Tibetan monks decided to honor Yauch, who over the last couple decades may have done more than any other celebrity to put Tibet’s liberation struggle into the consciousness of twentysomethings, by breakdancing in Union Square. They look pretty good to me.
The track is “Ch-Check It Out” off of the Beasties’ 2004 album To the 5 Boroughs.
Here’s a video taken by a spectator, which is unfortunately in portrait mode (booo):
via Gothamist
An energetic New Yorker wants to have the intersection of Ludlow and Rivington streets in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where the remarkable 360-degree album art for the Beastie Boys’ classic 1989 album Paul’s Boutique was photographed, renamed “Beastie Boys Square.”
Here’s some of the news report, from DNAInfo’s Serena Solomon:
A Brooklyn resident wants to name the intersection of Ludlow and Rivington streets after the hip-hop trio, marking the corner shown on the cover of their groundbreaking 1989 album “Paul’s Boutique.”
“I think the Beastie Boys represent New York in a certain way,” said LeRoy McCarthy, 46, who earlier this year proposed a street co-naming for rapper Biggie Smalls in Clinton Hill.
“They grew up here. They are New Yorkers.”
McCarthy, a film location scout who previously worked for a record label in Atlanta, has gathered nearly 20 signatures so far on a petition for the Beastie Boys co-naming, including eight of the nine businesses on Rivington Street between Ludlow and Essex streets and many of the apartments on the block, he said.
He hopes to present his proposal to Community Board 3 soon.
-snip-
“I think that the Lower East Side, what it used to be, is a good place to honor the Beastie Boys,” said McCarthy, who fell in love with hip-hop as a child.
“It represents New York. New York is always changing, New York is always on the move, New York is dirty [and] it is beautiful.”
Here’s the petition. Do sign it!
As it happens, I’m moving from New York to Cleveland in a couple of days, and completely coincidentally I held my farewell party about a block away from that Ludlow/Rivington intersection.
Here is that intersection as it looked in June 2011, according to Google Maps.
In May of this year Palmetto Playground in Brooklyn Heights was renamed Adam Yauch Park.
McCarthy is also looking to do something similar for Wu-Tang Clan “in the Park Hill neighborhood of the hip-hop group’s native Staten Island.” I definitely support this idea, but (speaking as a resident of Staten Island, even if only for another forty-eight hours) I propose renaming the “Spirit of America,” the only Staten Island Ferry boat currently in service that is not named for a human being, after the obvious choice: RZA. I would certainly sign a petition to that effect, and in fact I think if you jump ahead 25 years or so, it’s almost inevitable. Because RZA rules.
Here’s a very good interview from the AV Club with Jeremy Shatan, who took the original 360-degree photo. The interview is very informative, I’m a Paul’s Boutique nut but there were things in here I didn’t know.
via Brooklyn Vegan
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Beastie Boys: ‘Paul’s Boutique’ record release party, 1989
The Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul’s Boutique’ remixed and re-imagined from all the original samples
Goggle-eyed comedian Mantan Moreland is most famous for being chauffeur “Birmingham Brown” in the Charlie Chan movies, for his supporting role as one of Lucifer Jr.’s “idea men” in Vincente Minnelli’s all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, and for playing the hapless mailman in the “sick humor” cult favorite, Spider Baby. You know how some people are just so naturally funny that the minute you see them, you’re primed for laughter? Mantan Moreland has always had that kind of effect on me.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have inflicted King of the Zombies on unsuspecting friends in the 1980s. It’s a terrible, terrible film, but his scenes are hilarious. I’ve watched it a lot. Too many times!
The Beastie Boys must’ve been Mantan Moreland fans, too, as there is a particular punch-line from one of his rude-n-crude “party records” of the 1970s sampled in a song called “B-Boys makin’ with the Freak Freak” from 1994’s Ill Communication album. The line—“Shit, if this is gonna be that kind of party, I’m gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes!”—is (inexplicably) hilarious on its own, but here’s the entire routine from Mantan Moreland’s album “That ain’t my finger!”
It starts a bit slow, but stay with it.
Below, Moreland is basically the star of King of The Zombies, but he’s not given top billing, the white actors are. My favorite scenes are when he gets hypnotized into believing that he’s a zombie and the scene where he leads the zombies into the kitchen to be fed. He says a line in the scene that begins at the 54:00 minute mark that I have used as a “catchphrase” for decades: “As I member, I has privileges.” No one ever knows what I mean when I say that, but I laugh.