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Beastie Boys
Beastie Boys
Originally starting off as a punk band (much of their earlier punk stuff was compiled and released as '94's Some Old Bullshit [see early highlight "Cookie Puss"), the Beasties were not just some of the best rappers of all time, they were some of the best musicians to grace the stage. The Beastie Boys would go on to change the hip-hop game like no other (take that Eminem!). In a time when hip-hop was still a novelty act, three Jewish boys from Brooklyn would go on to change the game for the better. Now even though I remember the "Intergalactic" video playing on MTV when I was nine-years-old, as well as my brothers having owned their 2-disc 1999 anthology (Sounds of Science), of which I believe I could only find the 2nd CD, I wasn't really cognizant of the Beasties' releases until '04's To The 5 Boroughs. That album has some heavy hitters: "Ch-Check It Out," "An Open Letter to NYC" and "Triple Trouble" but reviews were mixed and the band would put down their mics and pick up their instruments for 2007's The Mix-Up, a personal favorite for me. Cocktail lounge jazz, funk, Latin-inspired vibes. I love that album. Man, it's hard to even get started with this band. MCA (who we lost in 2012) is up there with John Lennon for me. A Buddhist, a vegetarian, and amazing poet. He inspires me to this day. Damn- I miss him. Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D were able to change not only rap but the whole face of Rock 'n' Roll... I mean can you name a band that started as a hardcore punk band- went to rap- embraced jazz- and went back to rap? Didn't think so. My personal favorite is 1999's Hello Nasty, their (more organized & more enjoyable on first listen) Wowee Zowee. They do everything on this album: bossa nova, reggae, and whatever it is Biz Markie does. Luckily, we got our swan song out of the band with the cleverly titled, 2011's Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. Besides being amazing rappers, the triple trouble were also amazing musicians: Ad-Rock on guitar, MCA on bass, and Mike-D on drums. It's quite a beautiful thing to watch a band grow up & mature... when you can grow up with a band... there's something special about that. Beasties were just that: they went from juveniles (sample lyric from "Paul Revere":"I did it like this, I did it like that / I did it with a whiffleball bat") to elder statesmen (sample lyric from "Song for the Man": "What makes you feel / And why you gotta be / Like you got the right / To look her up and down"). Showing one can age gracefully and stay relevant in the hip-hop game, the Beasties defied all odds. There's not a lot of bands where I can name the discography chronologically & all the members like the back of my hand.... But the Beasties are just too great for that kinda' stuff to not just seep into the brain like that. They also released a cool convert-film created by their fans: 2006's Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That. MCA's passing cut the band short... shit... I'm still waiting on Vol. 1 of Hot Sauce Committee. Luckily, the legacy lives on. The recently announced Apple TV+ documentary on the band, the recently released Beastie Boys Book, and other projects show Mike-D and Ad-Rock are doing a great job of keeping the legacy alive and well, however, Beasties without MCA is like Nirvana without Kurt or Queen without Freddie. MCA is missed. Luckily the music live on. If you are new to the band, their two compilations, the aforementioned Sounds of Science anthology and 2005's single-disc Solid Gold Hits would be a good place to start. Beasties have a little something for everyone... & I think that's why their music transcended generations. Their legacy will live on forever. I'm going to leave this post with a write-up Darryl "DMC" McDaniels wrote for Rolling Stone magazine, when they came out with their 100 Greatest Artists of All Time (where they were ranked at an unjust 77).
"In the early days of rap, the conventional wisdom was that only black people were supposed to like hip-hop and only white people were supposed to like rock. But it wasn't like that. In Run-DMC, we were rapping over rock beats. The Beasties were a punk band listening to hip-hop.
I met the Beastie Boys in Rick Rubin's dorm room at NYU. What bugged me out about the Beasties was that they knew everything about hip-hop -- the Cold Crush Brothers, the Treacherous 3 and Afrika Bambaataa, all the old-school shit. In addition, they could rap, they could sing and they could play instruments.
Run-DMC wrote "Slow and Low" for the Beastie Boys. That was their first hit, and it was basically their blueprint. But then they started writing their own songs, and when Licensed to Ill came out, it went to Number One. They were writing songs we wished we had written, like "No Sleep Till Brooklyn." They put rock with rap like we did, but it made so much sense when they did it because they were already punk rockers.
The first time we toured with the Beastie Boys was the Raising Hell tour in 1986: Run-DMC, Whodini, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. We were playing the Deep South -- Crunkville, before there was crunk -- and it was just black people at those shows. The first night was somewhere in Georgia, and we were thinking, "I hope people don't leave when they see them." But the crowd loved them, because they weren't trying to be black rappers. They rapped about shit they knew about: skateboarding, going to White Castle, angel dust and mushrooms. Real recognizes real.
One of the most significant things about the Beasties is their longevity. They've been putting out genius records for twenty years, right through to To the 5 Boroughs. When Paul's Boutique came out, the critics said it wasn't up to par. But now people realize it's one of the best albums of the Eighties.
Each of the Beastie Boys has a different personality. Mike D is the examiner: He looks around, he takes in all the information, he's a little laid-back. MCA was always the mature one, but he could be a fool when it was time to be a fool. And Adrock is just full of life. He's approachable, affectionate and funny. But maybe my favorite thing about the Beastie Boys is that they're worldly. They taught me and many other people a lot about life, people and music."
-D.M.C.
Best be to the Beasties...
The Beastie Boys
Beastie Boys
Beastie Boys
Originally starting off as a punk band (much of their earlier punk stuff was compiled and released as '94's Some Old Bullshit [see early highlight "Cookie Puss"), the Beasties were not just some of the best rappers of all time, they were some of the best musicians to grace the stage. The Beastie Boys would go on to change the hip-hop game like no other (take that Eminem!). In a time when hip-hop was still a novelty act, three Jewish boys from Brooklyn would go on to change the game for the better. Now even though I remember the "Intergalactic" video playing on MTV when I was nine-years-old, as well as my brothers having owned their 2-disc 1999 anthology (Sounds of Science), of which I believe I could only find the 2nd CD, I wasn't really cognizant of the Beasties' releases until '04's To The 5 Boroughs. That album has some heavy hitters: "Ch-Check It Out," "An Open Letter to NYC" and "Triple Trouble" but reviews were mixed and the band would put down their mics and pick up their instruments for 2007's The Mix-Up, a personal favorite for me. Cocktail lounge jazz, funk, Latin-inspired vibes. I love that album. Man, it's hard to even get started with this band. MCA (who we lost in 2012) is up there with John Lennon for me. A Buddhist, a vegetarian, and amazing poet. He inspires me to this day. Damn- I miss him. Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D were able to change not only rap but the whole face of Rock 'n' Roll... I mean can you name a band that started as a hardcore punk band- went to rap- embraced jazz- and went back to rap? Didn't think so. My personal favorite is 1999's Hello Nasty, their (more organized & more enjoyable on first listen) Wowee Zowee. They do everything on this album: bossa nova, reggae, and whatever it is Biz Markie does. Luckily, we got our swan song out of the band with the cleverly titled, 2011's Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. Besides being amazing rappers, the triple trouble were also amazing musicians: Ad-Rock on guitar, MCA on bass, and Mike-D on drums. It's quite a beautiful thing to watch a band grow up & mature... when you can grow up with a band... there's something special about that. Beasties were just that: they went from juveniles (sample lyric from "Paul Revere":"I did it like this, I did it like that / I did it with a whiffleball bat") to elder statesmen (sample lyric from "Song for the Man": "What makes you feel / And why you gotta be / Like you got the right / To look her up and down"). Showing one can age gracefully and stay relevant in the hip-hop game, the Beasties defied all odds. There's not a lot of bands where I can name the discography chronologically & all the members like the back of my hand.... But the Beasties are just too great for that kinda' stuff to not just seep into the brain like that. They also released a cool convert-film created by their fans: 2006's Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That. MCA's passing cut the band short... shit... I'm still waiting on Vol. 1 of Hot Sauce Committee. Luckily, the legacy lives on. The recently announced Apple TV+ documentary on the band, the recently released Beastie Boys Book, and other projects show Mike-D and Ad-Rock are doing a great job of keeping the legacy alive and well, however, Beasties without MCA is like Nirvana without Kurt or Queen without Freddie. MCA is missed. Luckily the music live on. If you are new to the band, their two compilations, the aforementioned Sounds of Science anthology and 2005's single-disc Solid Gold Hits would be a good place to start. Beasties have a little something for everyone... & I think that's why their music transcended generations. Their legacy will live on forever. I'm going to leave this post with a write-up Darryl "DMC" McDaniels wrote for Rolling Stone magazine, when they came out with their 100 Greatest Artists of All Time (where they were ranked at an unjust 77).
"In the early days of rap, the conventional wisdom was that only black people were supposed to like hip-hop and only white people were supposed to like rock. But it wasn't like that. In Run-DMC, we were rapping over rock beats. The Beasties were a punk band listening to hip-hop.
I met the Beastie Boys in Rick Rubin's dorm room at NYU. What bugged me out about the Beasties was that they knew everything about hip-hop -- the Cold Crush Brothers, the Treacherous 3 and Afrika Bambaataa, all the old-school shit. In addition, they could rap, they could sing and they could play instruments.
Run-DMC wrote "Slow and Low" for the Beastie Boys. That was their first hit, and it was basically their blueprint. But then they started writing their own songs, and when Licensed to Ill came out, it went to Number One. They were writing songs we wished we had written, like "No Sleep Till Brooklyn." They put rock with rap like we did, but it made so much sense when they did it because they were already punk rockers.
The first time we toured with the Beastie Boys was the Raising Hell tour in 1986: Run-DMC, Whodini, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. We were playing the Deep South -- Crunkville, before there was crunk -- and it was just black people at those shows. The first night was somewhere in Georgia, and we were thinking, "I hope people don't leave when they see them." But the crowd loved them, because they weren't trying to be black rappers. They rapped about shit they knew about: skateboarding, going to White Castle, angel dust and mushrooms. Real recognizes real.
One of the most significant things about the Beasties is their longevity. They've been putting out genius records for twenty years, right through to To the 5 Boroughs. When Paul's Boutique came out, the critics said it wasn't up to par. But now people realize it's one of the best albums of the Eighties.
Each of the Beastie Boys has a different personality. Mike D is the examiner: He looks around, he takes in all the information, he's a little laid-back. MCA was always the mature one, but he could be a fool when it was time to be a fool. And Adrock is just full of life. He's approachable, affectionate and funny. But maybe my favorite thing about the Beastie Boys is that they're worldly. They taught me and many other people a lot about life, people and music."
-D.M.C.
Best be to the Beasties...
The Beastie Boys
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