(THIS) POLL REVERE(S) — ILM Artist Poll #19 — Beastie Boys VOTING THREAD

http://i.imgur.com/M92zC.jpg

Adam Nathaniel Yauch ("MCA")
5 August 1964 - 4 May 2012

Thank you to everyone who expressed support for this poll happening and to donna rouge who let me cut in line ahead of the ABBA poll to get this underway in a timely manner. Spend the next week digging deep into your Beasties records, eps, singles and compilations...even the later ones you didn't like as recently as Thursday.

• Vote for the standard 20 tracks using this scoring system: 1:40, 2:36, 3:33, 4:30, 5:28, 6:26, 7:25, 8:24, 9:23, 10:22, 11:21, 12:20, 13:19, 14:18, 15:17, 16:16, 17:15, 18:14, 19:13, 20:12.
• Optionally, include your 5 favorite albums in order. I'd be surprised if Paul's Boutique didn't win, but let's see how the rest of the list shakes out.
• Voting deadline is Friday May 11th at midnight EST, 8pm PST and Saturday May 12th at 5am GMT for the Britishes. Email your ballots to johnnyilxfever (at) gmail (dot) com before the deadline. Also, please make sure I know how to score your list (adding the points by each track would be super helpful).

oh cool

Is B-Boy Bouillabaisse one track or nine?

the eternal question

Is B-Boy Bouillabaisse one track or nine?

Executive decision: one track.

I think you should have asked for five favorite videos instead of albums.

Hold it now...POLL IT!

five favorite videos

This is a great idea. If you haven't voted yet (and none of you have), consider adding your five favorite Beasties videos.

It's the weekend, so...bump.

POLLS! AND ALL I REALLY WANT IS POLLS!

thanks JF, primed & so down for this

I'm going to try to compile an abbreviated ballot for this, but I doubt that I can. As I mentioned on the RIP thread, discovering them via "She's On It," and their breakthrough a year later, was tremendously exciting. I followed them more casually from Paul's Boutique forward, but was still a fan of all the hits through to "Sabotage." But that was it for me, and neither did their earlier music follow me into my 40s. For me, they're forever tied to that one moment when Licensed to Ill was the greatest thing in the world. I still show the "Sabotage" video to my students when I spend a period on music videos for media, and show them the Paul's Boutique foldout cover for art, but I haven't played either of the first two albums in 15-20 years. It just happens.

...aaaaaand we have our first ballot!

ha i like this thread title

Was that me, then?

Anyone got a source listing of all their songs?

Sick, yes.

Moka, Wiki is fairly useful if you don't mind a bunch clicking through.

Not a video per se, but I want to vote for their appearance on Futurama anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUrsKjTP2Zk

ballot sent.

2 ballots in, only 4 unanimous choices already.

I hope other people vote for unreleased outtakes and demos.

4 ballots in, only 1 unanimous choice remains.

gonna rep for some deep cuts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P2gW7uRpGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4RsOS2nQ1s

Boomin' Granny is def in contention for a spot on my ballot.

Twenty's going to hurt. A thousand cuts. I've only gone through two albums and I've got 20 already.

rap songs, rock songs, chill stoner jams, goofy filler tracks (like, "Mark on the Bus" is my shit, and I definitely want to include it on my ballot, but how it's going to eke its way past all this competition, i just don't know)

Sent.
Broke down as:-
x7 Licensed To Ill
x5 Paul's Boutique
x3 Check Your Head
x2 Ill Communication
x2 Hello Nasty
x1 Hot Sauce Committee II

Yeah I'm upwards of 40 with my first pass. This is gonna suck. And there's a lot of faves on Hello Nasty that I forgot!

One of my Hello Nasty faves, listening now makes me ;_;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rDklqPG5pU

Beastie Groove needs some hardcore repping. I'd love to see it get some love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iGQoWyWDyg

7 ballots in now, though clemenza knocked out the last remaining unanimous track. :P

psyched for this, but gonna take a little time touring before i submit

done!

this one really hurt. still not 100% sure that I made all the right choices, but I didn't want to labor too long and turn it into a nightmare.
Lots of heartstrings + nostalgia working with this one, it was really hard to be super-objective.

My ballot broke down thusly
4 - License to Ill
5 - Paul's Boutique
3 - Check Yr Head
4 - Ill Communication
2 - Hello Nasty
1 - Hot Sauce Committee

fuck, there are like 40 songs i want to vote for off the first four albums alone. they were flawless for a while. and everybody wants to say that paul's boutique is their time capsule act of genius, but for me it's check your head. shit is unstoppable.

yeah, I have to admit that i was part of the anti-paul's backlash when it happened. there are still 2 or 3 songs I want to include from it though. as my list stands right now, i have more than 20 that are just check your head and ill communication. i could've done this easily if we'd had 30.

I was going to ask about the backlash. Never really listened to them in that era, but I remember Check Your Head getting grudgingly decent reviews in the end-of-years, but still basically the hangover of a bewildered reception. Yet I find it far more impenetrable than Paul's Boutique, so I find it hard to understand how PB is the one that confused everybody.

Well, bear in mind that I was 10 at the time and my sole exposure to the album was the Hey Ladies video, which me and my friends didn't really understand all the 70s kitsch and stuff.

But even listening to PB now, it feels like their most uneven album to me. Songs I always skip:

Johnny Ryall
Egg Man
The Sounds of Science
What Comes Around
Shadrach

Then, by the time Check Your Head came out, I was playing punk in my own garage bands and at least starting to hang around with stoners although not yet actually smoking pot. And it's just a mega album for that kind of aesthetic. PB gets super corny at times and while CYH isn't serious through and through, it never really feels corny to me.

It's true CYH is rarely corny but I don't think the songs are as good as PB's.

^^^this otm.

"Finger Lickin' Good," "So Whatcha Want," "Professor Booty" -- awesome.

Plus I dunno being corny is part of the Beasties' MO.

If you value Paul's Boutique as their best record, sure. I think a lot of their best stuff is ostentatious and exaggerated without lapsing into corniness. But some of PB crosses that line for me. And maybe what does it for me is that their vocals sound very measured and rehearsed in a lot of places, whereas I prefer the stuff that sounds looser and rougher.

this should be out of 50

Goddamnit, I don't think there's any way I'm gonna be able to squeeze "Don't Let The Air Out Of My Tires" on here.

Having these separate albums and tracks polls every week, it's starting to seem like the best albums are the ones with the fewest standout tracks on 'em. They feel more ... cohesive somehow?

I didn't end up even including any demos or anything because I was so loathe to ditch any album tracks, ha!

paul's boutique is weirdly sequenced. problem isn't that it's corny, but that the second half is way better than the first. "shake your rump" is great, but "johnny ryal" and "egg man" and take things down a notch, and "high plains drifter" is one of the weakest tracks on the album, imo. "the sounds of science" winds up great, but takes a couple minutes to get cooking, and once it does, "3-minute rule" kills the energy again. from "hey ladies" on out it's flawless, but damn, that's like halfway through the album.

"Finger Lickin' Good," "So Whatcha Want," "Professor Booty" -- awesome.

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, May 8, 2012 4:30 AM (3 hours ago)

i disagree that the high points of paul's boutique eclipse check your head. alfred OTM, but also "pass the mic", "gratitude", "time for livin", "the maestro", "in 3's" - plus a bunch of great psychedelic funk jams. CYH isn't as sample-a-minute head-spinning as the best stuff on paul's boutique, but the fusion of rap, rock, funk and punk is at least as impressive, imo (despite the unfashionability of such things these days). after picking up and then just as quickly abandoning distinctive producer-driven sounds on ill communication and paul's boutique, check you head is where they finally find a style that's entirely their own.

I disagree about the extent to which Rubin and the Dust Bros drove those sounds. I know what you're saying – CYH is their first attempt at self-production – but CYH sounds perfunctory and half-assed in places, a band that can't play dropping rudimentary ideas as they lose interest.

Alfred OTM

well, not OTM about the Dust Bros

Dust Bros had like 2/3rds of the Paul's Boutique tracks done before they even hooked up with the Beasties - steve shasta to thread

Speaking about the album 20 years on, Adam Yauch told Clash Magazine: “The Dust Brothers had a bunch of music together, before we arrived to work with them. As a result, a lot of the tracks come from songs they’d planned to release to clubs as instrumentals – ‘Shake Your Rump’, for example. They’d put together some beats, basslines and guitar lines, all these loops together, and they were quite surprised when we said we wanted to rhyme on it, because they thought it was too dense. They offered to strip it down to just beats, but we wanted all of that stuff on there. I think half of the tracks were written when we got there, and the other half we wrote together.”

lti: 7
pb: 4
cyh: 3
ic: 2
hn: 1
tt5b: 1
non-album: 2

― balls, Friday, May 11, 2012 5:28 PM (33 minutes ago)

see, now that's how you do it

even if i only went for six of LTI myself

this is either a really stupid observation or an obvious one someone's already made but doing this quick overview over the past week the beastie boys maybe kinda echo the four seasons

Lol, I was wanting to map them onto phases of the Rolling Stones' career upthread, mostly as a product of the recent Stones poll:

Licensed to Ill = early Stones as a singles band, snotty bratty punk shit, timeless pop hits
Paul's Boutique = Their Satanic Majesties Request, hard left that the world wasn't ready for, "commercial suicide"
Check Your Head = late-60s/early-70s Stones, Beggar's Banquet through Exile, long hair & musicianship, glory regained
Ill Communication = mid-70s, Goat's Head Soup - Black and Blue, falling into a rut but still scoring hits
Hello Nasty = late-70s/early-80s, Some Girls - Tattoo You, new sounds & audiences, mining the past, dance music
To the Five Boroughs and cetera = inevitable decline (with bright spots), eminence

finishing my ballot right now. If it is not in exactly as the clock strokes midnight, it won't be much later than that.

Deadline was extended through Saturday (same times), so no worries mang.

Paul's Boutique = Their Satanic Majesties Request, hard left that the world wasn't ready for, "commercial suicide"

but the analogy breaks down around the fact that while there's plenty of Satanic Majesties defenders (I'm one) no one considers it their best, as a lot of people (including me) do re PB.

yeah, not gonna try to pretend the analogy is watertight, just some points in common

I am however intrigued by the Some Girls-Tattoo You phase of their carer.

*career

like satanic majesties, paul's boutique was a game-changing and aggressively psychedelic album that initially "underperformed" but fans eventually came around to. that's about as far as the analogy goes, though...

is paul's boutique really psychedelic tho?

Compared to LTI, I'd say yeah!

I think so. In a different way to Eight Miles High or Sgt Pepper, obviously. I'll explain why later.

If the beasties have an 'acid album,' it's totally paul's boutique

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aY2MrOue8E

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Gfqu_HqqeaU/TT9xs1ahHbI/AAAAAAAAEKc/eSbPm1ARS2Q/s1600/42_beastiesInner.jpg

We're at 39 now, my ballot will make 40. Who hasn't voted?!!!

eugenia

Kinda obvious, but I always mapped them onto Winston Churchill's career myself. LTI = snotty, punk-nosed brat with some questionable decisions (for 'Girls' read Gallipoli, for the stage show the gold standard). Then the visionary period in the wilderness (PB = crazy guy ranting about Hitler all through the 30s), with the public starting to get back on board with CYH/the ousting of Halifax. IC is the phoney war not-entirely-successful building of momentum (Dunkirk = Grand Royal?), before HN is D-Day onwards. Then with TT5B he gets kicked out of office even though he's still putting out the same work.

hard to argue w that

Is it too late to get my ballot in?

nah, deadline extended through tomorrow

I cannot believe that there was a time when I thought Bodhisattva Vow was an embarrassing throwaway. It's fantastic.

i still haven't voted. def. will though! only two more records to go, and they are ones i've never listened to before. (the mix-up and hot sauce).

Those Rolling Stone analogies are good. The one I'd change (it completely loses the chronology, so it doesn't work in that sense) is Paul's Boutique = Exile on Main Street. I love one and didn't get much out of the other, but a lot of Christgau's Exile review would seem to apply just as well to Paul's Boutique, and there's also the way that neither was immediately and universally acclaimed--it took a few years. (I always thought the problem with Satanic Majestie's Request was that the Rolling Stones were blatantly playing catch-up, not that the world wasn't ready.)

I always thought the problem with Satanic Majestie's Request was that the Rolling Stones were blatantly playing catch-up, not that the world wasn't ready.

yeah, i don't expect the analogy to hold up perfectly. alfred was right that, while time may have been kind to their satanic majesties request, it hasn't been retrospectively recognized as perhaps the band's finest hour. and you're right that the stones stumbled jumping onto an established psychedelic pop bandwagon, while the beasties/dust bros. more-or-less invented their version of psychedelic rap.

re: PB being "psychedelic" - the first vinyl copy I ever saw of PB was at the UCSC radio station and in the comments box on the sticker of the front one of the DJs had written "forget the 60s, this is our OWN psychedelic music!"

3 feet high and rising came out months before, it was a pretty sampledelic year. i doubt the timing works out (someone who knows their beastie history in detail can confirm or deny) but tone loc had hit the previous winter and spring w/ 'wild thing' and 'funky cold medina' and i could imagine the beasties, having ditched their label and the prominent producer responsible for their sound on their big huge hit album they now had to followup, knowing they were viewed understandably as a fluke novelty act, looking at a hip-hop scene that had moved on from rock box to rakim and public enemy and knowing that because of either their limited skillset or their race they couldn't really attempt to make a go of those styles, hearing 'wild thing' w/ its van halen sample and thinking 'the delicious vinyl guys, that's who we need to work with'. what i can remember is that w/ the native tongues and the bomb squad and 'paid in full (seven minutes of madness remix)' that by 89 licensed to ill felt like eons ago and the beasties definitely appeared to be a joke that was on the wrong side of the divide so when the new album flopped no one was surprised but when you heard it and the thing not only held its own w/ what prince paul and hank shocklee were doing but arguably advanced it? it was hard to believe what you were hearing and i knew alot of ppl who just wouldn't, they couldn't deal w/ this thing having the beastie boys name on it. the density of it was somewhat novel though part of the progression of the times also - fear of a black planet feels more sample dense than nation which feels way more sample dense than yo! bum rush.

just sent my ballot.

3 feet high and rising came out months before, it was a pretty sampledelic year.

yeah, good point. for some reason, i remembered 3ft coming out a few months after PB, and didn't think to wiki for confirmation. it's not like the beasties were alone in going wild with it. otoh, they weren't following the obvious pop trend of the moment, either.

great post btw

well De La were new artists when the album dropped and it seemed to build slowly with "Me Myself & I" being the third single

boy, it's been a while since I've had a chance to think about Randee of the Redwoods.

oh, I forgot "sampledelia" was a thing. I guess in that context Paul's Boutique is psychedelic. but, pretty much none of my (admittedly limited) experience with psychedelics is evoked when I listen to Paul's Boutique

About four more hours of voting left. We're over 40 now, so everything that comes in now is gravy!

Things that are psychedelic about Paul’s Boutique:
-“A Year and a Day”
-Late-period Beatles samples throughout “Sound of Science,” and the beat-less section between the song’s two main parts.
-The “dubby” feel of “3-Minute Rule”
-The heavy breathing laid over the Eagles sample in “High Plains Drifter”
-Maybe the “chorus” of “Shake Your Rump” (the squelchy bass sound after the title sample is played)
-The “Shadrach” video
-That underwater photo posted above

That said, I don’t think psychedelia is the dominant thing on “Paul’s Boutique.” As balls said, it came out at the same time as PE and De La were also creating these “chop up the past 30 years of music” sample collages that were far denser than the rap music of 3 years earlier. Psychedelia is in the mix just like funk, soul, and hard-rock records are, but it’s far from the only thing there; it’s not like “Hey Ladies” is reminiscent of listening to Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

^ also sampled bong hits

This is somewhat obvious, but there's a clear similarity in the careers of the Beasties/Beck/Eminem. They begin as clowns/novelties (not an aesthetic judgement--those early records are my favourites by them), release a second album that critics write about very seriously, and after that, it's up and down.

A little than an hour left to vote. If you're on the fence, get off it and send me a ballot.

A little *less

FIN.

Albums unveiled tomorrow.
Top 50 tracks over the course of the week.
Videos after tracks.

mmmmmmmmmmmmm

DROP

Forgot this, on the psychedelic tip: "59 Christie Street" has the Hendrix sample, and "Car Thief" as a whole has a certain elements that I think qualify it.

Again, I think psychedelia is just one element in the mix, but I think it's there.

Here's a playlist I made a few years ago: all the Paul's Boutique samples I could find on Spotify.

http://open.spotify.com/user/nathanwoolls/playlist/2lqepdfazLKllqynRPQBSL

(also if anyone's interested - Nation of Millions samples: http://open.spotify.com/user/nathanwoolls/playlist/3CUxIrGEInLzlVZeaiLLhR and 3 Feet High & Rising samples http://open.spotify.com/user/nathanwoolls/playlist/3lcfUhB2hHcvWGE3RzPfJk

Awesome thanks. This stuff, I lap it up.

Spotify suddenly now worth every penny, ty nate.

Things that are psychedelic about Paul’s Boutique:

and the riff at the end of "looking down the barrel of a gun", and overall, randomness embraced as an aesthetic approach

LTI was a good alb for drinking, but I know when my friends and I started listening to paul's boutique, certain substances made it a much richer listening experience, as good as spacemen 3 or monster magnet or w/e we were jamming at the time

so in that sense, if it wasn't psychedelic it was at least psychedelic-friendly

Ill Comm is the true psychedelic beasties album.

^^^^ this guy knows what's up

great playlists sir!