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

COS I'VE BEEN DROPPING THE NEW SCIENCE AND IVE BEEN KICKING THE NEW KUH-NOWLEDGE

otm, "kicking the new kuh-nowledge" is one of those things I look forward to hearing every time that track comes on. "Sound of Science" is fighting for a top-3 placement on my ballot.

yeah after 4 years there was a lot of pent up demand for new beasties material from several successive waves of new fans in '98.

This really rings true for me - some of my friends caught onto Ill Communication in about 1995, then over time people started checking out the other albums (I wound up with Paul's Boutique and Check Your Head on a C90 that I played to death in summer 1997). Hello Nasty was definitely an event, we all loved it - I haven't heard it in years though, I'm not sure how well it holds up.

Wiki reckons it samples LOADS of Beatles:

"Back in the U.S.S.R." by The Beatles
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by The Beatles
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" by The Beatles
"When I'm Sixty-Four" by The Beatles
"The End" by The Beatles
"Walk from Regio's" by Isaac Hayes
"Don't Sniff Coke" by Pato Banton
"Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved" by James Brown
"My Philosophy" by Boogie Down Productions

Never noticed USSR or 64 in there!

64 is the backbone of the first half of the song.

I remember excitedly buying paul's boutique on its release date and, like a whole lot of other people, just not getting it. the fanzine I was writing for at the time was very pro-beasties, but we ended up giving it to lisa suckdog to pan since nobody else wanted to touch it. there were a lot of positive reviews in the mainstream press, but iirc they mostly exhibited a begrudging respect for its sprawl rather than actual passionate raving.

then a weird thing happened... in 1990 I got an inexplicable hankering to hear it again. there wasn't any impetus, like a song being in a commercial or a TV show appearance, just wanted to check it out again, so I went looking for it in record stores and couldn't find a copy *anywhere*. I phoned up one store and the guy on the line said, "you are the third person who's called looking for that album this week. no, we don't have it." some bizarre hive mind moment. when I finally did locate a copy it didn't leave my car stereo for months.

paul's boutique was one of those times when somebody gets so far out in front it takes a while to catch on, and nobody ever catches up.

Throughout most of the 90s, the Beasties were a good year ahead of everyone else in almost every respect. I don't think they were conscious about steering trends, but they were doing it.

the fanzine I was writing for at the time was very pro-beasties, but we ended up giving it to lisa suckdog to pan since nobody else wanted to touch it.

can i just say how much i love this sentence

I'll have to listen again with 64 in mind; it'll probably be embarrassingly obvious now, it's just never really registered. The drums from The End hit me the first time I heard it, I think.

cosign on the sentence. Would hang with Lisa Suckdog.

what's suckdog?

Read Edward's post!

btw carrying on from this convo, Paul's is the 2nd most popular of the band's original LPs to return to the Billboard 200 this week:

In the wake of Beastie Boys member Adam "MCA" Yauch's
 death on Friday, the group's landmark 1986 debut, Licensed to Ill, broke back onto the charts at #18 on sales of 19,000, as business picked up by more than 800 percent over the previous week.

It was one of several Beastie Boys albums
 that crashed back onto the charts, which also included Solid Gold Hits (#51, 8,000), Paul's Boutique (#56, 8,000), Hot Sauce Committee Part Two (#107, 4,000), Ill Communication (#109, 4,000), Check Your Head (#124, 4,000) and Anthology: Sounds of Science (#141, 3,000).

I was at Target yesterday and they had cds of Licensed to Ill for $5 (didn't see any of the other albums at all). I got one just because it's easier than digging in a box to find my old copy.

pillbox you may know her by her govt name

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Crystal_Carver

very diff albums pecking order on the current most listened to albums on US Spotify btw: Ill Communication (#62), Licensed (#65), Hello Nasty (#66), Paul's Boutique (#70), Hot Sauce (#99)

i just kind of vaguely know Lisa Suckdog as an '80s underground rock person, since she wrote the liners for the reissue of Sonic Youth's Evol

I somehow ended up with a cassette copy of Licensed to Ill when I was about 15 - I don't remember buying it so I'm not sure how I ended up with it. But especially once I started driving, it was "the little cassette that could" for like, 10 years. Bored with new stuff, radio sucks? Throw on LTI. Crappy day, gonna drive to get some pizza? LTI.
Even when PB and CYH became the cool Beasties albums, there was something about LTI. And like someone mentioned upthread, it always settled those knock down, drag out, who-rules-the-stereo-arguments with your friends.

lisa never really rocked, except maybe back and forth

it's going to be hard not to do a 100% paul's boutique / ill communication ballot

dunno that there's such a thing as a bad ballot itt

I fucked up the order of my ballot because I was too impatient to get it out there, but I'm happy with my song selection.

i just remembered that LTI was the first non-Christian record I owned as a kid (mom was on the whole PMRC/satanic-panic tip), on cassette & given to me for my tenth birthday by my not-totally-ex-hippie uncle David. My folks let me keep it for some reason &, there then being no rationale for a continued household ban on the devil's music, I was free to pursue a life of music fandom and hedonic apostasy.

my ballot was pretty silly, I'm sure I would rank them differently on any given day. Resisted the urge to just submit the Paul's Boutique tracklisting.

when the re-appraisal of Paul's Boutique kicked in is hard to measure. I remember it being praised as similar to (and better than) "3 Feet High and Rising" when it came out while I was in high school, but I couldn't find a copy. I remember seeing the Hey Ladies video and being jealous of a classmate who had a cassette copy, but wasn't able to locate a copy of my own until 2 years later, at which point I was blown away. And then Check Your Head came out shortly afterwards.

I'm not sure reappraisal is the right word when the album got awesome reviews in '89. We discovered it many years later.

Pazz and Jop '89:

11. Tom Petty: Full Moon Fever (MCA) 381 (35)
12. Beastie Boys: Paul's Boutique (Capitol) 347 (32)
13. Fine Young Cannibals: The Raw and The Cooked (I.R.S.)

interesting sandwich!

would gladly consume such a sandwich tbh

Really wish I had bought Paul's Boutique instead of Raw and the Cooked : (

Owning either (or both) makes life better, so don't beat yourself up.

I'm not sure reappraisal is the right word

sure - it's an album that had trouble finding it's audience, I guess. I'm not sure why. It's not like my tastes changed radically between '89 and '91, I just literally could not get my hands on the album.

I heard about it for a few years before I actually heard it. I remember reading excited reviews about it in various places, but unlike LTI -- which was much in evidence everywhere throughout my college years -- I don't remember knowing anyone who had a copy of Paul's Boutique. It went on my "I should check that out" list, and eventually I did.

just wanna vote for the second half of Ill Communication except that it's such a groove in itself that it's hard to separate things. probably perverse to vote "Transitions" #1 but I'm thinking about it

yeah i mean...a much higher percentage of Appetite For Destruction fans bought GNR Lies than Licensed To Ill fans bought Paul's Boutique. it was really kind of a huge initial dropoff in sales.

yeah and I don't get why that was, exactly? was there some kind of backlash to LTI that I'm forgetting? I guess Tougher Than Leather had a similar drop-off

Mr Veg remembers a lot people complaining that PB was 'too noisy', ie bc of so much sampling. And I think a lot of people took them literally with the tuff leather jackets partyboy stuff and got mad when they didn't do LTI Part II

The differences between Tougher Than Leather and Raising Hell are WAY less substantial than the differences between Paul's Boutique and Licensed to Ill. I think a ton of people who thought No Sleep Til Brooklyn and Fight for Your Right were like, "what? This is actual rap. I want some rock with rapping on it."

Lies had an enormous hit ballad.

but see that would require that people actually heard PB and didn't like it. which to my mind was not the case, people just didn't buy it or hear it (or even know about it)

xp

actually not as hard as i thought

my breakdown

LTI - two songs, quite low
PB - nine songs, def dominating the top 10
CYH - only four songs, even though i really like it as an album it's hard to pick individual songs off of it, everything seems to work better in context
IC - only two songs?!? i thought i liked this album!
HN - three songs, but two of them are quite high

didn't pick any instrumental tracks because it didn't seem to make sense but if i picked one it would probably be "butterfly"

The differences between Tougher Than Leather and Raising Hell are WAY less substantial than the differences between Paul's Boutique and Licensed to Ill.

right, I was just bringing it up because they were both on Def Jam and both previous records sounded similar - a sound which was (maybe? I don't remember) considered passe by '88.

xp

relistening to Ill Communication and DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN!

not that PB sounded like LTI obviously, just that maybe people assumed it did and so didn't bother...?

xp

RUN DMC was never on Def Jam, though...right? Profile all the way!

i somehow forgot how FUNKY this album is. Crazy, especially considering the hardcore thrown in doesn't throw it off at all.

RUN DMC was never on Def Jam, though...right? Profile all the way!

― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, 9 May 2012 18:09 (15 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

understandable mistake to make, being brothers w/ Russell Simmons.

paul's boutique commercial failure was due to 1) no hit single and 2) it alienated almost all the existing fans who bought it unheard

with no word of mouth and nothing on radio/TV what was going to fuel sales?

when heard in the context of the album "hey ladies" makes sense, but as a single it sounded like a big mess. the chorus is non-existent, and those retro funk moves sounded kinda kitschy after years of 80s future shock and their own brief legacy of big drums and riffage. as a habitual MTV watcher at the time I can say honestly say I saw the "shake your rump" video once, and "hey ladies" 0 times.

I saw Hey Ladies every morning before school for a while.

haha I always forget that about Run DMC. I habitually associate Def Jam with that early Rick Rubin style, what can I say

def saw the Hey Ladies video a couple times when it came out

I remember the premiere of Hey Ladies being a huge deal on MTV, but I don't think I saw any of the other Paul's Boutique videos until well into the 90s.