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

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.

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

Robert Hillburn!

of course!

Maybe if Hey Ladies hadn't had to compete with Love Shack for America's retro kitcsh dollars that fall.

regarding tougher than leather, it was weird how in '88 that run DMC style of rapping suddenly sounded so old and played out. eazy-e and NWA were huge at this point, I remember having a compilation w/ them and the world class wreckin' cru on it and the latter's "I did THIS then I did THAT" flow sounded so corny.

Shadrach got some nominal daytime rotation on MTV iirc. I didn't hear Shake Your Rump until I bought the album years later, tho - that just seems kinda frankly insane!

also I saw tougher than leather, in the theater, while tripping

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

― how's life, Wednesday, May 9, 2012 1:20 PM (13 minutes ago)

that explains it, I was in college, mornings did not agree with me

if I'm remembering this right, wasn't capitol expecting a huge LTI-style blockbuster, got handed this bizarre mishmash, and when it didn't take off immediately they just threw up their hands? frankly they needed some marketing ninjas to sell PB to middle america.

in hindsight PB prolly would've moved more units initially if "looking down the barrel of a gun" was the lead single.

Yeah, the Beasties getting out of the CBS/Def Jam contract was a hassle iirc and Capitol treated them to a huge contract as their reward...so then they were handed Paul's Boutique and had no clue what to do with it.

Yeah, Capitol record held a big shindig on the roof of their building with (no joke) a dixieland jazz band, skywriting, the Cap records president gushing about them ....they even flew the capitol records-style Beastie logo flag over the building. Captiol clearly thought this was going to be massive.

There's even video: http://vimeo.com/26077924

That video is nuts! It all came back to me as soon as I saw the flag being raised and the three of them interviewed on the roof (saw a bunch of that footage on MTV).

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

― the late great, Wednesday, May 9, 2012 9:21 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

relistening to Ill Communication and DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN!

― Thoughts? You must have loads. (a hoy hoy), Wednesday, May 9, 2012 10:08 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

on relistening i've warmed slightly to ill communication, but it's still clearly a weak sister to check your head. great up through "sabrosa", don't get me wrong, but it loses serious steam after that. i mean, i'm considering voting for five IC tracks, but they all occur within the album's first seven. it's got two short punk jams, neither a tenth as good as "time for livin'", and a bunch of smoked-out instrumentals, none as memorable or inviting as "something's got to give" and "in 3's". though it's only six minutes longer than check your head, the back half of the album feels like a trudge in comparison.

lol contenderizer that DAAAAetc. happened about a 1/3rd of the way through and i got kinda bored of the end.

Those instrumentals are pretty great, imo! "Eugene's Lament" , "Futterman's Rule", and "Rickey's Theme"? I cut them from my ballot, but if it had been a bigger ballot, I wouldn't have. Also, you got "Do It" and "The Scoop", which are fresh as fuck.

actually, maybe the instrumentals work better in the context of "In Sound From Way Out".

In 3's is great, I don't care what anyone says.

"Do It" was my highest ranked track from Ill Communication

also, i don't think that paul's boutique failed commercially because no one was interested in the beastie boys anymore, or because no one heard it. it was a massive curveball, delivering basically none of the party tantrum rap-metal that had made licensed to ill such a huge hit. "fight for your right to party" fans were bound to be disappointed, and paul's boutique didn't have the kind of immediately accessible, guaranteed crossover hits that could instantly attract a comparably huge new audience. kid buys a copy, wants smash stuff up parent-hating insanity music, is bummed, tells his friends not to bother = bad sales out of the gate. "hey ladies" was a minor hit at best, and that's the only track that comes close to duplicating the LTI vibe.

just watched the LTI video. would have been a huge hit in the early 90s, but nobody was rocking that self-mocking loser/slacker 70s throwback shit in '88, at least not on MTV. as mentioned upthread, they were just a little to far ahead of the curve.

^ the "hey ladies" video, i mean

In 3's is great, I don't care what anyone says.

it is, it is! that's what i was saying. guaranteed a spot on my ballot.

i'm kind of amazed by the huge steps taken by the BBs over their first five albums. each represents a distinct phase that other acts might have spent several albums exploring (or just going through).

License to Ill - fresh style, massive hits
Paul's Boutique - radical divergence, baroque experimentation, audience lost
Check Your Head - assertion of artistic identity, muso seriousness, audience rebuilt
License to Ill - artistic stagnation, hits from the ruts
Hello Nasty - self referentiality, "old school" nostalgia, dance music

of course, part of the reason for this is probably that they took so damn long between albums. the BBs put out just five albums in their first 12 years on major labels. a couple decades earlier but over a similar period, the rolling stones released 14 (give or take, depending on how you count them).

you want to call everything Licensed to Ill today, don't you?

License to Ill represents artistic stagnation? Really? Best album ever released by a "stagnant" group then.

Sorry Ill Communication LOL mind control.

duh, and i keep calling it license to ill. fuck a brain cell.

but yeah, ill communication is the "stagnant" one, imo

Ill Communication only really adds the drone-y and Tibetan-drummy bits sonically. I guess it adds Yauch's interest in Buddhism too. Both of these are added in the back-half of the album. It does feel... I think it's harsh to say stagnation - let's say a consolidation - from Check Your Head. What it does have is a handful of stone cold 100% genius pop smash hits - Sabotage, Sure Shot, Get It Together, Root Down - which really lift the record. Nothing else on it is 'bad', but it doesn't feel as new and fresh and unexpected as CYH.

feels just like a continuum of awesomeness to me.

Ill Communication always seemed like a more stoned version of CYH, more fuggy. Still a great album though, yeah.

Listening through to Hello Nasty now, seems a lot better than it sounded last time I listened to it (probably about eight years ago). 'Intergalactic' can do one though, the sole BBs song I'm sick of hearing.

man I love the second half of Ill Communication, a thing in itself, stoned I guess but def reaching for something else, cosmic, the kind of thing you can get lost in. It's their best album imo.

for the record re PB's reviews; in the 33 and a 3rd book about it there's a quote from TIME magazine(!) that says 'this album is as important to 1989 as Blonde On Blonde was to 1966'. it was raved about in the UK; even the likes of Q magazine went majorly mental about it and they ignored almost all rap.

this is entirely my fault for trading too many phish tapes in the 1990s, but half the time I listen to sabotage and it gets to the wwwWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAUUuuuuuuuuuuugggggggghhhh part, i keep expecting to hear Trey from Phish singing it. but it says something about the song and about phish that it got a bigger response out of the crowd than anything else I ever saw them play.

one aspect of Ill Communication that I definitely get tired of is all the distorted vocals.

nothing you can say about Phish can ruin Sabotage for me, no sir

one aspect of Ill Communication that I definitely get tired of is all the distorted vocals.

yup, it's a good trick, served CYH well, but they really run it into the ground on illco

wonder how many more votes this gets than the all-time hip-hop poll. i'm gonna say 25-30.

it doesn't ruin it for me, exactly. god, i was rolling when i saw them do that too. it was a really faithful cover. just a different vocal timbre.

otm a hoy hoy, that poll's popularity was ridic disappointing

like Ill Communication, the second half of Hello Nasty is open-ended & spacey, a monolithic groove with lots of rooms to get lost inside; really loving HN on this relisten

always hear a lot of complaints that HN drops off in the second half but I dig it, it's structured like a party where the beginning's all wild and exuberant and by the end ppl are sleeping on the lawn or staring contemplatively at the fishbowl or giving incomprehensible shout-outs and listening to lee perry albums