Beastie Boys: Classic or Dud?

especially the Just Blaze version of Ch-Check It Out, which got its own bespoke video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm22GRJhGak (which in turn likely inspired the excellent Letterman performance)

Man this is a really great copy of the '98 MTV 2 hour special; Beastieography, with all the bumpers and Sifl And Olly adverts and MTV promos and such.. it's freakin amazing https://vimeo.com/68587522

There's been a version on YouTube for years that's way shorter and looks terrible.

Hello Nasty is the last time it seemed like they were really trying but tbh the rapping bores me to tears and the genre-hopping feels thin, I never go back to it

― Οὖτις, Saturday, October 6, 2018 3:27 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^ This.

nooooo

hello nasty is grate

it’s definitely their fifth best album but still

“lovey and thurston howell-ing, the grasshopper unit is prowl-ing”

how can you be down on the rapping with gems like that

I watched the MTV thing last night. It really captures the whiplash of the changes through their first three albums. They were genuinely funny the way the early Beatles were, and leveraged their unexpected superstardom just as effectively. The brattiness holds up so unexpectedly well, probably because the tunes do too.

i'm with late great, absolutely love hello nasty

intergalactic was a staple of high school dances, what a sick song to bust out to

Hello Nasty yeah it’s probably my fifth favorite. It is ridiculously good though, I think the music and beats and lyrics are great, and the rapping style they utilized here might seem a bit formulaic now but it’s the beastie boys so it’s a blast throughout.

I'm curious to know if they mean anything to the 18-30 set. Based on my observation, no.

A young and impetuous Capt James T Kirk begs 2 differ

Well I'm the king of Boggle, there is none higher
I get eleven points off the word 'quagmire'

You can get Beasties nostalgia tees at Target and Walmart, so I imagine they still have some cachet.

Just went on a mini Momo Crawl in honor of Adam Yauch.

https://open.spotify.com/track/1kigbQJ3vA8wmdq8WHB6iz

Our evening began in Peter Sechelle’s comfortable study in his New York townhouse. Where the candlelight was just right, the hi fi was in the background, and the wine was delicious.

https://open.spotify.com/track/2wtNNJTXnYi1LLNP7dbbae

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

cool

Haha I have a Spotify playlist of 10,000 songs that I often play on shuffle and Blue Nun came up just this morning when I was driving home from the bank.

hankies at the ready, folks, this is gonna be emotional

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=27&v=0aCBDL1sUY8&feature=emb_title

fuckin' embeds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aCBDL1sUY8

great revive

ffs

Glad it's on Apple+ to guarantee maximum exposure.

can't wait to torrent it on april 24 so i can watch it on my birthday the next day

so it's like a screening with live commentary... or something?

it's kind of unclear!

I'm looking forward to watching it whatever the format. The book and a couple podcast interviews reminded me of all the things I enjoyed about the Beastie Boys when I was younger and made me realize why I drifted away and decided something was inherently uncool about them at some point -- they were inherently uncynical, perpetually learning and doing what they enjoyed.

I got off the bus when their rhyming got lazier

that's when things started to get hazier

Hey Shakey!

it was around the time when they defaulted to that rhyme-style of everybody yelling the last syllable of every line in unison

xps

they might have started defaulting to that but they kind of did that all along?

it's something they copped from Run DMC and there's nothing wrong with it - but there's a lot more variety to the rhyming styles on the first three records. Once you get to Hello Nasty though, that's the only style they use.

fair enough

I was immediately thinking of Slow and Low when you mentioned that style, and it's.. a Run DMC song recorded by the Beastie Boys

and I know I know by that point they were trying to do a million things - reggae, hardcore, jazz-funk, indie rock, whatever - and rapping just became one of many things they did, but their attention to the craft of it suffered, and as that was always one of the things that really drew me to them, it was disappointing and my attention wandered

don't get me wrong I'm not knockin' em, they went where their interests guided them and that's cool, I will always love them

The fact that they were trying to do a million things on Hello Nasty at least kept it interesting. When they decided to go to strictly hip hop with To the 5 Boroughs is probably where their lazy rhyme style ended up hurting them more.

^^ agree 100%

they definitely just started jamming on ideas based on things they liked by the mid-90s

as a teen during the mid/late 90s it was cool to listen to them as a sort of amalgamation of things you should get into, lots of musical ideas that, like the rhymes, were a grab bag of cultural references

agree on Nasty/Boroughs. Loved Hot Sauce Committee, it was a nice surprise to get another Hello Nasty type trip

I finally got around in the past year to watching the long, goofy celebrity cameo-filled video from that last album and it's in this weird technological gap where it exists online but only in a low resolution grainy version.

like there's this entire media shift that they didn't bridge as the project ended and MCA died :(

Hello Nasty was the last album I bought. Liked it initially and then less and less each listen. The production style/textures/equipment had no life to it.

That's one of the crazy things about BB to me, that they never really updated their rap style from their old school roots, yet managed to make it feel adequately fresh (for at least 12+ years) by re-contextualizing it with their music/production, which was always curious and evolving.

they definitely never before or after seemed to really try to write rhymes on the same level they did on Paul's Boutique

the peak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtEVKO9_ZDY

I only just noticed that they recycle (but reverse) the "We're from Manhattan, you're from Secaucus" put down from "Rock Hard" in "The New Style."

I did once enjoy Ad-Rock doing his shtick whilst ordering lunch on line in front of me, but yeah.

I'm sure I've posted about it before, but my favorite BB story was when I went to see a history of hip-hop exhibit at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. My friend and I were freaking out that one of the only other people in there that day/time was Yauch. It must have been around sukkot, because outside the museum were all these Lubavitch Jews in wait, ready to hand out a lulav and etrog (palm frond and citrus fruit) and corner you about your beliefs. My friend and I think, aw man, we're as Jewish as they look, there's so way we can get through the gauntlet. So we prepare ourselves, but they zoom right past us and straight to Yauch. So thanks for taking the heat, Yauch.

My second favorite was seeing them right when "Check Your Head" came out, in '92, at close to the nadir of their coolness (but right before they became cooler than everybody else) at the Troc in Philly, with fIREHOSE and Basehead opening. That show ruuuuuuuuuuuled. They came out and did PE's "Sophisticated Bitch" with fIREHOSE.

oh fuck yeah, fIREHOSE used to totally rip it up on that tune, I saw them do it in maybe 1989