Beastie Boys

B-Boys in the Cut b/w Pop Your Balloon

scum stats: some on white vinyl, some on black vinyl...

Been absorbing lots of books about bands lately. Was downright STOKED to have the Beastie Boys Book show up this week, especially because band membersAd Roc and Mike D put the book together.

If their insight and perspective isn't enough, the tome is accentuated by essays of considerable cultural heft. Luc Sante's "Beastie Revolution" does an incredible job at painting the picture of what NYC was like as the band was germinating and slowly taking over. The spots, the players, the atmosphere, lines like this:

"...you can afford to fail. You can change your style and your name over and over again. You can branch out into painting or Super 8 movies and see whether any of it clicks, and if it doesn't you can try something else. You can maintain a reasonably decent life at the bottom, secure in the knowledge that if you jump out the window down there you won't get hurt."

Regarding the impending gentrification:

"...your club will become a bank, your rehearsal space a parking garage, your greasy spoon an eyeglass boutique, your dive a sports bar. Even if you manage to stay, you will feel like a ghost."

Both of these sentiments hit me hard in the gut. While a struggle at the time, I miss the feeling of "fuck it, let's start a band/zine/whatever" as much as I miss the life of Detroit I left behind almost ten years ago. The struggle now is to dedicate the time to new creative artistic endeavors. Always a challenge, just different parts are challenging me now in my mid-thirties.

This single came for free in some copies of "The Hot Sauce Committee Part Two" and while I thought at the time folks ragged on that album, recent listens show it as holding up SOLID. A-side is on the album, classic, unassailable, quintessential Beasties groove propels through slight scratching at austere accoutrements. The "Pop Your Balloon" flip is an exclusive track complete with what sounds like some tossed-off inside jokes and a slick sample of the English Beat's "March of the Swivelheads" all worth the price of a b-side.

Still digging my way through the book, the most apt critique I've read was Pitchfork's line "Like most of their records, Beastie Boys Book is longer than it probably should be (nearly 600 pages)." But damn...I don't really see any dross here. I just keep thinking that when "Sabotage" came out, I don't think there was anyone more universally cool than these guys. Their embodiment of the confluence of punk, rap, hardcore, obscure pop culture references, crate digging culture, shit VINYL in general deserves a solid respect from folks like me (and probably you too). Consider this my salute.