adam yauch Archives - Vinyl From The Vault

Beastie Boys “Beastie Boys Music”

sfilzen — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 17:29:08 +0000

Beastie Boys “Beastie Boys Music” 2020. Today, November 20th, is Mike D’s 55th birthday (b. Michael Diamond, 1965) so I’m spinning my newly acquired double LP retrospective, a companion to the Beastie Boys Story documentary (2020) and the Beastie Boys Book (2018). It’s only been out a few weeks so the chart positions may not be final/accurate: #64 Top 200 album chart, #34 R&B/Hip Hop chart, #12 Rock Albums chart. A couple of months ago, after watching the excellent documentary, I made my own Beastie mixtape/playlist (we don’t have much of their music in our library and almost none on vinyl as they mostly recorded during the digital-only age) and pretty much every song on my mix is on this comp (plus others like their first hit “Fight For Your Right” which I still have a hard time listening to: it reminds me of high school and high school assholes). My favorites (in chronological and Beastie Boys Music album order): “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” (Licensed to Ill, 1986); “Shake Your Rump” and “Shadrach” (from Paul’s Boutique, 1989); “So Watch’Cha Want” and “Jimmy James” (from Check Your Head, 1992); all of the featured tracks from Ill Communication (1994): “Sure Shot,” “Root Down,” “Sabotage” and “Get It Together” (I became a Beastie convert in ‘94 when Ill Communication came out; prior to that I thought I didn’t like them…see “Fight For Your Right” reasons); “Body Movin’” and “Intergalactic” (from Hello Nasty, 1998); “Ch-Check It Out” (from To the 5 Boroughs, 2004); and “Make Some Noise” (from Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, 2011). It’s an excellent way to have the best of the Beasties on vinyl.

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Beastie Boys “An Exciting Evening at Home with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego”

sfilzen — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 16:34:11 +0000

Beastie Boys “An Exciting Evening at Home with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego” 1989. I’m spinning this 6-song EP on what would have been MCA/Adam Yauch’s 56th birthday (b. Aug. 5th, 1964, d. 2012). Two of the tracks appear on the Beastie Boys’ 1989 LP Paul’s Boutique (#14 US) including the fabulous “Shadrach” (the first single released from the album, its animated video directed by Yauch), its groove (provided by a sampling of Sly Stone among others) carries through the rest of Side A: the non-LP tracks “Caught In the Middle of a 3-Way Mix” and “And What You Give is What You Get.” Side B has “Car Thief,” also from Paul’s Boutique and also super-funky with samples from Funk Factory, Funkadelic and Trouble Funk (that’s a shitload of funk) as well as “Some Dumb Cop Gave Me Two Tickets Already” (heavy on the Biz Markie lyrical samples or maybe he recorded it directly for them, I’m not sure, they did several collaborations over the years) and “Your Sister’s Def.”

I really didn’t like Beastie Boys when their first album Licensed to Ill came out in ‘86: the bonehead jocks at my high school, of course, LOVED it. We watched the Beastie Boys Story (2020) a couple of weeks ago and it turns out the band didn’t really like the record either (well, they probably did at the time but didn’t appreciate the bonehead jock thing either). I didn’t pay any attention to the Beastie Boys until ‘94′s Ill Communication which I loved so I missed out on some really great material which I’m only recently discovering/rediscovering.

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