It's funny man.
Woody Allen looks out the window of his New York apartment, and he hears Gershwin. He maybe hears Django Reinhardt doing a funky little jingle on his guitar.
Joey Ramone, he was probably just across the street, maybe looking at the same building, maybe glancing across that exact same slab of the sky-line, and he's hearing three chords distorted to all hell and a man singing about The Blitzkrieg Bopper or whatever and mispronouncing "Massacre".
And then down the road a little, maybe outside a basketball court, there's these three fellas standing admiring the Buddhist pamphlets they picked up outside a bookstore, and maybe there's a trashcan sitting next to one of them, and he's tapping out a funky beat on the side, and one of the other fellas is humming a cool three-note bass-line while he reads about how The Dali Lama was real fond of The Smiths second album.
The same city, man, the self same one. And all these folks, all eating in the same restaurants, ignoring the same taxi-drivers, and strolling through the same parks, they all hear different things.
I think they should swap iPod's for a month. The Duke thinks we might get some exciting results if that were the case.
Except in the case of Joey. The Duke loves you, man, but that'd just be a waste of 40 gigabytes is what.
Anyway, those three fellas I mentioned, the ones with the trashcans and the Vedic literature, they had a little success over the years with a few catchy dance-style numbers they concocted. You may have heard of them. The Beastie Boys, they like to call themselves.
You maybe remember how they used to be in a hardcore punk band that sounded a bit like The Dead Kennedys, and then they made a song about Fight For Your Right To Party, about a fella who looked like Booger from Revenge Of The Nerds.
They reached something of a creative peak round about the early nineties, when they tossed out an album by the name of Ill Communication, what featured loads of cross-genre bouncing and gyrating and also had the single Sabotage, about three folks pretend to be in a 70's TV police show. The video, directed by Spike Jonze who went on to make films about John Malcovich has a portal in his head, was rotated heavily on MTV.
And they got a conscience, too.
They hollered at The Prodigy about how those fire-starting malcontents shouldn't be singing about Smack My Bitch Up, since they were Buddhists now, those Beastie Boys, and they didn't want no such misogynist nonsense about a man pukes and throws up and gropes strippers and then turns out to be a woman.
Article comments
1 - Tom Johnson
There's very little concession to the extravagances of modern hip-hop. There's no strings, no choirs of sassy backing singers, no elaborate skits that make up a third of most "contemporary" hip-hop releases.
Thank freakin' God. I wondered what BB would pick up from today's hip-hop, and I'm real glad to hear it's nothing. I can't say I'm a huge fan, but Check Your Head is one of my All-time Favorite Albums, which is one of those ironical things since I profess to dislike rap - I'm a conflicted ball of contradictions, I know. But I might just be checking this out come next week . . . it sounds like fun, even if I fervently disagree with their politics.
2 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Tom, I'm guessing you'll be pleasantly suprised by this here record. I have never been much of a fan, and pretty much thought most of their last record sucked. Then it sells gazillions, so what the hell does The Duke know? But i've been listening to this one a lot. I was rather pleasantly suprised, is what.
3 - Eric Olsen
I've always been a big, if not always huge, fan, and I'm very pleased to hear this one is right. Another great one, Duker.
4 - Jim Carruthers
I've given this a couple of listens, and it is a great album. I especially like the use of the riff from "Sonic Reducer", and Duke (and everybody else) should listen to this while watching "In America".
But then, I like J-Roc from Trailer Park Boys, know what I'm sayin'?
But I think the Beastie Boys need to take a page from Menudo, I saw them on teevee doing the perp walk at some MTV awards thing, and they looked like somebody's dads.
Now, where's my wiffle ball bat?