Wrote about Diplo, model weirdo for a post-industry age, in this Sunday’s NYT.
#illuminati
“Obviously, I am a teenage girl here. I am gonna read into every single thing that you say. And I am going to take it to heart, because that is who I am. I am full of hormones and I can’t help it. But like, Earl Sweatshirt has been like my rap idol ever since I first heard him years ago. When I heard that, why couldn’t it have been Tyler? Why couldn’t it have been anybody but Earl? I mean, come on. That kind of stung.” —
Interview: Kitty Pryde Talks “Okay Cupid,” Internet Hate, and Her Crush On Danny Brown | Complex
I don’t know, I’m finding this tremendously fun.
“Moving to New York was also a radical change in our landscape; it’s very different to make something in the town where Beyoncé and Joan Rivers live than to make something in the town where Sleater-Kinney live.” — Progress Report: The Blow
“inaccuracy— new york is better now: The early nineties were the best time ever in New York since the the early 1900’s. THe beasties went to LA and played their instruments———- but JIm FOetus stayed. Stu SPasm came. Charles Gayle appeared again. THe THinking Fellers got signed by a New YOrk Label. Stereolab got signed by a new york label by Terry TOlkien. THe pYramid, THe space at Chase—great gigs. WIlliamsburg—Muggs, Earwax, THai Cafe in greenpoint.” — Stephen Malkmus, The Twentieth Anniversary of Pavement’s “Slanted & Enchanted”
“I’m at the hotel, as are members of the Beastie entourage, which consists of Sean, their hepcat British manager, Hurricane, a brawny deejay who carries lots of gold junk around his neck, Cey, who has known the Beasties since childhood and now serves as roadie and astrologer and all-around nice guy, and Eloise, an overweight go-go dancer who’s supposed to look “sexy” when she strips down to her black lace, I guess, but mostly just comes off as gruesome. The Beasties aren’t there, and the limo driver says it’s time to leave for the Rivers Show. All of a sudden a luxury machine burns rubber around the corner, just missing the limo, and skids to a halt in front of the hotel gate. MCA jumps out and runs inside, and Adrock takes the wheel even though he’s never driven a stick-shift before. MCA’s done doing what he was doing, and the treacherous three are ready to go now, but they’re not riding in the limo; they’ve just rented a Town Car after getting bored with a Ferrari and a Rolls, and they don’t want their dollars to go to waste. “We ride three in the front, you in the back,” Mike D tells me. “That’s the rule.”
The limousine goes first, and we follow. The auto I’m in is manned by derelicts: MCA’s wearing a wrinkled long-sleeve white button-down, a black leather jacket, and a five o’clock (or five day, maybe) beard-shadow; Adrock has an “Appalachian Basketball Camp” shirt, a red Texaco baseball cap and a light-blue windbreaker; Mike D, skinnier, and nerdier-looking than his cohorts, has a gold Volkswagen pendant, black horned-rim glasses, and an earring. Their jeans have holes, their Nikes lack laces (some new fad, I think), and I’m no queer but I know that these are not the prettiest men I’ve ever seen. Anyway, we’re chasing the limo, and Metallica’s “Battery” is blasting from our tapedeck, and the dudes in front of me are banging their heads towards the windshield as if they constituted one orgasm. They release their seatbacks so they can ride horizontally, they “accidentally” bump bumpers with the limo a few times, they shout catcalls at the usual feminine suspects. (“Before we were successful we used to stand at the streetcorner and yell at girls,” Mike D later informs Joan Rivers. “Now we can sit in a Ferrari and do it, and it’s a lot more effective.”) And they doo-wop along with the cassette, which plays the Coasters, Elvis, Roxanne Shante, Marvin Gaye, ? And The Mysterians, Stevie Wonder, and—as a tribute to their adolescent homeboys, I gather—Deep Purple.”
—
More from that 1987 Chuck Eddy article. If you had told me last week that the way Yauch would be memorialized would’ve been for Free Tibet and his “Sure Shot” verse I would’ve been surprised. People have rightly seized on what an improbable and dramatic change of personality Yauch—and Beastie Boys as a unit—underwent in the years after “Cooky Puss” and Licensed to Ill. Since so many kids my age identified with the Beastie Boys in a way that trumped their personal identification with any other artist, I guess this makes sense: the group’s bumpy but decisive glide from teenage obnoxiousness to classy, politically correct adulthood mirrored our own.
People tend to remember themselves when they remember the dead—especially when they remember a person like MCA. All the Whitney and MJ obituaries written by people my age felt more like autobiography than criticism, which I liked. Sasha’s MCA remembrance is in fact autobiography, and incredibly powerful for it. So was Mark Richardson’s, and so, I suspect, were many of the other things I read about Yauch over the weekend. Inseparable from the artists we loved is a vision of our best selves; they were what we aspired to be.
So it with some measure of pride, or shame, that I spent the weekend reflecting on the MCA that I loved most: the one that he tried to leave behind, that he buried, that he repudiated in the mothers-sisters-wives-and-friends “Sure Shot” verse so approvingly cited by everyone writing about him. The Beastie Boys were geniuses at changing their minds, which was admirable. But that ability to evolve and change and grow up was born of the era when they were anything but responsible humans. They prized honesty and jokes and anarchy over the desires or sensibilities of their audience; they were themselves in the way that Tyler, the Creator is himself or Lena Dunham is herself. They put the dumb festering things at the front of their minds into their work without calculation or censorship. Licensed to Ill is the most pure-id record, maybe ever, give or take some of the Led Zeppelin and James Brown records it samples. Every sound they loved, they sampled and rapped over it; every dumb detail of their dumb teenage lives, from White Castle to the under-aged and under-respected girls whose then-welcome attentions later made Yauch wince, they talked about it.
In this, as in many other things, MCA was the guy whose lead the other two followed. And it was that artist I loved the most. As Tom wrote the other day: “His voice was the hardest and the hoarsest, he always had a leather jacket and a three-day beard, and when the Beasties opened up Madonna’s Like A Virgin tour, he’s the one who ended up making out with her.” Dan Charnas wrote something thoughtful at SPIN about how Yauch and the other Beasties were avatars of a greater downtown scene that invented cool as we know it: “Yauch and his folks lived in these places and spaces before it was safe to do so. They picked the fashions before you could order them from a catalog or buy them in a boutique. They weren’t ‘ironically racist.’”
They weren’t ironically anything; they were sincere to a fault. It was that sincerity that made them interesting: they invented so much because they were so manifestly uninterested in doing anything but pleasing themselves.
That what ultimately pleased Yauch was becoming a good person is one of the more incredible and admirable facts about him. But it wasn’t always the most artistically compelling thing about him. To me, that will forever be this guy, one of the three most badly-behaved humans in the world, and loving every second of it:
“If you go to high school or live in a college dorm, you most likely know the thing forwards and backwards by now. Licensed to Ill has pushed rap into the whitest corridors of America’s heartland, and (along with D.M.C., Metallica and the Rubin-produced Slayer) had made the future safe for dangerous teenage music, a form that seemed to have died. CBS, concentrating on Bruce S. and Michael J., has an unexpected blockbuster on its hands. And the Beastie Boys are playing their fifteen minutes of fame to the hilt. “Five years from now I might be selling used cars on the lot,” MCA says. “I really don’t give a fuck, ’cause I’m having so much fun now.” — Chuck Eddy – “Lay It Down, Clowns!: The Beastie Boys Take Over?” (1987)
Wrote about summer blockbusters and the curse of a good Avengers for Grantland.