Today my little 'un turned 4. She was a very good girl despite the fact that halfway through starters today (we met Daddy cool for lunch) I was struck down with the most horrific stomach cramps - no - not what you think, not even close. I have no idea why. Maybe I'm dying. Bag of frozen peas. That's what my old GP used to prescribe for EVERYTHING.
Right - as it's the Nipper's day I can't very well spend it amusing myself online so here's something I wrote earlier.
The Beastie Boys explained in a long ago interview that in the early days of rap, the conventional wisdom was that only black people were supposed to like hip-hop and only white people were supposed to like rock. But it wasn't like that at all.
As the first white rap group of any importance, the Beastie Boys received the scorn of critics and strident hip-hop musicians, who accused them of cultural pirating, especially since they began as a hardcore punk group in 1981. But the Beasties weren't pirating —because they weren't trying to be black rappers. They rapped about shit they knew : skateboarding, going to White Castle (the oldest American hamburger chain of restaurants that serve square burgers called ‘sliders’), angel dust and mushrooms. Real recognises real. The Hip Hop crowds loved them.
In addition to this they knew everything about hip-hop -- the Cold Crush Brothers, the Treacherous 3 and Afrika Bambaataa, all the old-school shit.
They merely treated rap as part of a post-punk musical underground recognising that the do-it-yourself aesthetics and anti-establishment attitude of hip-hop and punk weren't that far apart.
The Beastie Boys were considered macho clowns for much of the mid-'80s. Their debut album, Licensed to Ill, an amalgam of street beats, metal riffs, b-boy jokes and satire was misinterpreted and largely dismissed as a mindless, obnoxious party record by the critics. That it went on to become the fastest-selling debut in Columbia Records's history goes to show how visionary underground movements can be and how mindless and obnoxious the critics can be.
Outside of this unexpected early success they continued to be ignored by the press at the time which was no doubt too busy exchanging make-up tips with the New Romantics.
While much of the Beasties' outrageous bigotry started out as a joke, it became a self-parody by the end of 1987 - a year plagued with arrests and lawsuits. Many would have called it a day and laughed all the way to the bank instead the group decided to revamp their sound and image over the next two years.
Unable to pigeon-hole it and with only a cult following, the press was on hand to trash their second album Paul’s Boutique.
None of this stopped them from coming out with a third; Check Your Head in which they play their own instruments. Whether this was something the press related to (if you are in a band you play something or you sing) it turned the tide for them and the album brought the Beasties back to the top of the charts. This time it didn’t appear to be a fluke. They were ‘suddenly’ considered one of the most influential and ambitious groups of the '90s.
It was however not until the fourth album Ill Communication with the singles ‘Sabotage’ and ‘Sure Shot’ that they went double-platinum. Paul’s Boutique is now of course considered one of the best albums of the 80s with its densely layered interweaving samples and pop culture references to retro-funk-psychedelia; critics falling over themselves unable to praise it enough now that they had a label for it. Obviously.
No comments:
Post a Comment