Tag: adam yauch

Gone but not forgotten

Snow Way Ahm Daein That

Craig McAllister

I found myself watching the Olympics the other night there. Men and women dressed head to (camel) toe in the sort of tight-fitting get up that yr average Marvel superhero might reject on grounds of it being ‘a bit revealing’ were throwing themselves down a glassy, serpentine ice track for around a minute at a time, lantern jaws and sculpted chins millimetres from the concrete ice, perfectly toned bodies rigid as arrows yet flexible enough to negotiate sudden, high banking turns, lying front-down and head-first on a plastic tray no larger than a restaurant-standard chopping block, and all at average speeds approaching 80mph. The ‘skeleton’ they call it. Probably because half the competitors become one before too long. When they finish their run, helmets are removed, hoods are peeled back and suddenly, the super-fit international youth of today is staring straight back at you with their perfect teeth and sparkling eyes and unyielding desire to give it just one more go; shave a hundredth of a second or more off your best time and you just might find yourself up there on the podium, one of the three fastest skeleton riders on the planet. Failure to do so – take the wrong line into a corner, leave your left ankle trailing for three tenths of a nanosecond as you straighten out of it, can see you languish down in 18th place at best. Or, at worst, become an actual skeleton. Four years’ training for that? It’s a tough sport.

So too the snowboarding, although that all looks a bit more loose ‘n rad ‘n rock ‘n roll. The BBC presenters, normally the last bastion of received pronunciation and standards in grammar have, quite rightly, eschewed with yr Baldings ‘n Irvines ‘n Crams – he’s got the curling to attend to – and drafted in a couple of young dudes in John Jackson and Jenny Jones, both snowboarding Olympic medalists, and both of whom are enthusiastically well-versed in the vernacular of the sport.

Halfpipes, lips, goofy stances, corks, grabs, 1440s, switches and kickers…all are explained and shouted excitedly down the microphone whenever one of the boarders becomes airborne against the inky-black Milanese sky and pulls off the unthinkable across a series of daring, freestyling manoeuevres. They zoom off the curled end of the jump, twist like Festive-time corkscrews in a blur of baggy, puffy salopettes, day-glo hip-hop graphics and sponsors’ logos on the base of their boards, winding and spiraling through the Italian night sky like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s a brilliant watch, especially as the camera footage is now so good. Slo-mo camera angles show the crowd reflected upside down in the visor of the boarder, capture the shavings of snow as they spray up and out from the edges of the board and let you count exactly the number of rotations the competitors have managed to squeeze into the vacuum of time between landing and launching again. You would see the fillings in their teeth as they ballet-danced their way across the skies, if only these supreme specimens of human life had fillings in their teeth.

The commentators ooh and aah or groan when either they land perfectly or crash and burn. As a spectator sport, it’s the crashes you really want to see…until they de-helmet and you realise the boarder who’s been entertaining you for the past few seconds is not yet 17 years old. Unreal. Truly. The gung-ho attitude of youth will take them further and higher and freer than before, especially if you’re one of those sneaky ski jumping cheats who’ve added extra weight to the groin area in order to gain extra in-air distance at the point of take-off. Maybe if they’d laid off the free condoms that reportedly have run dry throughout the Olympic village, nature would have seen to it that the abstaining man competing in the sport might have a natural advantage over his free-lovin’ adversary. Think about it for next time, lads. Marginal gains ‘n all that.

Anyway.

I can’t watch snowboarding without hearing an internal soundtrack of Beastie Boys. This probably comes from reading Beastie Boys Book, where Adam Yauch’s best friends/bandmates admit that they had no idea what he got up to in his spare time. At one point, they discover that Yauch has fallen so deep for snowboarding that he’s taken to flying to the top of mountains in helicopters, then jumping out, board attached, to cork, grab and switch all the way to the bottom again. I was thinking about this as I watched those young maniacs twirl their way from top to bottom in Milan, pretty sure that Yauch could’ve given them a run for their money…before breaking into a freestyling rap…or sitting down for tea with the Dalai Lama…or popping round with his plumbing gear to fix the dodgy pipe in your Brooklyn apartment. We all have friends with hidden depths, but Adam Yauch was seemingly peerless.

Here’s Something’s Got To Give, one of Check Your Head‘s more laidback moments, all ambient bass textures, loose-limbed drum action, dubby atmospherics and terrific Wurlitzer (or is it Rhodes?) playing. Next time the snowboarding is on, mute the TV commentary and instead play this. Tension is rebuilding…somethin’s got to give. It works perfectly.

Yauch takes flight

 

The Beasties, no strangers to sportswear or over-sized sunglasses or a baggy pair of pants would’ve looked great in snowboarding gear. Did they ever make a video of such? If so, I can’t find it. If not…wasted opportunity, lads.

Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Tension Is Rebuilding. Something’s Got To Give.

Craig McAllister

When the Beastie Boys first appeared, a burping and belching frat boy’s idea of fun (and, KIIIICCCKKK IT!, it was fun when you were 15, let’s not kid ourselves), all backwards baseball caps and crotch grabs and stuck-on sneers, you could’ve been forgiven for presuming they’d have 3, 4 hits at most on the back of one album before disappearing with diminishing returns down the very Noo Yoik sewer from whence they’d crawled. But something happened.

MCA, the gravel-throated tall one, better known to his ma an’ pa as Adam Yauch, found inner peace. Through Buddhism he left behind the rapper’s trappings of guns, girls and glorified violence and guided his fellow band mates onto the path of righteous being. The Beastie Boys were always a cartoon version of the staple diet of rap to begin with. They had far more wit and wisdom than your average angry boy from the ‘hood to ever truly mean it. To coin a well-worn cliche, he, MCA became a lover, not a fighter and the band gradually dropped the more base stuff in favour of a sophisticated worldly approach.

The signs were there on Paul’s Boutique, the cut ‘n paste meisterwork that is considered by many to be the Beasties’ greatest moment. On the album’s Year And A Day, MCA reports that, “my body and soul and mind are pure.” By the time of 1992’s Check Your Head (the Beasties’ true greatest moment) MCA had written Something’s Got To Give, a call to unite the world as one.

Beastie Boys – Something’s Got To Give

It’s a real turn-up for anyone who thinks of the Beasties as ‘just’ three white boy rappers. Returning to their hardcore punk roots, to a time when the band played as a band, drums, bass, guitars ‘n all, the trio wanted to show the world there was more to them than sexist raps and songs jigsawed from the best bits of other people’s records. The cover of Something’s Got To Give‘s parent album Check Your Head featured the band sitting at a roadside carefully guarding their instrument cases and band ephemera. “We’re a real band,” they’re saying. “We can play our instruments.” And boy, can they!

Something’s Got To Give is a terrific slab of slow-burning rock/rap. And if that has you breaking out in a Chili Pepper-sized rash of disgust, listen to the playing. It’s echoey, live and loose. Built from a tape of the band jamming live in the studio, there’s so much depth and space and separation between the instruments it could almost be a Lee Perry production. There’s great hi-hat action. There’s some spot-on clavinova from 4th Beastie Money Mark who seems to be living out his mid 70s Stevie Wonder fantasies. And there’s that constantly na-na-na-nagging refrain that runs through it like the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson, taking you from beginning to middle to end. Every time I hear it, I hear a subtle new thing; maybe a stray piece of percussion or an Ad Rock adlib, that surely marks Something’s Got To Give down as a great track.

With trigger finger-happy Presidents here and itchy warhead owners there and a growing sense of right wing bully boy tactics over the UK’s stubborn and stupid stance on Europe, we could all do worse than listen to its message. And then jump over a ghetto blaster with giddy abandon, y’all.