|
The Domain rhinosplode.com is for sale. For more information, please click here! |
My wife cleverly convinced me not to stay up until midnight on June 8 so that I could listen to To the 5 Boroughs in a sleep-deprived state mere hours before the average, rational, well-rested Beastie Boys fan. So, being the average, rational, well-rested Beastie Boys fan that I am, I got home from work on that fateful Tuesday and called my friendly neighborhood record store1 to ensure that they still had copies available. This was apparently an absurd question. They had enough copies in stock for every citizen of New Hampshire to get a copy and still have enough left over for our no-sales-tax leeches from the south to come get some. Bling.
And down to Manch Vegas we went. Confronted with a wall of Beasties CDs upon opening the door, I was very pleased to see that the image I saw in the promotional images was indeed the cover: Manhattan Unfurled by Matteo Pericoli. Mr. Pericoli had finished sketching the Manhattan skyline from his apartment in Hoboken some time during the summer of 2001. He didn’t know at the time that he had completed one of the most successful and tasteful tributes/fundraisers of September 11th. So the Beastie Boys have taken his coffee table book and made it in to a CD liner – in all likelihood damning Matteo’s art to be forgotten as Manhattan Unfurled and long remembered as simply the cover of To the 5 Boroughs. This "Ice Ice Baby"-style theft is not the only one the Beasties will commit on this album.
As I search the new releases for my other two needs – Sonic Youth’s Sonic Nurse and Chumbawamba’s Un, I note two disappointments on the track listings; First, "Hey Fuck You" is listed as "Hey F*?# You". On all the discs. Was there an unedited release? Apparently not. Ah well. Secondly, and worse yet, "In a World Gone Mad?" is nowhere to be found. The track from this album that couldn’t wait for the album to come out is for some inexplicable2 reason AWOL. Who in their right mind would leave out a track that compares our commander in chief to Zoolander?!
I’ve spent three paragraphs reviewing the experience of purchasing the album – impressively, you are still reading. To wrap up, although some of the “New Releases” had been out for over a month, Sonic Youth and Chumbawamba’s week old releases were not honored with the in-your-face-consumer-scum display. Sonic Youth did, however, merit the $10 new release price, so the happy Moore family went home with me while the overpriced British anarchists stayed behind to rot in their non-discounted misery. Eventually, I’ll make my boss buy me UnChumbawamba3 It makes him happy.
So we’ve all heard "Ch-Check it Out" more times than is really necessary. But I listened to it again and it brought me joy. Because that is what this album is for – to bring me joy. “All the Klingons in the fuckin’ house grab your backstreet friend and get loud.” Indeed. The first half of the album pretty much proves two essential facts which I had been hoping for: it’s the good old Beastie Boys you know and love but it’s not just the same old Beastie Boys you’d grow tired of if you got another Hello Nasty. To the 5 Boroughs features very little in the way of guitar, or, for that matter, original recordings of any sort. This is an album of samples and loops. Ingenious samples and loops, mind you, but samples and loops all the same. A 14-year-old on DJCentral.com with Garage Band could produce this album. He probably couldn’t come up with rhymes like “I’m the player and the coach. / I’m no roach. / I bought my grandma a brand new brooch.” But he could loop it.4
The first track that really stands out is "Hey Fuck You." Maybe I just like songs that make no attempt to blend obscenities in to the mix and just slap them in there as if they’re the only words that will do. Or maybe it’s just a really good song? Mocking other artists rhyming abilities (or inabilities, rather) is nothing new in hip hop, if you’ll allow me to classify the Beastie Boys as hip hop for a brief moment, but such tracks are usually the highlights of an album, and this is no exception. If the opening line’s use of the word “schnooks” doesn’t get you, nothing will.
Disappointingly, "SHAZAM!" has absolutely nothing to do with Captain Marvel whatsoever. But "An Open Letter To NYC" makes up for it in so many ways. So far, "NYC" is the only other track I’ve heard on the radio, and it is also the second5 "Ice Ice Baby"-style theft that will probably backfire on our clueless culture, "Open Letter" takes the opening riff to the Dead Boys’ 1977 "Sonic Reducer" and repeats it, ad infinitum, through the entire song – space guitar wah wah and all. It’s not until several seconds in that any booty-bass kicks in, alerting you that this is a very different C.B.G.B.’s you’re dealing with now. The song, at its core, is really just saying “Chin up, New York” but in a much more interesting way (specifically, by throwing out 101 references to assorted aspects of New York culture that may well just sound like random noises to most of America).
Ye ol’ Beatie Boys will probably continue to rock until they all need canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and oxygen tanks in order to get around. And we’ll probably continue to buy their albums. Fortunately, To the 5 Boroughs actually really does rock, and gives hope of things to come. It has a bizarre sort of mass appeal that I didn’t think any band with such an overt social agenda could have. Somehow, while other artists get torn to shreds for daring to challenge our government6, the Beastie Boys get to number one of every chart imaginable and are loved by both those who fully support our government and normal people alike. Maybe, eventually, music can make someone stop and think and reconsider and maybe – just maybe – change their mind?
While every man, woman, and child is listening to To the 5 Boroughs, Sonic Nurse is being surprisingly ignored. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising based on Sonic Youth’s recent path – every album released since 1992 has gotten progressively more and more experimental, way beyond the scope of anyone’s attempted definition of “alternative” music. But Sonic Nurse is surprisingly refreshing and mainstream, while at the same time maintaining the haunting dissonance which makes Sonic Youth Sonic Youth.
My wife’s theory is that Kim & Thurston realized that raising a child is a little more expensive than their tortured artists salary could afford. I prefer to believe that they’re just reversing directions to keep us on our toes. Rebelling against the rebellion, you could say. After a decade of consistently searching to find a new way to create music, who would have expected them to release an album that’s so fundamentally listenable that the mainstream media completely misses it?
I’ve heard Sonic Nurse described as a return to Goo or as a collection of songs that could have easily been outtakes from the Goo recording sessions. This album is so not Goo. It’s not even meta-Goo. Or pseudo-Goo. Or neo-Goo. It’s definitively post-Goo – in both time and style. There’s something about the anger and defiance of Goo that is simply not relevant on Sonic Nurse. It’s a more mature album. It’s the Sonic Youth album that’s always been there but hadn’t yet been recorded.
The first several times I listened to Sonic Nurse I got lost in it. No concept of songs starting and ending – no concept of how long I’d been listening to it for – no concept of which parts I liked more than others. Slowly, eventually, something struck me as familiar. Not familiar in the “I’ve been listening to this for three days and it’s all stuck in my subconscious” kind of way, but familiar in the “something about this album reminds me of something else, completely unrelated.
Then, slowly, it sinks in. Sonic Nurse sounds like the Carpenters. Not like they did a bunch of Carpenters tunes, or even taking the tune of a Carpenters song and doing something new with it. At one point, I tried to convince myself that I was simply having flashbacks to the Sonic Youth track on the early nineties tribute I Want to be A Carpenter, but going back and listening to that album quickly corrected my train of though. It wasn’t a Carpenters sound that was familiar, but the timeless essence of the music which stays with you – whether you like the music or not – and is instantly familiar in that comfortable friend kind of way. Sonic Nurse is the long lost cousin that you can see once a year at Thanksgiving and still pick up a conversation as if you see each other every day. You can sit back, relax, and know that Sonic Youth is there for you; they care, they love, and they want you to know that they do.
They also, however, have a bit of a musical bone to pick. Maybe that’s why we’ve heard so little of this album in the same venues that promoted Goo like all natural whole wheat bread. Steve Shelley jokes that the reason Sonic Youth has stayed together for almost twenty four years is because they’ve never had a hit. I prefer to think that the reason they’ve never had a it is the same reason they’ve stayed together: they have something worth saying and want to say it in an interesting way7. The best track along these lines is "Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream" (which, on many sites which based their track lists on early promotional information, is listed as "Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream"); Sonic Youth’s ode to Mariah’s fragile pop-princess psyche. Lyrics such as “How was your date with Eminem? Did he bake you and then forsake you? Is innocence gonna still overtake you? Like Arthur Doyle they can't fake you” seem like they should be in a Beastie’s track, not a Sonic Youth track, but somehow they work.
I still have absolutely no idea what New Hampshire is about, but it makes references to Johnny Winter, BB King, Aerosmith, and the state which I call home. And it makes me happy. The line “kill us your scumbag youths” has absolutely nothing to do with it. Honest.
One of the most beautiful songs on the album – which I think would make a live performance of Sonic Youth worth it, even for a non-fan – is "I Love You Golden Blue". Aside from being quintessentially Sonic Youth in lyric, tone, melody, rhythm, and, well, length, it is a hauntingly wonderful masterpiece which stands up above all others. Think of Concrete Blonde’s "Tommorrow, Wendy", Sinead O’Connor’s "Three Babies", just about anything by Madradeus, or maybe even Lars’ solo performances of Rancid’s "The War’s End". Yet somehow there’s a Sonic Youth drone through it which only adds to the layers of texture (and, I suppose, which every Sonic Youth song has).8
While To the 5 Boroughs and Sonic Nurse are two distinctly different albums, each representative of a group which has spent two decades perfecting their sounds, they are somehow the perfect complements for one another. It could be that they were purchased on the same day, but the more I listen to each, the more I realize that they go together. I can’t listen to one without needing to dig the other out, and I damn well couldn’t write about one without they other.
Then, to top it all off, Thurston Moore explains for me why "In a World Gone Mad" is not on To the 5 Boroughs and can’t be found anywhere on beastieboys.com. The Beastie Boys join Sonic Youth ("Youth Against Fascism") and over twenty other artists on a series of MP3 based Protest Records recordings. And Capitol Records can’t be attaching themselves to such a project. Criticize the decisions of our nation’s leadership and allow people to download music for FREE?! Not this record label!
“The copy protection software used in the Beastie Boys' "To the 5 Boroughs" is the same software that has been used in over 5,000 EMI titles, including recent CDs by Radiohead, Norah Jones, Coldplay, NERD, Janet Jackson, and Chingy. Over 80 million CDs have been sold with this software.”9
That’s funny. I suppose if it’s on the Chingy album . . . Capitol Records hasn’t been releasing “Compact Discs” in years – they can only use the “EnhancedCD” trademark since they don’t qualify for Phillips’ “Compact Disc” trademark.
“This product is provided AS IS, without any express or implied warranties. Although the product is intended to play on most CD players and operate on most personal computers running Windows 95 (or higher) or Macintosh OS systems 7.5.5 (or higher) that have CD ROM drives and Quicktime software version 5.0 or higher installed (not included), Capitol Records is not liable if it does not or if it damages any CD players, computers, peripherals or data.”10
Disestablishmentarianism, man.
1 Actually, I called the surly comic shop in someone else’s neighborhood, about half an hour south of me because the only options in my ‘hood amount to: one independent record store owned by an admitted rapist, who is, appropriately enough, boycotted by yours truly; a certain large chain store that also sell books and ‘café products’ which, while very friendly, has the most bizarre concept of CD pricing I’ve ever seen; and the excruciating experience which is ‘the mall and it’s surrounding area’ (to whit, Target, Best Buy, Circuit City, HMV, Hot Topic, and other such tomfoolery).
2 Inexplicable at the time, at least. I’ve got my theories.
3 But that, my friends, will be another story.
4 “You stole somebody's record then you looped it, you looped it
You boosted the record then ya looped it, ya looped it
Hey yo, I came from Cali, and they hooped it, they hooped it
But now you're gettin sued - kinda stupid!”
Sorry. I'll stop now.
5 Third, if you want to make yourself cry by realizing that there are probably people dumb enough to hear Rappers Delight and say it’s a rip off of Triple Trouble.
6 Or, in the case of many smaller bands, simply ignored. See entry for Anti-Flag.
7 They have, by the way, come back to accepting the label “art music.”
8 Incidentally, I Love You Golden Blue also features the second Dead Boys reference in one day’s purchase. Instead of ’77 Punk Rock boys, we’re talking about a real, live, dead boy. Oddly.
9 Capitol Records’ press release regarding fans’ claims about To the 5 Boroughs installing software on their computer which permanently prevented them from ripping MP3s from any CD they own.
10 Capitol Records’ manifesto next to the FBI Anti-Piracy Warning on every “CD” they release, where normal record labels put the classic “Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.”
HARTFORD, CT--Today's transfer of power to incoming Governor Jodi Rell was marred by continuing insurgent violence today, plunging the normally placid Nutmeg State into deeper disorder. Militiamen loyal to outgoing Governor John Rowland took to the streets of Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, and Danbury, firing weapons and burning tires at makeshift roadblocks. Contact with journalists inside the so-called Golden Triangle--bordered by Bridgeport and Greenwich in the south and Danbury in the north--was lost late last night.
The changeover comes less than two weeks after Rowland, facing possible impeachment on several ethics charges, announced his resignation. "There comes a time in everyone's life," he said when announcing his resignation, "when you realize it's time to take a new path. This is our time."
Almost immediately after the announcement, however, the last pro-Rowland politicians in the state had assembled private armies and moved into position in the state's major cities. Reports of men clad in LL Bean weekend gear, described in color as "vintage red," poured in from around Connecticut. The Bridgeport Bluefish were forced to cancel a game last week after some fifty insurgents armed with Kalashnikovs refused to come down from their positions at the top of Harbor Yards Stadium.
Connecticut National Guard troops sealed off the state's borders with New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts late last night in an attempt to prevent fighters from those states from entering and complicating the situation. Their efforts, however, might have been too little too late. Particularly vulnerable is the unfortified border with New York on Route 6 in Danbury. Masked men, identifying themselves as "mujahideen of the South Salem Warriors of Light" have been apprehended there by National Guard patrols every night for the past week. The SSWL is the same group that claimed responsibility for the bombings of Metro-North commuter trains in the spring of 2002.
Water patrols have also been stepped up. The Long Island Sound is full of Coast Guard cutters. Apache and Black Hawk helicopters prowl the coastline, occasionally engaging targets inland. As this story went to press, helicopter gunships were reportedly firing on insurgent positions in the highlands overlooking Southport Harbor.
Still, life goes on in this embattled state. Investment banker Lauren Maldonaldo went to the Westport train station this morning, despite warnings of possible violence from domestic and out-of-state resistance fighters. "I can't live in fear," she said. "If the Rowlandistas want to attack this train, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm trained in CPR and jujitsu, so I'll be happy to help if anything does go down." Many seats remained empty on Ms. Maldonaldo's 6:51 train. It was impossible to say whether the lower passenger count was due to fear, or as almost no passengers I spoke to would acknowledge, lives lost in the continuing violence.
While Rell's supporters are doing their utmost not harm civilians, many have been injured or killed in the fighting. A wedding paty at a Methodist church in Windsor Locks was annihilated by mortar fire from pro-Rell forces after a reveller fired an automatic weapon into the air in a traditional act of celebration. Government forces, on edge due to the uptick in violence, are taking no chances. Governor Rell, in a statement issued after the Windsor Locks incident, described the situation as "regrettable," adding that citizens should be aware that any discharge of firearms "will be responded to with overwhelming force."