had more juice than picasso got paint
May 4th, 2012 by elmattic
Dear Legendary Rappers,
Please stop dying now. Wait until you're very old and we can't believe you were still alive.
Thanks.
[below] MCA :: A Year And A Day
I always thought this was his best, most blistering set of rhymes.
Me and my boys probably listened to License To Ill every single day in '87. Still know all the words. Couldn't listen to it for about five years. A cat we knew had the Paul's Boutique demo on cassette about 6 months before it dropped. Shit was like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
By the time of Hello Nasty I moved away from the Beastie Boys...I just thought other cats were doing more interesting stuff, felt like the jokey, clever, party-hearty thing was getting old compared to, say, Heavy Mental. Couple of years ago I revisited and saw how much craft there is in their rhymes and music, a lot of interesting experiments happening. In the MCA obits I don't think the musical innovation gets enough play. No doubt they got kinda stale but they never got lazy, pandering or repetitive.
Also, you really gotta give them their due for breaking hip-hop into suburbia, wider audiences--like it or not, it turned hip-hop into a viable economic genre resulting in labels, radio play, tours...you want hip-hop to have stayed in the park with power from the streetlight, you do that and tell me if it would have survived to see 1990.
And they get props for being there from the start of the Golden Age. Def Jam's second release (DJ002) was the Beastie Boys' Rock Hard EP. I was disappointed when Chuck D said Paul's Boutique 'went UNDER people's heads.' I guess because everyone fell all over its sampling, and the Bomb Squad had already been doing that in an even more intricate way. But I was really struck by what Chuck D said about MCA.
I think it was in the 33 1/3 book where Rush is bugging the shit out of the Beastie Boys to make a License to Ill 2 and make another shitload of money, but MCA is off in Tibet, and Ad-Rock is trying to act in Molly Ringwald movies, and Mike D is writing short stories or learning watercolors or archery or some shit. And Rush is going fucking nuts. Because Rush is a businessman: maximize a successful product. But the Beastie Boys are bohemian artistes. Reflects their backgrounds to a T. Rush didn't get into music for the art, he got into it to move up from Hollis. The Beastie Boys were already comfortable. Maybe obvious but coming from decently well-off families meant the Beastie Boys could afford to fuck around and innovate. But we should all be glad they did, because if they repeated License To Ill in five ever-decreasing Xeroxes (like Cypress Hill pretty much did after Temples of Boom) they'd be dimly remembered jokes like Vanilla Ice & Hammer. 'Oh, those frat-rap guys! With the hydraulic dick on stage!'
You can't really make a good MCA tribute mix, because the 3 MCs wove so tight on almost every track. Trading lines/words as well as verses. Try and dissect a song just to pull out MCA, and it's a bare snippet or butcher job. I can't build a mix on that. You'd have to be some atomic structure laser DJ, and then it'd turn the tracks into something totally different.
The way the Beasties' work as MCs together on tracks is tighter than anyone else I can think of. Run-DMC maybe, but with 3 MCs it was on a whole other level. EPMD, but they rhymed slower (PMD could go and grab a sandwich and still be back on stage in time to parry Erick). The Wu structure for example is so different--each MC gets a verse or a whole track, very little playing off each other that way.
So if some DJ tries to extract essence of MCA and turns a mix out of it, I'm down, but it's not my lane. Peace to the King of the Ave.
See also:
- No Trivia & Passion of the Weiss tributes
- MCA interviews the Dalai Lama for Grand Royal
- Jimmy Green's Brooklyn Dust Beastie Boys Mix
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