In today’s music video of the day, Beastie Boys once again show that they could make practically any activity look cool.
Alive was the first single to be released off of Beastie Boys Anthology: The Sounds of Science. While it didn’t chart in the United States, it did make it to the 22nd position on the New Zealand Singles Chart.
Enjoy!
Nobody did it better than the Beastie Boys.
This video was shot at 262 Mott Street in Manhattan. Mix Master Mike, in his first song with the Beatie Boys, has to sneak into the building in order to perform with them. Anyone who has ever lived in New York or even just visited family in New York should be able to relate.
Enjoy!
I don’t have a lot to say about this music video. It’s the Beastie Boys having fun with Japanese monster movies just like they did with Danger: Diabolik (1968) for the Body Movin’ music video. They even filmed parts of it in Japan. It was directed by Adam Yauch under the pseudonym Nathaniel Hornblower. What I mostly have to say about this is the interesting copyright/version issues that seem to be at work here.
You may have noticed that video above is not official. I’m pretty sure you can find any other Beastie Boys music video on YouTube, but not this one. Well, not since sometime after September 14th, 2009 as you can see where EMI once had it posted. You can find the song posted twice as part of this new YouTube music thing they have been doing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0VHyobZd4
You’ll hear that both of them are missing something that is in the music video. It is also missing from my copy that I obtained from iTunes a few years ago. According to Wikipedia, it was on the album. This song originally began with a sample of Stravinsky’s ballet Rite of Spring. I guess they must have lost the rights, or didn’t think it was worth it. How much you wanna bet it was after the Men at Work fiasco over the flute riff in Down Under in 2009?
Strangely, the video is over on VEVO with a different piece of classical music. You can also hear this version below thanks to Dailymotion. If you are running an ad blocker then follow this link because Dailymotion has decided to try and be clever by only letting the audio through if their ad is blocked.
The Wikipedia article on Rite of Spring makes it look like it’s very well-known, but is a nightmare of a piece when it comes to copyright and different versions of it.
Songfacts sorta comes to my rescue here. They say it opens with a sample from Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky that was edited out of the radio version. From what I can tell, the version I posted at the start samples the beginning of Night on Bald Mountain.
However, the version I linked to that is on VEVO and embedded from Dailymotion does sample from Rite of Spring as you can hear below.
According to Songfacts and Wikipedia, they also incorporated Les Baxter’s version of Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude C-sharp Minor” and “Love is Blue” by The Jazz Crusaders. I’ve embedded the first one and a different version of the second one below.
I couldn’t pick out those in the song. I also don’t know for sure what was on the original album cause I don’t own a hard copy. Wikipedia also seems to indicate that there were two different versions of the music video to begin with, but doesn’t shine any light on the online posting situation from what I can see.
It’s always an adventure when I sit down to write one of these posts. Enjoy!
Through the Shattered Lens 