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!
This song was supposedly written on a train ride from Philadelphia to New York City. Having played a killer show in Philly, the band was riding the train back home when they noticed some members of the crew were starting to fall asleep. To keep everyone awake, the Beastie Boys started to chant, “No sleep till Brooklyn!”
(The name of the song is also a play on the title of Motörhead’s No Sleep ’til Hammersmith.)
The song is one of the band’s signature tunes and the video features the Beastie Boys when they were young, rebellious, and didn’t care who they pissed off. The video parodied that type of glam rock (think Poison, for example) that was popular in 1987.
The video was directed by Adam Dubin and Ric Menello, who previously directed the video for (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party). Menello also plays the club owner who rejects the band at the start of the video.
Enjoy!
Today’s music video of the day is my personal pick for the greatest music video of all time, Sabotage by the Beastie Boys!
This song was actually inspired by the band’s frustration with a sound engineer who the band felt was trying to rush them through their recording sessions. The feeling was that he was deliberately “sabotaging” them and the band expressed their frustrations in an instrumental track. It wasn’t until two weeks before the track was actually to be recorded that the Beastie Boys came up with the lyrics for the song.
The video, famously, features the Beastie Boys as three cops on a 70s cop show, pursuing and apparently murdering Sir Stewart Wallace. This video is usually held up as an example of director Spike Jonze’s love of kitsch but the 70s cop show theme was actually first suggested by Adam Horowitz.
Believe it or not, this video was controversial when it was first released because it was considered by some to be too violent. MTV actually demanded three cuts before they would accept it. They demanded that the knife fight be shortened and that shots of bodies being tossed out of a car and over a bridge be taken out of the video. Of course, in both shots, the body was obviously a dummy so I’m not sure what MTV was freaking out about.
Sabotage received five nominations at the MTV Music Video Awards and, amazingly, it lost every one of them. Even best direction was won by Jake Scott, who did the video for R.E.M’s Everybody Hurts. While Michael Stipe was accepting the best direction award, Adam Yauch rushed the stage (while dressed as Nathaniel Hornblower) and protested the snubbing of Sabotage.
This was actually the first time in the history of the VMAs that someone rushed the stage to protest a win. Kanye West, of course, later made this a famous move but Adam Yauch did it first. (My favorite thing about the picture above is the look on Michael Stipe’s face.)
The MTV Music Video Awards may not have appreciated Sabotage but the rest of the world certainly did. It not only remains one of the signature tunes of the 90s but, if you believe Star Trek, it’s also the song that inspired Jim Kirk to grow up, join Starfleet, and put the safety of everyone under his command at risk at least once a week.
Enjoy!
First things first, Lisa has asked me to apologize to everyone. She’s currently under the weather and has been ordered to get a lot of rest, which is why she didn’t post anything yesterday. She will be back and regularly posting soon.
As for today’s music video of the day, what can you say about Sure Shot and the Beastie Boys? This is the song and the video that I think made everyone want to be the fourth beastie boy. If I remember correctly, it came out directly after Sabotage and it provides quite a contrast to that earlier video. Interestingly enough, both videos were directed by Spike Jonze.
This is the rare rap song to feature a flute. The flute was sampled from the 1970 song, Howling For Judy, by Jeremy Steig. Steig, who has released twenty albums, has said that he made more money off the royalties to that sample than he has from all of his previous work.
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 