by English Facial Hair Versus American Facial Hair! Comics Curmudgeon Versus Music Mensch!
There is a great article on Rick Rubin in the Daily Beast. Rubin has produced an eclectic range of bands — his most recent effort producing the new Black Sabbath album. I remember hearing about this guy when the first Beastie Boys album came out and there was a swirl of comments about how much he did on License to Ill versus the Beastie Boys themselves. He’s gone from rap to rock and back again — he’s not only produced Sabbath but Kanye’s latest album. This guy produced Adele and Neil Diamond too.
From his wikipedia page:
Rubin has worked with Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Run–D.M.C., Tom Petty, Black Sabbath, Trouble, Slipknot, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Mars Volta, Jay-Z, Danzig, Dixie Chicks, Metallica, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Weezer, Linkin Park, The Cult, Neil Diamond, Mick Jagger, System of a Down, Rage Against the Machine, Melanie C, Audioslave, Sheryl Crow, The Avett Brothers, ZZ Top, Lana Del Rey, Adele, Kanye West and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Do you ever just free-float through wikipedia and the web, jumping where the topics take you? Thinking about writing this post did just that and I wound up deep into Beastie Boys territory, flipping through details of the Paul’s Boutique album (which gets most of the credit as their masterpiece) and remembering Check Your Head, which was a novel melding of rap and real instruments on record.
As I got older and the Beasties record releases got spaced further and further out I didn’t follow them as closely as I used too (I don’t think I followed any music as closely as I used to) so I missed a lot of the back and forth over their last album Hot Sauce Committee. Whether they ever meant to put out two albums or not you can be sure that they enjoyed goofing around with all of it. They weren’t quite full Andy Kaufman in their approach to the rest of the world but you always got the impression that everything they did, especially the odder stuff, was full of inside jokes for their amusement. Wikipedia has the original album cover that was ditched in the reshuffling of plans from part one to part two and back again:
Woah I just realized that the Beastie Boy concert film, Awesome I Shot That is probably on the Internet somewhere. Yes — Youtube has the whole thing.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwyDBN50ffA?rel=0]
