Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 201

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Beastie Boys Book," by Michael Diamond:



(Luc Sante)

Rap right now is a direct, mimetic product of the streets of New York City, embodying the city’s verbal agility and aggression, its constantly fractured barrage of traveling sounds, its abrasive textures and juxtaposed incongruities, its densely layered strata of information. And it’s only just becoming apparent how much more can be done with the fundaments of the style: how much stripping down, speeding up, pulling in of other sounds musical and otherwise, and how much textual complexity and nuanced attitudinizing and justified protest and seductive strategizing and flat-out indictment can be brought to the talkover. It is occurring to people all over the city that rap is a sound that can be carved. And so it is occurring to three young city kids, lately in the punk-rock business, that they can use it to make anthems and stage sketch comedy and arrange pinpoint-precise repartee that wears a stupid hat to conceal its sophistication—and that’s just the beginning.

(Adam Horowitz)

Anyone who’s trying to convince you that tapes are cool, and that iPhones are corny, is dead wrong. I can tell you from experience, and with a professional’s opinion: the cassette vs. vinyl vs. CD vs. mp3 argument is boring. If I made you a mixtape and you’ve just heard the J.B.’s song “Pass the Peas” for the first time…the song would be just as fucking awesome if I emailed you an mp3 instead. I promise. Being able to scroll and click to get to the next song is a wonderful new feature. “Yeah, but…mp3s sound terrible.” Who cares?! Try Scotch-taping a broken cassette tape four or five times in different places on the tape, and then listen back to that after it’s been in various linty pockets for a year and a half. To me, the only thing that’s really missing with the iPhone is that physical relationship to your music.