Kickin’ It Live: Beastie Boys at Summerstage
The Beasties make party. Party is their product, and there was a great one going on at Summer Stage Wednesday night. After a day like Wednesday, it was a gift beyond measure.
The day started badly and then it got worse. It was a bad day for a great many New Yorkers. I was blessed, however, to be one of a select group of Gotham residents - those who were going to see the Beasties at Summer Stage that night.
The Beasties opened up with the live band thing. Developing that part of their act has added much longevity to their career. The Beastie Boys aren’t the greatest band, but they are a band, and that’s enough to set them apart from most of their peers.
But just who are their peers?
The Beastie Boys are three acts. They are a Rap group, for which they are most well known, but they are a sleazy 70’s porn style funk band and a Hardcore band as well.
Their peers are Murphy’s Law and Run-DMC. An interesting demographic; certainly it was back in the late eighties.
The Beastie Boys were a Hardcore Punk band before they got involved with Hip Hop, and to their credit, they have not forgotten that fact. Their set was peppered with songs from their un-glorious youth, short fast bursts of angst driven energy.
The Summer Stage was populated with my peers - forty-ish white folk who still like to party.
Just like the Beastie Boys.
I think that was, and still is, a large part of their appeal. They are us, and we are them, and we are all together, as exemplified by Mike D’s assertion that he took a ‘very hot’ A train to the show.
After three band numbers, including Gratitude, they put down the guitars and picked up the microphones. Root Down was followed by Shake Your Rump, and people were doing just that despite the not great sound.
It’s hard to sound amazing at an outdoor gig, even more so if you are currently touring small halls where it’s much easier to get decent sound. I’d say, overall, nobody cared too much about the sound. They were there for the party, not to be dazzled by soundscapes.
The Beastie Boys are not, and never will be Pink Floyd. We can all rest assured of that one fact.
Before long they picked up the instruments again, and I realized that the band numbers actually provided a break of sorts – a breather. That’s smart. Two hours is a long time to be running around the stage jumping up and down and rapping.
The sound was much better during the instrumental jam numbers, which I very much enjoyed despite the fact that my drug intake for the night was limited to beer - sweet, sweet beer.
Their new record, The Mix Up is an instrumental album, and if the few tunes they played off that record are any indication, I’d say it’s the best instrumental record since Jeff Beck’s Blow By Blow.
Of course I don’t buy a lot of instrumental records.
So that’s how it went for the rest of the show, back and forth between the MC thing and the band thing. They dropped a number of crowd favorites: Time To Get Ill, So What’cha Want, Pass The Mic, Brass Monkey, Sure Shot, Sabotage – the show closer, but the highlight of the evening for everyone was An Open Letter To NYC.
I’m a proud New Yorker, as I think we all are, and An Open Letter To NYC perfectly sums up what I’m so proud about.
Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten
From the Battery to the top of Manhattan
Asian, Middle-Eastern and Latin
Black, White, New York you make it happen
The Beasties aren’t gonna spend a lot of time tugging at your emotions, and that’s just as well. There’s room, a need even, for music that doesn’t require much thought to enjoy. The Beastie Boys have always provided that. Not that they aren’t intelligent in their approach, their craft – they are, but they don’t lose sight of what it is they are doing.
They are making party.
The Beastie Boys, making party since 1982.
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