Trash Day #5: Sound Inspires Sound

I've been thinking a lot about Mike D and his new album, Thank You. I still remember hearing "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn" while caravanning back to the BK after my first Boy Scout summer camp way upstate. I think that was the longest time I had spent away from my family, and hearing the older kids from the neighborhood hype up the Beasties as hometown heroes while we lived out the lyrics I was hearing made quite the impression. Ill Communication came out when I was in junior high school. My social studies teacher at Hudde Junior High blew my mind when she casually mentioned that one of her daughters hung out with the Beasties (shoutout to Ms. Rosen, RIP) . I grabbed Hello Nasty on CD the week it came out, walking over to The Wiz that used to be across from Kings Plaza. The older stoner friends at my high school got me into Check Your Head and Paul's Boutique. When Adam Yauch died in May of 2012, I wrote an earnest tribute to him on my Tumblr blog (a post that is essentially a more rambling version of this paragraph).

I never got to see the Beastie Boys live but I did snag an In The Round tour shirt at some point. I've gone to see some of the reunion or album anniversary tours of bands from the 80s and 90s that I was either too young, naive, or broke to see back then. The results have been a bit mixed. Usually the crowd is a bit of a drain. Some people are way too drunk, some people seem irritated to be out of the house on a school night, some people are just annoying as hell for other reasons. Sometimes the bands seem a bit out of sync. While I have heard great things about their more recent outings, Pavement seemed a bit too abstract and bored when I saw them in Boston on their initial reunion run. The Breeders were great playing Last Splash and Pod at The Paradise. Not everyone can be The Breeders, unfortunately.

I wasn't even expecting Mike D and The 5D Band to play any Beastie Boys covers when they came to Royale here in Boston last month. I really enjoyed the initial songs from Thank You that began circulating online and I was curious to see how those sonic textures and jams played out in a live setting. As the press coverage has almost incessantly noted, this record feels risky to people who care about artistic legacies, prestige, and art as IP. There are folks who have felt burned by late-career projects, though I don't understand that point of contention as much when streaming makes sampling these wares a low-effort affair. There are nepo baby allegations that are easy to make, given the presence of Mike D's sons in 5D. And then there are the people who are just ageist or too obsessed with the maintenance of their own imagined IP, I guess.

The crowd met my low expectations but I knew that would be the case and decided to enjoy myself no matter what. I'll still take a minute to complain about them here for the clicks. I didn't care as much about the people who were decked head-to-toe in brand new Adidas fits and ironic big chains. Cosplay should be open to all, I suppose, even to people who no doubt have Mike Minogue signs in their front yards. I was more annoyed by the guy behind me who kept yelling "CLARENCE" at Mike despite getting zero positive encouragement from his peers in the crowd. When a last-minute opening DJ set got added to the bill, some people around me looked ready to speak to the manager, even though a DJ opening for a Beastie Boy seems like the least shocking thing to encounter in the world. The second song of Mike D and 5D's set was "Looking Down The Barrel of A Gun" and everyone (myself included) lost their minds. Then the band shifted back into Thank You tracks, which seemed to underwhelm the folks who wanted more classic hits. I did love that "Remote Control" off Hello Nasty was the second and final Beasties song of the set (don't worry, everyone went home happy when they plays "So Whatcha Want" as the encore). I think the crowds will shift up after the first wave of nostalgia-seekers gets their fill. And there were plenty of people not yelling things or talking who seemed more than happy to hear the new stuff.

Over the past year and change I have finally made it a priority to make art on a regular basis, primarily via collage. I'm 44 years old, and sometimes it can be easy to self-sabotage my efforts with concerns about my age and other perceived limitations. So it is perhaps not shocking that I am interested in hearing why Mike D decided to take up these endeavors again later in life at the age of 60. And a lot of what I have come across in those interviews has really validated my own growing sense of how valuable and fun this work is for me on a personal level.

For example, I really liked his comment to Consequence of Sound that, especially in the earlier stages of the process, "sound inspires sound":

Of course I'm going to use the mixing console. I'm going to run stuff through synthesizers in ways those things were never built to do, because I can. It's endless possibility. So I want to see how all of it sounds. Why just settle for doing it straight? I get it if you're Billie Holiday. I want to hear Billie Holiday sing too, but I'm no Billie Holiday. Hate to break the news!”

I've been thinking a lot recently about how my interest in sampling from hip-hop might inform some of the stuff I'm playing around with in collage. At the outset of doing collage work, I would find myself getting a bit too precious about certain images or materials. I still have a pile of stuff set aside in a folder that I am thinking about, but recently I had to get out of my own way and just see what might happen if my work got a bit messier and layered. And it's been really fun! I am increasingly building and building on top of different materials and trying out different things now, whereas previously I could easily get stuck in a rut. It's also been interesting to see patterns and deviations across these more recent, busier pieces. I can even start to see how certain things might fit together in a collection and how I might arrange things in that context, something I had been thinking about conceptually but struggling a bit with in practice. It feels like there are fewer constraints that I am placing on myself.

To circle back to Mike D and Thank You, I really like how opening track "Switch Up" excitedly throws a bunch of textures, noises, and beats at us at the outset, changing pace from fast to slow, moving from electronic beats to distorted symphonies, and encouraging its listeners to consider the question that gets repeated here: "Where we gonna go?" Starting with "Switch Up" is also a way to get curious listeners on board to a project that might not sound like what they might expect, but it feels more generous than calculated. I also really like the way that lyrical repetition plays against the sounds of these songs. Sometimes it can feel like the voice is an anchor in an electronic sea, other times it can feel like a mantra, like on "True Colors." If you don't go into this record expecting tidy alignment with the rhythms and wordplay of a Beastie Boys production, you'll find some fun songs in here. And it's also not a project that is so far removed from something like Hello Nasty.

Anyway, I didn't expect to go all Pitchfork in this installment. As I said, I'm excited to see someone on the other side of 50 making something like this and having a good time in the process. Hopefully more new music is in the cards. In the meantime I am thinking a lot about textures, harmonies, and discord in my own stuff elsewhere.

I didn't love Onslaught or Hope, cleverly-marketed "genre-bending" movies from A24 and Neon. Hope has some great-looking ads running in my algorithms, and I really like some of those Onslaught posters. I can barely remember much about the movies themselves, aside from the Nazi White Duke outfit and bald cap Dan Stevens wears in Onslaught and the pretentious sci-fi gibberish that "concludes" Hope. I was going to write more about these movies but I am finding myself annoyed. You can see some initial thoughts over at Letterboxd.

If you're looking a movie recommendation from the crop of what I have seen so far this month, check out 1977's Death Promise from the good folks over at Vinegar Syndrome. It may not have had the sheen, marketing, or pedigree of a Neon or A24 release, but Death Promise has more than its share of what these production companies claim to be selling contemporary cinephiles. A collective of slumlords and business interests work to forcibly remove poor tenants from various New York City properties in the late 1970s, and things are going pretty well for them until they murder the father of an up-and-coming martial artist (played by "The Latin Panther" Charles Bonet). The class war heats up and revenge is sought and found over a series of satisfying deaths and set pieces, culminating in a surprise showdown that involves some particularly entertaining evil henchmen. Marc Edward Heuck has a nice overview of the flick over at the New Beverly Cinema site.

Death Promise is an extremely satisfying story of class war gone right that was likely also cathartic for Bonet, given his own apparent issues with landlords at the time. I don't mind when actors play dress up and get weird but the energy and the aesthetics feel different when it feels like the actors aren't too far afield from the stories being told on the screen. The bulk of Onslaught is set in a trailer park but the setting feels more like a caricature than something lived in or even interesting from a spatial perspective for the carnage that unfolds there. Hope takes place at an imagined space just outside the DMZ separating North and South Korea, and the subtitles translate certain signs in the landscape to amplify this setting. But the film seems increasingly disinterested in its own locations, especially as the village and its heavily-armed elderly inhabitants are abandoned for drawn-out sequences in anonymous forests and stretches of highway.

Onslaught and Hope both set up imposing antagonists and reel in audiences with the story of their inevitable collisions with their respective main characters, but the actual encounters between these opposing forces are pretty unsatisfying. Onslaught's souped-up hit squad is somehow flummoxed by the inferior firepower of the film's heroes, conveniently scaling back the efficiency and ultraviolence the movie has spent its runtime documenting prior to this meeting. Hope fares similarly, in that the sources of the film's rampage are suddenly reduced to Tom and Jerry success rates once the designated survivors are in their vicinity. These sorts of interactions are fine in, say, a video game, but an unwillingness to commit to their own terms left Hope and Onslaught looking a bit lazy and silly when the rubber hit the road.

I think I am going to expand my writing over here in the coming weeks and months. I'll still be doing these "Trash Day" posts because they are enjoyable to me, but I've also been thinking about posts that fall into categories that align with some of my current interests in comics, wrestling, art, etc. The first bit of stuff in that series will be looking at adaptations; stay tuned!

In the meantime, here are some links and notes related to some other things I have been encountering and enjoying:

Over on Bluesky, writer Tom Ewing recently wrapped up a mega-thread he was calling #EventsDearBoy, in which he read, discussed, and ranked a bunch of comic book crossover events. I really enjoyed scrolling through this series. If anyone has recs for similar types of accounts to follow over there, please let me know.

In the wrestling world, "The Butcher" Andy Williams recently and tragically passed away at the age of 48. The Butcher and The Blade (and The Bunny!) were standouts from the early days of AEW, and my enjoyment led me to Every Time I Die (a band that many of my non-wrestling friends have been fans of for years). The tribute show to Butcher on this past week's AEW Collision had a great collection of tributes from colleagues and an emotional main event match that let fellow Buffalo wrestler Danny Garcia shine.

I finally decided to upgrade the terrible record player I purchased impulsively a decade or so ago, so I am back in the vinyl game over here. Some recent acquisitions I have been enjoying (in addition to my copy of Thank You) are Gravest Gravy by The Cramps, Who Loves The Sun by Chat Pile, and Fifth Dimension by The Byrds. The high prices of new releases and the glut of Record Store Day slop have made it easy to not go on a spending spree yet. I am bummed that my copy of Pavement's Terror Twilight seems to be scratched up but that is a fixable problem. It's been fun to blast some tunes when I'm making a mess in my office as I cut up old comic books.

While Serial Mom was a cable staple of my teens and I have always been glad that John Waters exists in the world, I have only recently been really diving into his movies, writing, and artwork. One of my current commuter reads is Role Models. I read and enjoyed Mr. Know-It-All when it came out in 2019 but I am really taken with this one. I especially love how interested Waters is in other people; it never feels extractive or anthropological in an annoying academic way. It's got some voyeuristic elements I suppose but never in a manner that isn't self-aware or compassionate. I love when he invites people over to his house to chat. Waters is a real citizen of the world in the best possible ways.

My other commuter book is Paul Elie's The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in The 1980s. Elie is definitely riffing on Greil Marcus (as he notes) but it works particularly well with this subject matter and cast of characters. Growing up Catholic in Brooklyn in the 1980s in a predominantly Irish and Italian-American neighborhood, I definitely felt the contrast between my more immediately conservative surroundings and what was happening in Manhattan. I remember sympathizing a ton with Peggy Olson during the first season of two of Mad Men despite growing up a generation after her. As someone who feels increasingly exhausted by pop culture explainer videos and AI summaries on social media, Elie's book feels like a nice alternative, drilling down on particular moments and individuals and drawing different contemporaries into conversation with each other. What's funny (to me) is that he's covering some well-worn ground here and pretty sizable figures: Warhol, U2, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen (among many others). But the framing and the connections to other contexts through the lens of organized religion, in addition to the online fatigue I've been experiencing, make for a compelling read so far.

Feel free to chat with me on Bluesky or email me: jimmcgrath[dot]us[at]gmail