THE BEASTIE EFFECT

Just as some sites seem to have fostered Kitty Genovese syndrome on a global scale, with hordes more likely to whip out the phone to film before they’ll ever call for help, I’ve long felt that social media has a tendency to sustain grieving to the point where it simply becomes crocodile tears. If it’s not a death, it’s a birthday of a dead person, then the anniversary of that death and I felt that I’d become a little hardened to all that. After all, how can you feel real sadness for the passing of somebody you never met? Then Adam Yauch died and I felt guilty for being so cynical, because — trite as it sounds — it genuinely felt like I’d lost a mentor.

This blog can’t be neatly summarised, but I can assure you that at nearly every level, there’s some Beastie Boys influence — despite MCA’s admirable achievements as an individual, I’m afraid that I see the trio as one. Instead I treat the Beastie Boys as a leaping trinity of differently pitched sounds operating in unison. I can’t pin down the people who visit here either, but I know — from comments on skate and clothing entries in particular — that the Beastie Boys had a vast impact on them. The Beastie Boys were a conduit for pretty much every sub-cultural element I’ve ever taken an interest in. Lee Perry, John Holmes, Spike Jonze, Minor Threat, Slayer, Ben Davis (see above for evidence of that brand’s impact on me), adidas Campus, PUMA Clydes and all the rest were all interconnected by Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D’s joyous brain farts of cultural references. Let them decipher it rather than offer a simplified path — those that get it will get it eventually. ‘Grand Royal’ magazine’s frequent journalistic gems opened my eyes to the joys of self-indulgent long form writing, Todd James’ Brooklyn Dust logo is still one of my favourites, the talk of deadstock shoe sourcing (and we’ll forgive them for inadvertently spawning the crappy Sneaker Pimps) and Mike D’s involvement in X-Large is a pivotal moment in street wear.

A fair chunk of the industry I work in is the byproduct of something that the Beastie Boys contributed to significantly and I know, from Russ at Unorthodox Styles’ office on my first job interview there, that they’d made a mark on him too. So I kind of owe them for providing me with a source of income and as a founder member, Yauch can take a fair amount of that gratitude from me. If you operate in the street wear realm at any level, you’ve got to doth a snapback to the man — think back to the X-Fuct era, Nigo doing his homework by studying X-Large’s ape preoccupation (which went full circle when Ad-Rock wore Very Ape and the crew wore and collaborated with Bathing Ape) and MCA wearing a Supreme coach jacket to meet the Dalai Lama. They embraced the internet pretty early on too (I can remember thinking X-Large shunning paper catalogues for a website wasn’t going to catch on — turns out I was wrong). All that and I haven’t even mentioned the music.

From seeing the Beastie Boys get vilified on the cover of ‘The Sun’ when they toured with Madonna, I found myself festooning crudely drawn characters with equally poorly rendered VW logos at the age of 9 in every notebook at school. The Beastie Boys had strippers and the press said that they made fun of disabled kids. As a kid myself, that seemed funny. Just as the charts were riddled with comedy raps, the contents of ‘Licence to Ill’ seemed to fit in perfectly (and in retrospect, given the boys’ misunderstood self-parody, satires like ‘No Sleep Til Bedtime’ were doubly weak). Then they vanished for a minute after cropping up in a Sky Movies classic, ‘Tougher Than Leather’ (despite being regarded as a flop, an album that helped cement my love of hip-hop way more than ‘Raising Hell’ did — I know a few other rap nerds that feel the same). After ads cropped up in the specialist press and ‘Smash Hits’ alike, ‘Paul’s Boutique’ seemed to hit with a thud, despite the deserved good will it amassed later down the line. I especially like the revelation in the articles below that the Beastie Boys horror-comedy film they were meant to make with Russell and Rick — ‘Scared Stupid’— which was going to be followed up by a ‘To Catch a Thief’ remake starring Oran’ Juice Jones was deaded when Molly Ringwald talked Ad-Rock out of making it because it might harm his acting credibility.

My blood boiled when 3rd Bass took potshots at them (“Screaming ‘Hey Ladies’? Why bother?”) at the close of ‘Sons of 3rd Bass’ (Whiteboys calling whiteboys “devils” always confused me). Then the Beastie Boys owned the decade that followed and taught me that being unpleasant to ladies wasn’t that cool, growing up publicly. Not a lot of bands can do that and while the whole instrumental jam and comedy ‘Country Mike’ material never did anything for me, you had to respect the willingness to experiment. Plus they proved to we rap-loving crackers that just being your damn self and getting whiteboy wasted was the key to longevity, rather than haplessly trying to be “down”, and that through a few degrees of separation, pretty much everything was hip-hop in one way or another. I still kind of blame them for inadvertently creating Limp Bizkit and co, but despite that charmless mutant offspring misinterpreting what went before, the good far outweighs the bad.

Skipping from talk of skin colour, how many rap groups from the early 1980s are still together and more importantly, how many would you still pay to see? That’s the real mark of the Beastie Boys’ achievement. Some argued that forty-somethings spitting fly gibberish over distorted drums might have started to lose its appeal as an MP3, but live they could still crush it. Plus, they really seemed to be friends offstage — this was no marriage of convenience, which makes Adam’s passing all the more heartbreaking.

At a push, if I had to pick, MCA was the best rapper of the trio — as with the equally missed Guru, it’s mostly the voice, with those gruff tones counteracting the nasal nerdery at work. I’m particularly fond of his insanely stoned delivery on an early demo of ‘Car Thief’. Yauch’s film work (not dissimilar to George Harrison’s work with Handmade) with Oscilloscope Laboratories is significant too in supporting great output — ‘Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot’, directed by Adam, was strong. This is just a scraping of what MCA achieved too — it’s the art of turning music, art, clothing, film, sport and print into one big playroom, but somehow adding integrity into the mix too. Nobody else will ever match that, but even a handful of lessons learnt are enough to keep things moving.

Goodbye Adam Yauch — cheers for everything.

The images below are taken from this ‘Spin’ article from 1998 that’s a must-read.

Here’s the whole of ‘Tougher Than Leather’ in all its trashy glory. MCA just jeers and pulls some faces when he’s off the stage, but that doesn’t stop the Beastie Boys cameos from being excellent.

PLENTY TOUGH

Hey, ironist whitey — don’t front, you know you’ve pretended to throw up a gang sign, Crip walk or done up the top button on a Pendleton and scowled at the mirror. Bet you’d shit yourself if you were in gang territory though — your blogwear wouldn’t stop from being treated like Marky Mark by locals. Still, our preoccupation with Los Angeles gang culture isn’t any more inexplicable than the mafia fascination that pervades popular culture (gotta love ‘Bangin’ in Little Rock’ with one of my favourite moments at 17:06), and any organisation operating outside society’s rules with its own rules and uniforms is going to fire imaginations. Ah yes, the uniforms.

Let’s be clear here, who’s selling the aforementioned Pendleton, Chucks, Carhartt, Dickies, Ben Davis, khakis and white tees to you — some lookbook clown with a side parting who you could put in a chokehold, or some real OGs? That pride in the quality basics is a striking aesthetic that’s had more impact on the current wave of simple, quality looks than is credited.

If we’re going to explore how a blog post like this comes about, it was entirely fuelled by the photo of Crip founder member Greg “Batman” Davis (check his website here) in swagger mode — I don’t understand enough to either condone or condemn Greg’s earlier lifestyle, but with his Charles Manson friendship plus dalliances with the Symbionese Liberation Army and Jim Jones he’s a fascinating figure — that I spotted at the MOCA ‘Art in the Streets’ show. The way a whole gang phenomenon was summarised in a couple of sentences as part of the exhibit was curious, but that high rolling image is a strong piece of criminal imagery, with Davis seemingly looking to document a moment of perceived invincibility fired my imagination.

 

What happened to Nemo Librizzi’s Bloods and Crips documentary ‘Lay Down Old Man’ from 2005 that got a single screening at Blacktronica and some film festivals before vanishing? It had plenty of footage of Davis reflecting over his past, but whereas ‘Bastards of the Party’ and Stacy Peralta’s ‘Crips & Bloods: Made in America’ are readily available, ‘Lay Down Old Man’ has never reached DVD.

That Crip talk made me think of the Glen E’ Friedman photo session from South Central Cartel’s 1994 LP ‘N Gatz We Truss’. It’s not the guns which grabbed my attention (seriously, what was the odds of ANOTHER group having a Havoc and Prodeje in?), it was the customised Ben Davis work shirts, including the Def Jam West variation that blew me away. I’ve even put it in mood boards, blissfully ignorant of the heavy metal in the foreground. What can I say? I’m stupid like that. That in turn had me pondering the mighty Ben Davis. Seeing as the blog logo (courtesy of Sofarok) is a Ben Davis tribute, I’ve never done the brand justice on this site.

All you really need is O.D. Wolfson’s 1995 interview with Benjamin Franklin Davis and Frank Davis from ‘Grand Royal’ #2 — that offers some excellent background on the brand and how it started. I’ve upped a scan of the page here, but there’s a few other interesting morsels that make for an interesting supplement to the answers Mr. Davis provides.

Beyond the handful of store photos, painted ads and newspaper promotions from the late 1940s and 1950s, it’s interesting that Davis mentions that while the shirt is a Ben Davis creation, their pants were based on a design that was an acquisition (the Ben Davis brand started in 1935) from the then defunct Neustradter Bros. and their ‘Boss of the Road’ line — the gorilla was a reaction to mascots like the ‘Boss of the Road’ bulldog. I found some of their old advertising (dating back to 1901), and it’s notable that the ‘Boss of the Road’ brand was bought and resurrected by Lee in the late 1930s with added Lee branding, but that familiar jowly pooch is still present.

Continuing Ben Davis’s link to other denim powerhouses, Ben’s grandfather Jacob W. Davis’s patent for his invention – the copper pocket rivet for jeans — filed on August 9, 1872 is available too. That started with duck pants before the transfer to denim. That patent was half-owned by a certain Levi Strauss, and it’s a hugely significant moment in denim evolution — Jacob worked with Levi by developing the manufacture of the resulting pants and he sold his interest in the patent to Levi Strauss in 1907, just before he passed away.

Ben Davis passed away on February 19, 2009 — a pioneer and inadvertent father of streetwear in many ways. But that’s a whole different story…

UK/Euro heads should tap up the good folks of www.theoriginalstore.co.uk for your Ben Davis needs.

Ben Davis store photos taken from this page right here.

STAINS

I watched Joel Schumacher’s adaptation of Nick McDonell’s ‘Twelve’ recently and loathed it. If there’s a teen drama with a hint of grit, I’m fully down, but this was nonsense that hovered between fantasy and realism, before slipping over and choking on its own vomit. It was an unsuccessful experiment, and one that made me appreciate Roger Avary’s ‘The Rules of Attraction’ a great deal more. You’d think dead-eyed rich kids getting up to no good would be a no-brainer, but it frequently misfires on the basis that the entire cast are invariably totally unlikeable. I can’t tolerate the wobbling camera any more either.

I want beauty on my screen, even if it’s in the ugliest setting—I enjoyed seeing Coppola unleash the visual pyrotechnics again on the melodramatic ‘Tetro’, even if critics claiming it’s his best since 1979 omit the mighty ‘Rumble Fish’ (on which ‘Tetro’ bears many similarities) and ‘The Outsiders’. ‘Animal Kingdom’ made Melbourne’s underworld look pretty without compromising on the intensity. Accessible equipment doesn’t need to eliminate the art of cinematography. Twin a lo-fi look—albeit one with a digital sheen—with Larry Clark-lite sex and narcotics, and you’re in trouble. Larry Clark’s knack for composure means he can create a memorable shot in the gnarliest of circumstances too, and true-to-form, he’s stirring up a controversy in Paris right now as under-18s are getting denied entrance to his new exhibition, if they’re actually older than some of the exhibited subjects. I’m keen to see how Larry’s interpretation of Neil Jordan’s ‘Mona Lisa’ turns out.

That, plus Verbal and Yoon’s Runaways cover version (I recommend ‘The Runaways’ to anyone who’s interested in that era—it surpasses ‘What We Do Is Secret’ in the band biopic stakes) got me thinking about the golden age of teen flicks (I claim that 1979-1981 was a pretty good vintage) once again. I’ve discussed it here before, extolling the virtues of ‘Over the Edge’, ‘Times Square’, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen. the Fabulous Stains’, ‘Pixote’ and ‘Christiane F.’ but my lack of a scanner stopped me from upping what I think is the finest love letter to a cult movie ever written—Sarah Jacobson’s ‘1997 Grand Royal article on ‘…the Fabulous Stains’, entitled ‘Why They Didn’t Put Out’.

Sarah championed Riot Grrrrl on movies as both a journalist and filmmaker. Sadly, she passed away in 2004, but her dedication to an barely released 1981 movie that attempted to capture the new wave of feminist rock with a touch of Runaways and Go-Go’s in the plot, plus heavy testosterone in the form of a curious supergroup made of Pistols and Clash members with Ray Winstone as the vocalist. Sarah directed a nice little documentary about the movie too, effectively enlightening a snowballing cult audience who may well have been disappointed by the actual execution of the film. It’s a noble effort, well performed (witness Winstone thump Fee Waybill of the Tubes in the face for real), but for all the ladies and excess makeup, it’s heavy-handed in the extreme.

After years of hunts for copies of a friend’s VHS copy of a friend’s copy of a copy from a convention of a brother’s friend’s copy from New Wave Theater back in the ’80s, Rhino putting it out on DVD a few years back felt curiously anticlimactic. The lack of this documentary as an extra due to rights issues was sad, and the Grand Royal piece should have been included too in a Criterion style. Worse still, Sarah Jacobson’s absence to appreciate the fruits of her cheerleading made this long-overdue package’s arrival bittersweet. The story behind the film is a lot better than the film itself, and the article’s soundbite-heavy approach makes it a necessary read if you’ve got a passing interest in the film or any of the subcultures it sucks up in its attempts to channel a rebel zeitgeist.

Because I don’t eff with Tumblr, because they’re mostly excuses for posers to demonstrate how much of a pseudo-intellectual idiot they are and how quick their right-click forefinger is on Google Images is, like chucking extra images down here. Two of my favourite Nike-related images this time. This Friedman Bad Brains shot (used on the ‘Omega Sessions’ release) taken in 1980 is legendary for more than Darryl Jenifer’s Dr. Know’s (Thanks for the correction Nick) footwear. For years I thought they were Blazers, but is that malnourished swoosh not that of the legendary Franchise? And loosely tied into this talk of Riot Grrrl, the homie Sharmadean’s opening of Bleach a hair salon inside the WAH! space used Courtney and Lil’ Kim on the one-year anniversary and launch flyer, Kimberley looked cool on the cover of ‘Hardcore’, but her Air Max 95s look in the 1995 press shot for Junior M.A.F.I.A. is crazy underrated.

In the scanned piece above, boy genius Ben Fogelnest (of Squirt TV fame) shouts out ‘Thurston Moore’s Rap Damage’ that short film gets triple props beyond the Sonic Youth affiliations for having the legendary Maurice Menares guest star. Those who’ve met him can testify that he’s a very funny man. He was equally amusing in 1991.

CAMBER: NO NONSENSE

It’s apparent that Camber don’t do funny business. There’s an enduring mystery to this sports/workwear brand that’s nicely at odds with every other brand letting the blogsphere see every inch of their inner workings down to the guts – they make great product, so hard wearing that it nearly falls into the current workwear boom that’s got your local hipster hotspot looking like dress rehearsals for ‘The Grapes Of Wrath’ with added GORE-TEX. This has been the year of the heritage range. Marketing guy spots local urchins in denim and workboots, discovers the hype blogs and realises that all they need is their old logo on a patch, Vibram on the sole and voila! They’re in the running.

In the tumble to show just how goddamn old and authentic they are, old brands are acting less like the bemused Farnklin Davis who expressed concern for Ben Davis fan Snoop Dogg around the time he was aquitted of murder charges, “I heard something about that Snoop Dogg guy getting in trouble…” or a crotchety old man chasing a young man in cropped chinos wielding a DMC-GF1 off his factory property. Nope. Now it’s all blogger tours and storytelling.