Conducting Sabotage with "Sabotage:" Remembering MCA

My main gig in the mid 90s was working as a lackey in Blockbuster Music’s flagship store in Lewisville. In a way, the store was the last step in the evolution of music consumerism before the internet made hardcopy obsolete. The store was constructed with a complicated array of directional speakers and taped video that pummeled the customer with images and sounds as they moved through its labyrinthine aisles. When in the country section, you would only hear George Strait and Garth Brooks, but as the customer moved to the rock section, they would magically move into an environment bathed in the newest hits from Soundgarden and Smashmouth.

The screens assigned for each section played music videos of taped point-of-sale items. By today’s standards, they were pretty archaic. Relatively small screens were hooked up to VCRs that had to be rewound every three hours or so. For the casual customer, it worked pretty well. For the employee stuck in this environment for forty hours a week, however, it was incredibly overstimulating.  There was also a large nine-screen display that concentrated on the top sellers in each genre.  Its contents could be heard in the entryways and listening booth areas of the store.

Most of the music on this top-seller tape was utter crap. When the Beastie Boys' Ill Communication came out, however, Sabotage made the cut, and most of us in the store were delighted to have this track end up in rotation. We would always crank the song up when it came on. In fact, as an experiment, we slowly began testing the limits of the store's equipment on Sabotage, pushing it louder and louder each time it came up.



Eventually, the manager came up and complained about how it was so loud. We insisted, however, that the song was just louder on the tape than all of the others, and we began to take great joy in cranking the song up beyond all reason. Then, when the manager came and turned it down, we would turn the rest of the tape down to a barely audible level so that he would have to come back and turn it back up. This continued for nearly a month and a half until the next point of sale tape came in.

This is my most treasured memory of any Beastie Boys track, conducting sabotage with Sabotage, and the one that immediately came to mind when I heard about the untimely death of Adam Yauch, AKA MCA. I knew that he had been fighting cancer for awhile, and his absence in the videos attached to The Hot Sauce Committee made me concerned that the battle might not have been going so well.



Still, I was taken aback yesterday when I heard the news. Although I have many memories associated with the Beastie Boys music, I hope that this story is one that might have made Yauch smile in the way that his music often made me smile.

Surreal Listening With The Hot Sauce Committee

I associate a lot of personal music with the people and places that band trips have taken me, both as teacher and as student.  Although I can certainly recall, for example, listening to Rush’s Vapor Trails as I moved percussion equipment down a particularly steep hill in San Marcos in 2002, it is often the people that were with me on these trips that I remember most vividly.  This seems odd to me because listening in these situations necessitates the use of personal media and headphones, which is often, for me, an isolating and almost surreal experience.

Don’t misunderstand - I do enjoy the fidelity of current earbud earphones.  If I want to have a focused, nuanced listening to an album, there is probably no better way than to pipe it straight into my skull, but it is impossible to have any kind of conversation with the people around me.  Even more disorienting is the schism between what the ears hear and the body feels.  My ear often perceives frequencies that I would, under normal circumstances, also feel in my chest or with the hairs on my arms, which creates a feeling of dreamlike disengagement from “regular” perception.

Sometimes this detachment is almost empowering, like I am walking around with a secret that no one else is hip to.  This was certainly the case when I popped in the earbuds at Sea World with a dual purpose: to listen to the Beastie Boys’ long-anticipated new release The Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 and to escape the park’s musical mandate.  The park's unending and nearly unbearable cross between an unhip instrumental version of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and Kenny G’s pentatonic noodling seemed to say nothing more than “welcome, now move on” over and over again.

Although the first listen to any album is rarely forthcoming, The Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 was in no way disappointing, particularly in the immersive environment that personal audio provides.  As I meandered through the park watching the activities of all the “normal” people on that pleasant spring afternoon, I was simultaneously engulfed in a seemingly cavernous auditory space circumscribed by humming bass, distorted vocals, and reverb-drenched drum loops.  Several tracks brought on a smile, but this one stood out on my initial listen.  

In retrospect, this post is probably more about my listening practices than the album itself, but I think that personal music players create a particularly unique listening experience that is worth the diversion.  I reserve the right to come back to The Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 in the near future once it has simmered a bit.  For now, it will undoubtedly satisfy my craving for some new hip-hop.