Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
On 'Check Your Head' and 'Ill Communication,' most of the lyrics are much more, 'OK, you take that, and I'll say that' - they're split up.
If it's genuinely new, when people are hearing it, they're not really gonna be comfortable because they haven't heard it a thousand times before.
We have rocked the ozone radically, man. They could probably fix the ozone if everybody stopped what they were doing and they put some cement up there.
When Yauch died, it was really like losing my older brother. I mean, I have biological older brothers, but growing up, Adam really was my older brother.
Japan is brilliant for vinyl. There's all this rare stuff that I've been looking two years for, and you walk into a store, and you find it straight away.
Music is more available than ever. It's up to people to figure out. Ultimately, it's up to the business to figure out what the business is, monetizing that.
I don't know - the idea of a specific wine paired with a specific piece of music seems a little far-fetched to me. But maybe I just need to be opened to it.
That's the thing with all of us music geeks - music is the soundtrack to the things that happen in our lives, and there's music that's unique to that movie.
When I first became aware of music, it was probably the same way a lot of people do - even more suburban or rural people - from my older brothers playing music.
At the time, I was living pretty close to Ground Zero. I had to grab some necessary equipment, put it in my backpack, and flee the immediate proximity on my bike.
I kind of idolized older punk-rock and hip-hop bands, and I was, like, 15 when I started the Beastie Boys. And what business did we having doing that at that age?
I remember going to the East Village for the first time as a fifteen-year-old and going to Tompkins Square Park. That really seemed like a pretty edgy thing to do.
The amazing thing about music is that however many thousands of records I've got now, I know that there are still thousands more that I haven't even begun to discover.
The bottom line with a lot of bands that funk is being applied to is that they don't really listen to funk and aren't versed in funk. Like, you know, Gordon Lightfoot.
Mr. Philippe Zdar is a little bit like the uncle of the whole Daft Punk-Phoenix-Air thing in Paris and known for being in the group Cassius. It was interesting working with Philippe.
Things change. I used to have a real resistance to it and hold on to things, but let things happen and go with it, and you will actually go through it, and it's a lot less stressful.
New York isn't segregated the way many American cities are, where there are specific ethnic neighborhoods that don't necessarily co-exist, or they co-exist but in a much separate sense.
I don't think about Yauch in the form of his death. I think about him in the form of his life. He was like my closest older brother. There's just so much that we lived through together.
Lofts are great. But with a home, there is a lot to be said for delineated space. To have the luxury of a little separate work space is huge - and to have the dream-sequence master bath.
All the music I listened to in high school that I loved and that moved me wasn't the same music other kids were listening to in school. I got into punk rock and new wave, then dub and hip-hop.
I was showing up at the studio all the time with no bag, being like, 'I don't want to have a backpack. I've had backpacks my whole life, and I'm a grown man now. I should have something better.'
I do really enjoy Jay McInerney's wine writing. He's a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He's not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it.
When I was growing up in New York, we were the anomaly. Our family stayed, but back then families didn't stay. Once you had a second kid, you immediately left, so the kids could run around outside.
Each time you present a tour, you're faced with these questions of, 'How do you want to present visual information? How do you want to take the music that we're making on stage and visualize that?'
I don't know if it's just me getting older or if it's a reflection of times changing, but it just seems to me like among most of my friends and peers, there's a lot more time being spent at home than out.
Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it's never worked that way.
I'm really kind of a little bit romantic for the lost era. There's a lot of us that are - kind like James Murphy, same thing - we feel like it's this magic era that happened before us. And it wasn't even necessarily disco.
Arrogance generally is a bad thing, but with a band, somehow you have to have this gang mentality or this certain degree of arrogance to push forward an idea that's new enough that people aren't comfortable with it at first.
To me, the whole thing with the roots of rap music was when the DJ had to supply all the music for the group with two turntables. And the whole criteria of what that DJ would use had nothing to do with what type of band made a record.
My parents were very, very good about not separating us as kids from their adult friends. So on any given night, we'd have, like, this kind of freak show - artists and art dealers coming over. And these are the people I feel like I learned from.
Dub has been a big influence in terms of production. It's inspired so many people and so much music - in terms of music where mixing desk was the instrument. Central to that is the echo chamber, and I think there's a little bit of a romantic thing there.
Having to wake up at seven and go take the subway every morning, having to get over there with all these commuters and see every possible face of humanity and realizing that you're just the same as these other people is actually an amazingly positive thing.
I wanted to create this dialogue between music and visual art and vice versa. No matter what part of the spectrum they fill, whether it's visual, music, or whatever, artists are interested in other art forms. Your brain is already kind of firing in that way.
We're downtown New Yorkers and had very close proximity to the events of September 11th. Like everybody on the island of Manhattan, we were impacted by it in so many ways in terms of what we saw, what we felt, what our daily experience became in the wake of it.
I'm the first to admit that we were totally dependent on a particular place and time... for us, seeing Minor Threat at the CBGB hardcore matinee was just as necessary a force in our lives as the Treacherous Three at Club Negril or the Funky Four + One More at the Rock Lounge.
Wine is similar to music in that it's a purely experiential realm, and it's a purely subjective practice. That's sort of the funny thing about wine criticism or, for that matter, music criticism. At times, those are useful guides, but ultimately it's all about how you react to that music or wine.
London cabs always dis me. I purposefully give them a good tip because I'm trying to straighten up the image where they don't want to pick up some shady-looking, bummy kid like myself. I'm trying to teach them that if you pick up the bummy-looking kid, you still get tipped, man. But they still jerk me around.
Obviously, there are moments that you look back at and cringe - things in the past involving violence or disrespect to women or disrespect to other people that are so far away from what I want to put out there now. But it's actually a privilege to be able to change and be making records that reflect that change.
Hopefully everybody in the audience thinks, 'That's cool. I could do that.' I don't like the thought that they say, 'I saw the Beastie Boys last night, and they're mega-stars.' I'm a lot happier when the kids who come backstage or to the hotel try to give us tapes of what they've done instead of just getting an autograph.
For me, growing up in New York, it started with Elvis Costello and the Clash and then got into louder things like Bad Brains and Stimulators, because those were, like, the local bands. Then I started getting into bands from England like the Slits. I remember seeing Gang of Four at Irving Plaza; that was a really big show for me.
Even though hip-hop started as a battle format, different artists appeared on each other's records or hung out in the same clubs, supporting each other. That was a profound influence. Also, hip-hop, to me, represents limitless possibility. Hip-hop is always evolving. People say, "Oh, it's a very commercial thing, it's too R&B." But in six months, a record is gonna come out that will completely change that.