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see the end of the article...funny shit
AUSTIN, Texas - Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz has a bone to pick with the City of Brotherly Love.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/n...y/14163480.htm
"Yo, what's up with Philadelphia?" the Beastie Boy asks, turning the tables after I've come to ask him, and his partners-in-rhyme Michael "Mike D" Diamond and Adam "MCA" Yauch, about their new movie, Awesome: I ... Shot That! The pioneering white rap group's populist concert film is having a preview tonight at 200 theaters, including the UA Riverview in South Philadelphia. It opens March 31.
The Three Stooges of hip-hop made their names as impudent louts in the "Fight for Your Right to Party" 1980s. Now, they've grown into mature artistes and political activists (Free Tibet!), and, in Yauch's case, have acquired a seriously old-school, full gray beard.
But even as the boyhood pals from upper middle-class Jewish families in New York near (and pass) 40, when they're together, they revert to wisecracking form.
They're meeting the media here at the South by Southwest music festival to promote Awesome - a concert film that documents a sold-out show at New York's Madison Square Garden in October 2004. The footage was shot on video cameras given to 50 fans, then edited together by Yauch, who directed under the alias Nathaniel Hornblower.
But that doesn't mean that they're actually going to talk about the movie.
There are more pressing matters to discuss.
Like the Lollapalooza tour the Beasties headlined in Philadelphia in 1994. That show made headlines when the Buddhist monks who began it with a blessing were pelted by water bottles. (The monks were very forgiving.) Less publicized was the theft of the Beasties' full-size basketball backboard from backstage.
"There are a lot of intense people in Philadelphia, I guess," Ad-Rock says. "They stole our backboard."
"It's the city of tough love," says Mike D, still in shock as he ponders an unsolved mystery suitable for Cold Case. "How do you walk out with a whole backboard while we're up on stage?"
Then there's the sorry state of the New York Knicks. "I would like to make you a trade," says Ad-Rock, who dates Le Tigre's riot-grrl leader, Kathleen Hanna. He's inviting derision by wearing a Patrick Ewing shirt and the cap of his favorite, forlorn hoops squad. "Stephon Marbury for Allen Iverson."
No? "OK, Stephon Marbury and Steve Francis for Allen Iverson, and we'll throw in Quentin Richardson," suggests Mike D, the tanned, California-based Beastie, who's the hands-on man at the trio's record label, Grand Royal. Shaking his head over an early-morning bowl of Cheerios, he's realized the futility of the situation. "This is the worst New York Knicks team I can remember my entire life."
OK, guys. Good luck with Larry Brown. We're keeping Iverson. We're sorry about your backboard. Can we talk about the movie? Which one of you came up with idea to have the fans shoot the whole thing?
"It was something I saw on our Web site," Yauch says. "A kid had posted 30 seconds of a show that he had shot on the video camera on his cell phone."
Previously, the Beasties had encouraged creative interaction with their fans - they've made their tracks available for free to be remixed by anyone who chooses to stand in for Mix Master Mike, their longtime DJ.
Yauch wanted to upend concert-movie convention. "So I got the idea to do a whole movie that way, with footage shot from the audience. I talked to these guys and they were like - "
" - I believe my exact words were: Sounds like a great idea, as long as I don't have to do any work," Ad-Rock says.
"I sent my condolences," Mike D says.
Yauch hunkered down for a year with a team of editors, augmenting the audience footage - some would say cheating - with film shot on five onstage cameras, and employed 6,732 edits to put together a hyperkinetic concert film that looks unlike any other.
Awesome draws on the band's impressive two-decade career, from 1985's mega-selling (and critically derided) License to Ill through 1989's wildly influential, sample-mad masterpiece, Paul's Boutique, and to their current stature as canny craftsmen of classic hip-hop cut with punk-rock and old soul grooves.
The movie is packed with laddish 1980s hits like "Hey Ladies" and their still-crackling material from 2004's To the 5 Boroughs such as "Ch-Check It Out" and "An Open Letter to NYC." It also shows off their ugly green Adidas track suits, as well as powder-blue tuxes, in a segment of the show where Horovitz plays guitar, Yauch, bass, and Diamond, drums.
And it goes where few concert films have gone before - not just tracking the Boys as they ride the elevator to the Garden's upper levels for an in-crowd encore, but following fans to the beer line, the hot dog stand and, yes, the urinal.
Awesome is the polar opposite of Jonathan Demme's new Neil Young: Heart of Gold, which ignores the audience and puts the filmgoer on stage with the musicians. The Beasties' movie makes the crowd as much a part of the movie as the band.
"Wattstax is one really good concert movie," Mike D says. "And a lot of the things that make it great don't have anything to do with the music. That's what I like about our movie. Yeah, it revolves around our performance, but it feels more like the audience's experience of a show than just what's going on onstage."
Oh, and before we go, Ad-Rock's got something else to say about Philadelphia. It has to do with Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson.
"I started an online Scrabble game with him, and he decided not to finish it. Maybe it was because I was ahead, by a lot," the rapper surmises. "So I rolled up to him on the street in New York one day, and he says to me, 'That's really weird, because I've been playing a lot of online Scrabble with Wendy from Wendy and Lisa.' "
"What kind of ... is that? Like, you've moved up in the solar system from the Beastie Boys to Wendy and Lisa, and now you don't have time for me? Just go back to Philly and tell him that when he's through hanging out with celebrities and he wants to come back and play Scrabble with his real friends, I'm ready."
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