<nettime> The Raw Uncut: Beastie Boys Liner notes...

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@mail.earthlink.net>]

hey folks, this is an essay I did for the Beastie Boys new photo book 
"Pass the Mic." I discuss stuff like multi-cultural movements in 
contemporary culture, trying to break down barriers between various 
factions and what it means to make music in the late 20th century - 
through the lens, of course, of the current 21C moment. The reason 
I'm posting it here is that it's about the gaze - how people really 
look at one another - Black, White, Asian, Hispanic etc etc not to 
mention a perverse sense of "hey... why not..." It's not just about 
technology...
Paul



The Raw Uncut
by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Ari Marcopolous and the Beastie Boys or how friends can catch some of 
the weirdest stuff you never really thought anybody would remember, 
and then show it to you 10 years laterŠ


"I hold the mic like a grudgeŠ"
Rakim

Š.It was another one of those days in the early 21st Century - I was 
on another continent, dj'ing another event in another country. Flip 
coordinates, repeat circumstances, reconnect the line of thought with 
the sounds of the scenario. Transition and exit, convergence and 
departure. Flip the moment, fold it in on itself. Cut. Repeat. 
Another tour, another situation. Look at the people and hear the 
sounds. RepeatŠCut.
Š.But anyway, this time, after a long set, I got back to   the hotel 
and couldn't sleep. I sat trying to figure out some different angles 
for this essay: Ari Marcopoulos and the Beastie Boys are all pretty 
distinct figures and basically, they're ciphers - real personalities 
with real viewpoints - something that's all too rare these days. You 
have to think of these two variables and how they interact: one, the 
band, the other the photographer. You've got to look at the images in 
this book as the kind of photographs a friend would take. Rare 
moments of sentiment, flashes of lucidity in front of  thousands of 
people, reflective fragments of thought splayed out on a mixing board 
after hours and hours of getting the track just rightŠ the studio, 
the audience, the action; it's all what you wouldn't really think 
about, and Ari's a master of getting those kinds of portraits out of 
his subjects. In the pages of this book, you'll see how friends 
interact and create portraits of one another. I guess that's what 
visual music is about. Mirror and reflection, sound and selectionŠTo 
make a long story short, it's not easy to encapsulate the 
photographer or the band. As with any medium, there's a literal 
chorus of precedents: James van Der Zee's documentation of the Harlem 
jazz scene of the 1920's, Gordon Parks real time liquid flow 
capturing the mood and intensity of the civil rights movement, Walker 
Evans invocations of the radical pluralism of America in the midst of 
intense industrial change, Ernie Paniccioli's flash of the spirit 
prints of the electricity that animates so much of hip-hop in the 
pages of magazines like "Word Up!", and the athletic prowess that 
seems to be the ouevre's raison d'etre in magazines like "The 
Source." But there's also that weird sense of timelessness too: I 
think of Edward S. Curtis's monumental prints of the Native People's 
of North America one hundred years ago, or Barron Claiborne's black 
and white photos - fashionably cosmopolitan pan-African portraits of 
contemporary r &b stars and hip-hop mogulsŠ But of course, this is 
the Beastie Boys, and yeah, class, social hierarchy, and of course, 
there's that basic sense of 'yo! this is the crew just hanging out' 
type vibe pervading the imagesŠ but maybe that's the point. The 
reality of how bands become dj's and m.c.'s -  and migrate back and 
back again - is something that has yet to really be documented, 
although, I think that with this book, we're off to a good start. 
Think of "Pass the Mic" as a kind of action portrait of a crew that 
was caught at the crossroads of America in the late 20th century - a 
radically changing landscape made of just about everything we can 
think about at the moment, and you'll get an idea of the lives lived 
in these images. It's a movie that's yet to be released, although I'm 
sure someone somewhere is working on it as I writeŠ Whiteboys, 
brothers with what in hip-hop some like to call the 'ice grill' 
melts, becomes what others call the 'gas face'  and then just morphs 
and becomesŠ. Real. From one state of existence to another, the face 
and the eyes and the movements that hold it all together are what 
makes these portraits so poignant. The Beastie Boys album titles say 
it all: "License to Ill," "Pass the Mic" "Check your Head," 
"Scientists of Sound," "Ill Communication" - these are titles of 
philosophers and psycho-analysts of America's patchwork mind at work, 
and the photos of these gents as they do their thing brings to mind 
some of the strangest ways that America has changed in the last two 
decades - it's the ease of flow, the utterly natural mayhem that 
young folks in the U.S. of A just take for granted. That's the 
'modern primitive' sound-image, just go to any major concert these 
days, and your eyes will tell you the same thingŠ.
  Back at the hotel the t.v.'s glow told the usual story: There's the 
usual debates over whether or not genetically modified  foods would 
affect consumers, riots at a G-8 meeting in Genoa, Italy, the 
attempted impeachment of the Indonesian President, financial 
shennanigans amongst the wealthiest countries about the Kyoto 
Accord's attempts (at least on paper) to reduce various emissions 
that are destroying the atmosphere,  shark attacks off the coast of 
Florida etc etc The usual litanyŠ Anyway, I channel surfed for a 
little bit (it was after all, something like 5 a.m. I had just walked 
into the hotel roomŠ) and, of course, it's mostly American titles - 
funny how stuff like "Bugs Bunny" over dubbed into Spanish always 
makes you feel so utterly surreal etc etc
Anyway, feel a million flurries of now, a million intangibles of the 
present moment, an infinite permutation of what could beŠ the thought 
gets caughtŠ You get the picture. In the data cloud of collective 
consciousness, it's one of those issues that just seems to keep 
popping up. Where did I start? Where did I end? First and foremost, 
it's that flash of insight, a way of looking at the fragments of 
time. Check it: visual mode - open source, a kinematoscope of the 
unconscious: a bullet that cuts through everything like a Doc 
Edgerton, E.J. Maret or Muybridge flash frozen frame. You look for 
the elements of the experience, and if you think about it, even the 
word "analysis" means to break down something into its component 
parts. Stop motion: weapons drawn, flip the situation into a new kind 
of dawnŠ. What else is there to do but just check the pictures and 
see what people do in the process of making culture. Behind the 
scenes it's all about friends and time spent with people that are 
part of your tribe, your situation, your scenario. Think of Jack 
Kerouac behind some turntables cuttin' up a storm, think of James Van 
Der Zee skiing with Lauryn Hill, think of King Tubby just chilling 
out after a session with Gordon Parks - see? The mixes get more and 
more diverse, and time seems to just become more and more fragments 
to mix. If there's anything the 20th century taught us, it's that 
there are so many cultures out there that are mixed beyond anything 
we can possibly really contain in one image, one thought, one word. 
Acceptance of the pluralism and being open to diversity all starts 
with your crew. And I think that that's what you'll find in these 
images: an America that exists just at the edge of convention, 
photographed by someone who was and is part of the dynamic backdrop 
of a pop culture made all the more resilient and powerful because it 
can absorb. If you can deal with that, then these photos are 
something that can highlight just how much the world has changed in 
such a short amount of time. When this crew started out, hip-hop was 
the image of uncertainty after reconstruction - a faint echo of the 
South Bronx demolitions drawn across a map of New York City that 
urban planner and architect, Robert Moses simply imposed, like the 
European powers did to Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. The 
Cross Bronx Expressway created a sound track to dispersion. It was a 
highway of imminent domain - but whose culture was erased, and whose 
culture thrived and survived? That's the question of the early 21st 
century. Can America really deal with all the accumulated fragments 
of dispossessed culture? Can the music of America (it's all fragments 
at this point anywayŠ) honestly be open to just about anything under 
the sun? One culture's Diaspora becomes another culture's soundtrack. 
In the here and now that Ari's photos capture, the Diaspora just acts 
as a reflection site, a way to reach across bridges made by class, 
social hierarchy and all the bullshit that normally accompanies that 
stuff - and make music. That's what "Pass the Mic" is about. If you 
can't deal with that, well, like the Beasties said so long ago you 
might just have to check your head.
But anyway, it was another one of those days in the early 21st 
Century - I was on another continent, dj'ing another event in another 
country. Flip coordinates, repeat circumstances, reconnect the line 
of thought with the sounds of the scenario. Transition and exit, 
convergence and departure. Flip the moment, fold it in on itself. 
Cut. Repeat. Another tour, another situation. Look at the people and 
hear the sounds. RepeatŠUn-Cut.
In one of my favorite recent essays to accompany a museum show of 
contemporary photography, The Brooklyn Museum's 2001 controversial 
survey of contemporary African American photographers "Commited To 
the Image," Clyde Taylor wrote: "one of the exclusive entitlements of 
the propertied class was the gaze. The disenfranchised were fixed at 
the receiving end of the right to scrutinize. Come the mid-twentieth 
century, a shift takes place. A recurrent academic joke tells of a 
European anthropologist looking through his telescope to research 
"primitive" customs when he discovers an African anthropologist 
peering through his own telescope and taking notes on him. "Today," 
wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, introducing a volume of poems from the 
Negritude movement of the 1930's and 1940's, "these black men have 
fixed their gaze upon us and our gaze is thrown back in our eyesŠ" 
What you're seeing here is what folks like Levi Strauss might have 
written about is the "Raw and The Cooked" had been written in an 
uptown situation - the modern visual jazz of a crew that came to 
catch wreck. White on white, and with a whole lot of Others thrown in 
to the mix, it all just changes and becomes something else. Maybe 
that's what dj culture and it's spin-off the M.C. are all about. 
Involution and cultural evolution sometimes go hand and hand, and 
make for a deeper vision of the way things work. And from b-boys to 
Buddhists, dusty 45's to MP3 files, the sounds of science are what 
make this collection of images so compelling a document to show how 
behind the stages and scenes, the people that make the sounds are 
just exactly that: people. The music and the images are reflections 
of one another, and at the end of the day, it's friends and people 
that make it all go that way. Anyway, feel a million flurries of now, 
a million intangibles of the present moment, an infinite permutation 
of what could beŠ the thought gets caughtŠ You get the picture. In 
the data cloud of collective consciousness, it's one of those issues 
that just seems to keep popping up. Where did I start? Where did I 
end? That's the message that I think these images send.


Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
July 21, Santiago, Chile 2001



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wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
Music and Art
245 w14th st #2RC NY NY
10011

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