I don't think I've ever talked about this on the site, but I'm a massive fan of the Beastie Boys. I haven't been to too many concerts in the past twenty years, but the best show I've been to was seeing the Beastie Boys on October 11, 2004 at the (then) Wachovia Center in Philadelphia, PA. If you want to get a feel for what I saw, check out the concert film Awesome! I Fuckin' Shot That.
Getting back on point, I love the band and that Summer was absolutely the most glorious time. Their fifth album, Hello Nasty, was released on July 14, 1998. It's safe to say at this point that it's my all-time favorite album from the band. I have a difficult time describing the album accurately as the songs bounce from rap to rock to jazz and all of it is incredibly good. Mix Master Mike became their new DJ and it really gave a album a fresh sound. Good albums on their own don't sell albums on their own...
June 1998 saw the release of the music video for the first single from the album, Intergalactic. If you're reading this site and you've never seen the video, correct this immediately...
There are many things to unpack here. The Beastie Boys have always done some great music videos (well...not so much in the TTFB days), but this one was untoppable. Sure the fast motion stuff isn't all that great, but the Robot vs Octopus fight is incredibly fun and actually pretty well done. On the DVD commentary, the band tried to piece together some kind of plot for the fight. Ultimately they settled on the robot steppin' on the Octopus' turf. That's all. Perfect.
It's absurd and I utterly love it. Imagine being a Tokusatsu fan in 1998 and your favorite band releases this video. Not only that, everyone loved that video. The song itself is kinda polarizing through it's somewhat shrill repetitiveness, but the video in undeniable.
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A few month later the second single from the album, Body Movin', was released. Naturally a music video was released to promote sales and the results...were just as silly as Intergalactic. The idea behind it was to license a film and shoot new footage to weave a new plot around it. Sound familiar? The film in this case was Danger: Diabolik from 1968. Check it out...
A high-society burglary based on...a fondue recipe? Sure! Again, I couldn't help but loving the hell out of this creative re-purposing of old movie footage. Like...how did it all come together? Why the decapitation? A crow took out an entire plane? How did the Adrock have a harder landing WITH a parachute?
It may not have anything to do with Tokusatsu or anything, but I can't help get that vibe I get if I ever happen to catch an early episode of Power Rangers or Masked Rider. It's like "OK, so how are they going to write their way around this one?".
I may not like the remix that was used for the video all the much, but I love the video for this one just as much as the video for Intergalatic...even if that Jaguar E-Type getting wrecked was painful to watch.
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From there, things kinda sputtered. The video for Three MC's and One DJ was an impressive single-take video of the song performed live. That was really it for this album... Did it really need any more, though?
This is to twenty years to a great duo of music videos from one of my all-time favorite albums. Did you latch on to Intergalactic as much as I did? Let me know!
See ya!
-CC
You're bound to go to the beach in the summer to escape the heat
ReplyDeleteI used to have a relative that lived there. Now I prefer going to the beach in the Winter.
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