I’ve got this “Beastie Boys Non-Rap” Spotify playlist I made and it tends to be just the perfect mid-day music for October. I thought I’d lead with “I Don’t Know,” track 15 on Hello Nasty, a kind of tender little folk-rock ode to ignorance and oblivion, which could thereby perhaps yield a new brand of open-mindedness. “Picture This” is another really track I slapped on there, coming late within Hello Nasty and toting this kind of eerie approach to songwriting and intervals that bespeaks the staggering amount of talent these guys had, even in their rock tracks, which are certainly more plentiful than a lot of people might realize.
“Live Wire” is another cut across these same lines — it’s built on wacky minor chords, adhering to a bizarre, warped vocal technique the whole time and also offer a highly eclectic set of instrumentation, complete with a harpsichord-sounding keyboard, an impossibly trippy guitar sound for the governing riff, and, probably, the coolest set of DJ scratches I’ve ever heard in a rock song.
Anthology: The Sounds of Science is a two-CD collection that came out in ’99 and was meant to be a cross-section of their best work, with an emphasis on the eccentric, a la “The Biz vs. The Nuge,” which features Biz Markie singing in this goofy voice, and, of course, the lustful and somewhat regrettable “Boomin’ Granny.” “Live Wire” is buried at track 16 on disc two of Sounds of Science, so the fact that I’ve heard it at all speaks volumes to my attention span, you might say. I mean, The Sounds of Science was pretty fun, but certainly playful, to say the least. Once I discovered the crisp, taut hip-hop collection of Ill Communication, Sounds of Science started to kind of collect dust in my collection, a little bit.
And I’m not sure if I should rail into the Beastie Boys for not issuing “Live Wire” on any collection other than this scattershot, hopelessly goofy “anthology,” or just thank the lord that they did at least slot it here — anyway, it doesn’t seem to appear on any other Beasties release [1], and there’s not a Wikipedia page devoted to the track. It’s a really indescribable track, full of this uncanny weirdness and ingenious chord play, like “Something’s Got to Give” amped up on coffee and meth and funk-tified into next Tuesday. Give the producer credit, too, for this mix that finds Ad-Rock’s drums amped up into a gargantuan stature, pounding out snare/hat thunder to get even granny’s head nodding.
Genius credits Maria Caldato Jr., a longtime soundman for the Beasties, as well as the band themselves, with production on the track. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be a single speck of ink on this song anywhere online: maybe nobody else in the world listened to every bit of The Sounds of Science, out there, other than me. That is, it’s hard to imagine this track failing to make an impression on anybody who heard it. Oh, come on, their granny at least had to have heard it. Ok, I’ll stop, I promise.
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[1] Granted, we’re talking about a band that, almost psychotically, didn’t release even a single compilation album after the 2012 death of one of their members, MCA.
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