Beastie Boys- Technology and Politics
The Beastie Boys show on Friday in Fairfax was great. If you want a full review, you can check my personal blog, AnonymousCoworker.
On MSD I'm going to get into some of the cool technology that was being used at the show, as well as some of the politics.
On the technology front, there were 2 cool things going on. Actually, one cool thing and one very very cool thing. First, Mix Master Mike had a video up on the screens behind him of Stevie Wonder and his band playing "Superstition." Mix Master Mike had the record for the very same show on one turntable, and an electronica record on the other turntable. The cool thing was, the turntable was hooked up to the video control, so whenever he scratched forward, the video would speed up and skip forward. When he scratched back, the video would align with the sound on the record. Mike mainly skipped around with the drumming intro, so we saw a lot of the drummer played forward and backward, but he also mixed in some of the bass player and other images in a way that showed he was aware he was scratching both the audio and video simultaneously. Definitely cool.
The other cool thing was "bullet time." The Beastie Boys had parabolic arc of small cameras that was about 10 feet wide (from arc end to arc end across the base) at the front of the stage. I wasn't sure what they were for at first, but when I saw the frozen image of Mike D in midair on the projection screens I realized that they had set up an instant bullet time camera system. The coolest part was when they would just let the bullet time cameras go and you could see a multi-perspective view of one of the Beastie Boys rapping into the arc in real time. It was really cool.
Now, on politics, the Beastie Boys were a little more tame than I thought they'd be. They only asked the crowd if we were voting for Bush once. Of course the idea was booed. They also showed a clip of Will Ferrell playing Bush doing a campaign commercial. I imagine most people had seen it already, but for those who hadn't it was probably pretty funny. I was really expecting them to do more Get Out the Vote type of stuff, but they didn't. On the one hand, that's cool. They're musicians, they should play music. Their opinions matter to me no more than anyone else's. On the other hand, their last album was full of politically minded material, so I figured they would have a more political go of things. Oh well, maybe they have outrage fatigue.
On MSD I'm going to get into some of the cool technology that was being used at the show, as well as some of the politics.
On the technology front, there were 2 cool things going on. Actually, one cool thing and one very very cool thing. First, Mix Master Mike had a video up on the screens behind him of Stevie Wonder and his band playing "Superstition." Mix Master Mike had the record for the very same show on one turntable, and an electronica record on the other turntable. The cool thing was, the turntable was hooked up to the video control, so whenever he scratched forward, the video would speed up and skip forward. When he scratched back, the video would align with the sound on the record. Mike mainly skipped around with the drumming intro, so we saw a lot of the drummer played forward and backward, but he also mixed in some of the bass player and other images in a way that showed he was aware he was scratching both the audio and video simultaneously. Definitely cool.
The other cool thing was "bullet time." The Beastie Boys had parabolic arc of small cameras that was about 10 feet wide (from arc end to arc end across the base) at the front of the stage. I wasn't sure what they were for at first, but when I saw the frozen image of Mike D in midair on the projection screens I realized that they had set up an instant bullet time camera system. The coolest part was when they would just let the bullet time cameras go and you could see a multi-perspective view of one of the Beastie Boys rapping into the arc in real time. It was really cool.
Now, on politics, the Beastie Boys were a little more tame than I thought they'd be. They only asked the crowd if we were voting for Bush once. Of course the idea was booed. They also showed a clip of Will Ferrell playing Bush doing a campaign commercial. I imagine most people had seen it already, but for those who hadn't it was probably pretty funny. I was really expecting them to do more Get Out the Vote type of stuff, but they didn't. On the one hand, that's cool. They're musicians, they should play music. Their opinions matter to me no more than anyone else's. On the other hand, their last album was full of politically minded material, so I figured they would have a more political go of things. Oh well, maybe they have outrage fatigue.
2 Comments:
One thing that I (ACWGF) really liked about the Stevie Wonder video, besides the fact that it was friggin' awesome to see it aligned with the music, was that it was a clip of Stevie Wonder playing that song on Sesame Street. Did you notice that?
I did notice that. Too bad we didn't see Grover groovin' down with Stevie though.
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