The Beastie Boys for Technologists

Dan Le Roy wrote a book recently chronicling the making of the Beastie Boys’ Album “Paul’s Boutique” in 1989, which I just read. The Beastie Boys’ are not my favorite of musical groups, or even my favorite rap band, but I have a certain fascination and respect for them  as a middle class New York group who helped define something very critical to my generation. Strangely, though I was deeply embedded in hip hop at the time as a DJ myself (of no success in Akron Ohio), I soon after turned to the older generation for identification, even the father of Beastie Boys’ member Adam Horovitz, the playwright Israel Horovitz who I worked with and became friends with.  As my life moved from free-lance DJ to producer, to entrepreneur to physicist, I somehow lost track of what made my generation’s contributions possible, and how they ultimately affected me.

The story of “Paul’s Boutique” is a biography about how a new technological emergence and art form combined with the right talent to create an album would help define a unique generational voice. What isn’t spelled out as clearly is how that very same movement, that of mixes, overlays and samplings is actually the musical equivalent of technological convergence that I and others in my generation have embraced. Perhaps this is a stretch, but I don’t think so.

The key to making rap more than rhymes and simple rhythms lies in a complex looping and sampling of a wide array of existing musical tracks, precisely controlled by the engineer or DJ to provide the textures for rhythm and rhyme. This isn’t uniquely an invention of rap, as sampling goes back to Bach and before. What makes this different is the ability for technology to allow for control of more elements than were ever possible before. The synth and sync were like Bach’s organs for the Beastie Boys and their partners in the making of “Paul’s Boutique”. Within just two years the top 10 were full of music in this vein. On a bit of a side note, sampling still exists in major commercial releases but it has largely been replaced by something more generic which are songs that all sound the bloody same. Like so many other things DJing and sampling have now been elevated to a high art, meant for a smaller but respectful audience. DJSpooky (Paul Miller) for example has sampled everything from musical tracks to the cracking of the icecaps in Antarctica. He has even written books published by MIT Press. So my generation, which Paul is a part of, is no longer seen as drinking  partiers, but as innovators and artists. (who do coincidentally like to drink and party).

It is not my goal to promote my own company or inventions, but since I understand them a little bit better than other people’s inventions I have to use them here. I am sorry for any appearance of self-promotion as I hate when people do this. My blogs are not advertisements.  Still I have this little company that is growing, and enjoining doing something that my generation was cut out to do. We make microscopes that have qualities that other microscopes don’t, mainly due to the many software features that we have invented. When I say invented, this is only part of it. I mostly say we invent and we converge. That is we use the most interesting hardware available, and even existing coding languages to make something completely unique. This is called convergence in technology, but it could be called mixing just as easily. What the Beastie Boys were doing in a studio with new machines and old albums, along with unique voices we are doing in small labs and on computers. Perhaps this type of mixing is why my generation can innovate in a world of steep competition from younger innovators, who in so many ways have the technological advantage of growing up with tools already in place.

So next time I listen to the songs of my adolescence I won’t listen only with nostalgia, but with an eye towards the future. I will look for inspiration, not to create a rap record, but to create something, whether it be a new type of Artificial Intelligence, a space ship or just a better microscope.