Yeah… so there’s this.
I’m way too late to be posting anything related to what MCA and the Beastie Boys meant to me, but I will say that having the opportunity to DJ at a friend’s bar playing nothing but their music and the music that inspired them is one not to be passed up. So if you can get to Brooklyn on Friday May 18th, come hang. I’ll be dropping science like Galileo dropped the orange.
I woke up with this in my head the other morning. Flash back to 1987.
Two years after picking up a trumpet for the first time, I found myself sitting in the band room of the middle school, learning to play versions of “popular” songs arranged for beginner/intermediate school bands, such as the theme from “Hill Street Blues” and “Eye of the Tiger”. Beginner/intermediate band meant all the fun things like syncopation were quantized to the nearest eighth note, and nary a sixteenth note or anything above high E on the staff to be found.
I didn’t think i was especially good at the trumpet at the time, and this was before the discovery of my having perfect pitch by another music teacher all but sealed my fate as a career musician. But it wasn’t long until I was moved up from Intermediate to Concert Band. That was a big deal, because normally students didn’t enter Concert band until sixth grade and I had just entered fifth grade, still enjoying such novelties as lockers and study hall. Not only was I good enough for the top-level band, but i started off sharing first chair with a seventh grader, who later took great pleasure in giving me ‘purple nerples’ and once made me cry for some reason I really don’t remember. He may have made fun of my Benetton rugby.
One of the first pieces in the concert band repertoire was a medley of all the songs from “Fame”. The medley’s finale, just like the movie’s final graduation concert, was “I Sing the Body Electric”, with a solo written in for the 1st chair trumpet. I can’t recall why B didn’t take it, but for some reason, I was now the youngest kid in the room taking it home, with the flautists in the front row craning their heads back to see who was interpreting the first verse:
I sing the body electric
I celebrate the me yet to come
I toast to my own reunion, when I become one with the sun
Outside of the piano recitals my sister and I performed in occasionally, this was my first taste of performing live. How fitting it was, that the song marked the triumphant close to the movie with hope; despite a suicide attempt, awkward baring of souls (and Irene Cara’s front end), clashing with teachers while hiding illiteracy, and everything else that comes with high school, the students of the NYC High School of the Performing Arts are sent into the world with bright futures and shitloads of hope. The last lines of the movie are sung by the choir:
And I’ll look back on Venus
I’ll look back on Mars
and I’ll burn with the fire of ten million stars
and in time, and in time,
we will all be stars.
A line which i’ll be sure to remember when i wake up in a couple hours for my day job.
I spent a year honing my Photoshop skills in a graphic design studio in Westchester. It’s the only reason I could explain staying home on a Saturday night and farting this out in less than five minutes, then spending twenty minutes staring at it and laughing. Hair’s always been a problem.
He likes turntables and Pee-Wee. Couldn’t ask for a more perfect mix of me and @lapaulatina. (Taken with instagram)
Robert Downey Jr. teaches you math.
10 months today!
“Who’s this black guy on my shirt?” Kinda hard to believe that he’ll grow up in a world where MJ isn’t alive. #anstagram #longlivetheking #mamasemamasamamacoosa (Taken with instagram)
A study in browns. (Taken with instagram)
Things everyone should own: a worn-out copy of The Great Gatsby. This one belongs to @lapaulatina. #readingisfundamental (Taken with instagram)
One of these uses of italics is unnecessary. (Taken with Instagram at Chelsea)
@preplove
