When Rap's Great White Hope...

(PULSE!)
by: Michael Jarrett
July 1994
When rap's great white hope comes to your town, don't fear for your children - fear for your record collections

The Beastie Boys aren't your buddies, although the Culture industry conspires to create that illusion, to make you feel that you posess them. But then again, they aren't exactly tight with music critics either. They do talk, though (a lot). And in a noisy little diner in New York City they brace themselves for another season of interviews; after lunch (rice, beans and egg sandwiches), the conversation continues in a nearby conference room.

It's a Tuesday; it's still winter. Piles of ash-gray snow litter the sidewalks, gutters and vacant lots of Greenwich Village. And somewhere in Europe - Italy maybe - Kurt Cobain is alive. Meanwhile, the Beastie Boys - and this is difficult news to report - are about to furnish the world with irrefutable evidence that they have become absolutley delightful men. They're also as confindent as kids cradling water balloons, certain in the knowledge that Ill Communication (Grand Royal/Capitol) - a potent dose of old-school rhyming, hardcore slamming and Meters-style jamming - will dispel any premature reports of early senility.

To head off silence or to soften up potentially hostile natives, PULSE! has come to the big city bearing gifts.

PULSE!: There are three LPs in my briefcase. Don't let me forget to give them to you.

Mike D: What are they?

Though he's not exactly the band's official spokesman (nothing about this crew is the slightest bit _offical_), Michael Diamond has been deputized to make noises like a leader. No question that he's capable. First, he's a world-class talker, a wag in the best tradition of (early) Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Second, Mike D clearly enjoys taking care of business. He's the eminence behind the Beastie's company, Grand Royal Merchandising: Grand Royal Records; Grand Royal magazine; Grand Royal t-shirts, caps, sushi, etc. Both Adams - Horovitz (Adrock aka Mr. Ione Skye) and Yauch (MCA aka Mr. Snowboarder) - seem basically phlegmatic about corporate matters, but they are hardly silent partners. You can see it on their faces. They are too curious about the contents of their interviewers's black briefcase. Or at least everybody's willing to play through a patently obvious game-show gambit.

But think about it. What does one give a Beastie Boy who has everything?

PULSE!: First, a Batman drama. My mom snagged it at a garage sale - bought it for my kids. They wanted you to have it. The Caped Crusader and Robin discuss the potential need to lobotomize the Joker.

Mike D: That's heavy.

MCA: That's pretty harsh!

Mike D: They're going to really lobotomize the Joker? Talk about a conspiracy. That's like ...

MCA: Well, thery're feeling that - even though that's not the best thing for the Joker - for the overall ...

ADRock: For the people ...

MCA: For mankind, it's the best thing.

PULSE!: I also brought you a couple of jazz things. One's by Rahsaan Roland Kirk: Blacknuss.

Mike D: ''Ain't No Sunshine.'' He covers it - first song.

ADRock: I have a 45 of ''Ain't No Sunshine'' - the version off this album - that I bought at Groove Merchant.

MCA: I could use a copy of that.

Mike D: I've got it. That's a bad Rahsaan.

ADRock: So what's the other record? The third record.

PULSE!: Homage to Charles Parker. It's by trombonist George Lewis. Richard Teitelbaum plays synthesizers; Anthony Davis is on piano. Douglas Ewart plays alto sax.

ADRock: You might have stumped me on this one.

Mike D: This is right up my alley. Say no more! Right up my alley. Black Saint, that my label. They have Charles Gayle, a lot of good stuff. The Italian label - all the out jazz shit is on Black Saint. Do you know about Dick Hyman by any chance?

PULSE!: The piano player?

ADRock: Moog player.

Mike D: He switched over to synthesizer - Moog. When I give my first comedy, I'm going to have Dick Hyman playing Moog though the whole thing.

MCA: You into Dick Hyman?

PULSE!: I've listened to him. I wouldn't say that I was into him.

MCA: Good answer.

When all three Beastie Boys focus their energies, conversation becomes a matter of play, years removed from the A-A-B-A patterns of classic rock. They don't harmonize; they don't lend support to soloists. They talk hip-hop, a dazzling version of word tag that reveals a level of empathy reached after years of partnership. It also defies conventional journalistic design. Any article that presumes to isolate and order Beastie banter in a style other than Q&A not only risks incoherence, it misrepresents the pass-the-mic aesthetic and, by extension, rock history.

The story of rock'n'roll divides pretty evenly into four revolutionary moments. Elvis and Little Richard (mid '50s) retool rhythm and blues and country and western music; Bob Dylan and the Beatles (mid '60s) retool early rock'n'roll and American folk music; The Sex Pistols and the Clash (mid '70s) retool art-pop and reggae; Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys (mid '80s) retool popular music's basic material object - the record - and rap attains critical mass. Undoubtedly, there's a dialectic at work here. History unfolds. Hegel believed it was energized by spirit. Marx thought it was driven by economic forces. And the children of Elvis and Little Richard suspect that obsessive love makes the pop world spin. All the great proper names of rock'n'roll are or were inspired amateurs, no matter how well they could play or sing.

In this regard, the Beastie Boys are exemplary. Whatever else one my say about them, Mike D, Adrock and MCA are, first and foremost, fans. Their art - a legacy of bacchanalian live shows and a string of brilliantly crafted, magnificently audacious recordings - is motivated by an ardent love for music. This love takes five guises that, by stretching logic a little, correspond to the five senses.

Ears: Listening to Wax

Well before they cut License To Ill, rap's first number-one album, the Beastie Boys were chasing vinyl. They're record stor junkies, specialists in hip-hop science, got what jazz fans call ''big ears.'' For example, quizzed about one sample - the dog that does a highly commendable imitation of Scoobie Doo on ''Sure Shot,'' the track that kicks off Ill Comunnication - Mike D immediately gets stupid and volunteers, ''That's a special studio-talented dog. He gets a lot of money for sessions like that.'' Questions about records, though, prompt a decidedly different responce.

One casual mention of Jeremy Steig - it's his flute sample that loops after the dog's short cadenza - and all traces of forced coyness vanish. IQ's mysteriously spike. Immediately, all three B-Boys become gregarious and buzz with excitement. ''You know him?'' asks Adrock, incredulous at meeting another anal retentive. ''Were you down with Jeremy Steig when he came out?'' adds Mike D.

PULSE!: This is your interview, but yeah, I once won tickets to Disney World by identifying Steig and pianist Denny Zeitlin in a call-in radio quiz.

Mike D: I've really got to give you congratulations!

ADRock: He's our man.

Mike D: I'm speechless.

ADRock: I have so many samples. Every record I have of his has loops on it.

Mike D: He's an underrated guy, too.

PULSE!: The story goes that he was once in a motorbike accident. It damaged the nerves in his face so badly that he had to devise a prosthesis to insert in his mouth just to blow the flute.

Mike D: He's kind of like the Tony Iommi of the flute.

MCA: Who ever thought that there'd be a correlation between Jeremy Steig and Disney World?

ADRock: Black Sabbath...

Mike D: Tony Iommi's from Black Sabbath. He's got metal tips in his fingers so nobody else can play like that.

MCA: Him, I could more believe being associated ... [with Disney World].

Mike D: Jeremy Steig, now he's got this special device. It links them together.

PULSE!: One day you may be have to be genetically engineered to play an instrument. That's a scenario Rahsaan Roland Kirk talked about.

Mike D: Now _that_ guy was engineered to play an instrument. I wish Rahsaan was still around. He'd be the guy to take on tour. He could rock.

The Beastie Boys' range of cultural reference is exceptionally vast. Lee Dorsey, the Meters, John Woo, Rod Carew, Lee ''Sctratch'' Perry, Jimmy Smith, Anthony Mason, Russell Simmons, Dick Hyman, Kool Moe D, Busy Bee, Buddy Rich, Patty Duke, Gene Fudderman, Pretty Purdie, Pat Sajak, Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Don Cornelius, Elvis Costello, Son of Sam, Darth Vader, David Koresh, and Buddha: And that's just a partial list of the names rhymed on Ill Comunnication!

So why don't Mike D, Adrock and MCA come off as pretentious (as the Hip-Hop Precinct of the Cultural Literacy Police)? The answer is pretty simple, actually. Most of their vocals are distorted; patterns of sounds first, messages second. But more importantly, the Beastie Boys are more animated by lust for experience than driven by anxiety about getting smart. Perhaps that's because, growing up in New York and Brooklyn, they enjoyed enough privilege to develop self-confidence, or perhaps ther were somehow radicalized during adolescence. It could be a combination of both factors. In any event, even as the Beasties approach their 30th birthdays, they remain archetypical of a particular sort of fan: the kind who refuses to accept the convention which demands that one's love of records should gradually decline after reaching age 16.

Hands: Working in the Woodshed

The first commandment of popular music - recieved by Elvis Presley in Sam Phillips' Sun Studios and dutifully delivered to the people - is this: The primary goal of modern music making isn't playing well; it's making great records. Thus far, the Beastie Boys have created four masterpieces. (The Some old Bullshit collection, though maximally silly and sloppy, doesn't count; it's juvenilia.) License To Ill (1986), like all proper rock'n'roll, managed to turn snotty-nosed juvenile posturing into the highest form of lowbrow art. (It also revealed that God, in his infinite wisdom, had invented Led Leppelin specifically to hook up the B-Boys with beats.) Paul's Boutique (1989) was a tour de force of samples and rhymes; bricolage became the new God-word and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was canonized as hip-hop patron saint. ''So when it came down to Check Your Head [1992],'' says Mike D, ''we just started playing together ... doing stuff that we've done at different times in our lives.'' Perhaps, but the album also made manifest a new band: a lean but sufficiently greasy funk outfit. Adrock (guitar), MCA (bass) and Mike D (drums) - in cahoots with keyboardist Mark Ramos Nishita (Money Mark) - demonstrated that they shared genetic material with Booker T. and the MGs, the Meters and Funkadelic. Critics gushed; fans were amazed. The Beastie Boys had learned to play!

Ill Communication revisits and extends the three-pronged strategy employed on Check Your Head, but it's even tighter, punchier and more exotic. ''We like the way the mix wound up on the last one,'' says MCA, ''there being some hardcore, some rhyming, some playing. It's all part of the music that we know how to play at this point.'' ''Our next album is a samba album - Brazilian samba,'' Adrock deadpans, and Mike D, without blinking, says, ''It's more like there was still a bunch of stuff that I wanted to rock on Check Your Head that I didn't get around to - that I wanted to rock on this album. Actually, I have backed some samba beats for the Rhythm Ace [a drum machine - Ed.]. We're ready.'' Adrock nods, then adds, ''We definitely plan ahead.''

Although loath to admit it, the Beastie Boys are, and have been, long-time professionals. They work hard, won't condone the role of slacker, but in conversation they, perhaps unconsciously, exalt the bohemian virtue of maximum effect from minimum effort. To hear them talk, their somgs aren't monuments to craft; thery're traces of grace. They just arrive - midwifed by engineer Maria Caldato, Jr.

_Example One_. Hip-hop has never heard anything quite like ''Eugene's Lament,'' a song that features the Beasties plus Money Mark, violinist Eugene Gore and Eric Bobo. Imagine - if the reference isn't too arcane - a meeting between classical composer George Crumb (Black Angels) and dub-master Augustus Pablo. It's enough to make one wonder.

Mike D: I hope people will wonder about it.

MCA: We wonder about it.

PULSE!: What do you wonder about it?

ADRock: Where'd the damn thing come from?

MCA: Who'd of thought!

Mike D: I know we never even thought. The basic track just came. Was that when we were jamming here or was that in L.A.?

ADRock: Here.

Mike D: Eric Bobo's the percussion player.

ADRock: That's Willie Bobo's son. He's our man.

MCA: I wish you could see Eugene. If more people could see what Eugene looks like, they'd realize how that song is solely bridging the generation gap of the world.

Mike D: Yeah, it is. See, you've got Bobo, who's the son of Willie Bobo - you got that lineage there - who's playing the djymbe, the most ancient instrument in the world. Mark's playing a little clave. We're all playing a little. Eugene, he's like eight years younger than us, but he's a classically trained, virtuoso-violinist kind of kid.

ADRock: He plays Bad Brains songs on the violin.

Mike D: He's a punk-rock violinist.

MCA: Like at first glance, just looking at him on the street, you would think that he was definitely like a grunge kid from Seattle. He's got dreadlocks, a beard ...

ADRock: Pearl Jam style. Crusty.

MCA: When he grabs hold of the violin, if you didn't know, he'd start ripping some Stravinsky.

ADRock: He's Hungarian.

MCA: He plays unbelievable violin.

Mike D: That's when he's unplugged. Plug him in, and he goes through like echoplex and all kinds of stuff. Look out! That's when he gets into the dub-violin mode.

MCA: People don't know, but Eugene's getting ready to explode.

Mike D: We got stuff for B-sides with Eugene that is straight-up _out_. I'm talking he's out to lunch like Eric Dolphy.

_Example Two_. ''Transitions,'' which forms a kind of benediction to the new album, is a jam recalling the funky, acid-damaged space-rock of Funkadelic's ''Maggot Brain.'' Adrock agrees, then provides brief commentary: ''The guitar is definitely the Funkadelic guitar - that sound. But fuck it. I don't care.'' Mike D continues: ''That was just something we played together, after not playing together for a few months. It was just a mood and a moment. At the same time, it definitely comes from a lot of different shared influences that we all have.'' ''That's my cut though,'' clarifies Adrock. ''You hear Yauch messing around [on upright bass] and, then, you hear Mark. And if you listen, you can hear Mike walk up to the drums, sit down, pick his sticks up. And whap-uh-uh-uh-uh.'' MCA concludes with a pronouncement, ''That shit is dope. That's the way that one happened. Me and Mark were jamming, and Mario turned on the DAT. That just recorded direct to two-track.''

Nose: Punks Inhale

Cussing, spewing beer and acting slack aren't measures of punk authenticity. And punks aren't necessarily nihilists. Nor are they required to join the Situationist International. Punk is not musical espionage, a cabal of leftists who think that the best way to jumpstart anarchy is with a power chord. The essence of punk is a mythic desire, a wish, to mend the gap that separates fans from music, to make fans no longer comsumers, but producers of music. Punks dream of a better-smelling world, where corporate dust clogs nobody's senses.

As punks, the Beastie Boys pledge allegiance to the DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic. They're quick to challenge cultural assumptions about what counts as musicianship. But as incorrigible fans, ready to dote on an excellent player when they hear one, the Beasties are ambivalent about relinquishing the concept of musicianship. Or at least Mike D is. ''I don't say things like, 'Oh we can play,''' he declares, ''because I don't know that we _can_ play. I'm not saying this for everyone else in the band, but I know, for myself, I'm always hesitant to call myself a musician. I think a musician is someone like Ziggy Modeliste or Tony Williams or Machito - any of your guys that can play for real.'' MCA dissents, but he's diplomatic: ''I don't totally share that view. That's what I do. I play music.'' ''That's my shit!'' concurs Adrock, prompting Mike D to qualify and enlarge his assertions to include studio craft and rhyming. He says, ''I would be more firm to say I was a musician as an MC, or as someone who's using my MPC 60 to sample, than as a player. ... That's the whole future of music, not just sampling, but like, say, the kids that are going to pick up technology that we've used. They're going to do something that we've never thought. It's inevitable. And that's going to be music. They'll be musicians as much as anybody.''

MCA, however, is not willing to drop the subject. Pushing towards a definition of ''musician'' that only a practicing punk (or an aging anarchist) could honor, he argues: ''I wouldn't have a beef with anybody who wanted to call themselves a musician. They make sounds. If someone picked up the guitar, played it for two weeks, and said, 'I'm a musician.' I'd be like, 'Cool.' I'd be far from doubting. I guess, it's just a different way to think of the word. Someone who plays music is a musician. You don't have to have any kind of chops.

''A lot of people who aren't involved with hip-hop have this concept that people who make hip-hop aren't musicians. If it's coming from their heart, it's powerful, and if it's making a bunch of other people jump around the room, then that's music in its most root form.''

Then Mike D makes a connection. ''That's the same with punk rock, hardcore or whatever,'' he says. ''You might not be Al DiMeola, but you're expressing yourself. That's actually a lot more genuine that 98 percent of everything else that's coming out.''

MCA: I was in a cab in Singapore, and the cab driver was talking something about that. Some rap came on the radio, a good friend of mine. The guy didn't know that I rhymed. He said, ''I hate rap music. I hate that.'' I'm like, ''Why?'' And he said, ''Anybody could do it. Anybody could do that. That's not music.'' I said, ''That's the whole point. Anybody can do it. It's not elitist.''

ADRock: It's not illegal.

Mike D: The highest praise that [you can give] any kind of music - coming from both the punk rock and hip-hop sides - is that you're actually playing music that inspires other people to make music, as opposed to sit back and say, ''OK, I'm in the audience.'' That's like the best shit you could ever possibly achieve. That's what it's about, right there.

Eyes: Looking Askance

If his childhood had included sustained doses of Ben E. King's ''Supernatural Thing - Part 1'' and the Ramones' ''Beat on the Brat,'' if the sound of Sugarhill records had made his pubes tingle like they'd been sprinkled with Miracle Gro, then Bob Dylan might have grown up to become a Beastie Boy. Then again, maybe the original mega-watt, free-stylin' rock bard is the Beasties' unacknowledged patriarch, for Dylan ironized folk music like the ''Original Nasal Kids'' ironized hip-hop. This might be their ultimate claim to fame.

As strategists, the Beastie Boys recall the Rolling Stones - who instead of trying to become authentic bluesmen, worked hard at perfecting the pose of middle-class white guys trying to become ersatz bluesmen. But the Beasties don't preen like the Stones. (''I'm shopping at Sears, 'cause I don't buy at the Gap,'' raps Mike D.) And they aren't fey. Still, they look at hip-hop, hardcore and funky soul-stews - the styles they love to love - with a degree of distance. Mike D, Adrock and MCA are meta-rappers. Their best songs consistently lay bare the conventions that structure rap: a music that prides itself on naturalness and honesty, that is, on a lack of convention.

That's the main reason why the Beastie Boys aren't Vanilla Ice, Ice-T or Ice Cube. The Ice Men - despite enormous differences - are anxious to pass as authentic; the Beasties delight in tweaking the image-making machine that manufactures authenticity. Why else whould MCA, on a tune that pairs him and his partners with Q-Tip, rhyme a couplet that goes: ''I don't think I'm slick nor do I play like I'm hard / But I shall drive the lane like I was Evan Bernard.'' Self-deprecating humor? Simple honesty? Yeah, maybe, but the implications of this claim are only a bit less brazen than the Volkswagen medallion Mike D used to wear. It rejects _hardness_, the gangsta pose, for _game playing_: a productive image for ironists. Which isn't the same thing as embracing cynicism. In fact, it's far from it. The Beastie Boys aren't jaded because, like Ma Bell, they enjoy ill communications: looping - watching themselves watch themselves ... watch themselves.

Mouths: Speaking the Truth

On the other hand, the Beasties don't spend their days pondering, and they don't equivocate or mince words. Just about anything can make its way into their songs; they speak their mind. Make that mind - singular. The Beastie Brain, like Freud's, has an id (Adrock), ego (Mike D) and superego (MCA). It clowns around. It says ''fuck'' a lot (and thus earns its parental advisory sticker). But sometimes, it takes the form of testimonial or public service announcement. ''I want to say a little something that's long overdue / The disrespect to women has got to be through,'' rhymes MCA on ''Sure Shot.'' Later he tips off listeners. He's stopped smoking cheeba; he busted his pistol with a sledgehammer; he'd like to see a free Tibet. So how are the Beasties going to respond to accusations or encouragements that they've grown up?

PULSE!: Haw are you going to respond to accusations or encouragements that you've grown up?

Mike D: We've had to deal with that for a couple of years now.

MCA: The most important thing is that accusations and encouragements and even insults are basically all the same thing. We put them all together in the Bullshit Zone. If you let them affect you - if you put one in the good pile and one in the bad pile - that's when it gets hectic.

ADRock: Is that like an insult, though, when people say, ''Oh, you've grown up''?

Mike D: That's what's weird, when people say you've grown up in an accusing manner. It's kind of like, well, isn't that pretty much what everybody on earth is doing? Or is supposed to be doing?

So it turns out that Michael Diamond, Adom Horovitz and Adam Yauch have stopped trying to live up to the ridiculously high standard established in their early years of fame. They no longer strive to be the world's biggest dicks. Not to worry. When they take the stage at Lollapalooza, funk will fly, the house'll rock at, oh, about 6.7 on the Richter scale, and aftershocks will follow.

PULSE!: Don't you worry that one day the negative effects of fame might prohibit you from walking freely on the streets?

Mike D: It's not going to happen.

ADRock: We don't really stand out that much.

PULSE!: But it could happen, especially to you, because of your work in film.

ADRock: White guys all look alike. You know what I mean?

Mike D: That's true.

ADRock: We all blend in together. Put a baseball cap on any high-school kid ...

PULSE!: I hope you're right. But look at Elvis - the most famous white guy. His life changed in 1956.

Mike D: Yeah, but he was into that whole Graceland thing.

MCA: Hopefully, we're not going out like that.

Mike D: I have too much stuff I want to do to allow non-anonymity to hinder that.

ADRock: We're not flashy: Elvis, Vanilla Ice, Rick Rubin - you know.

MCA: It just depends on how large you want to go. If the three of us went out and made a movie on the beach, wearing bikinis, shaking our little tush ...

Mike D: And wearing MC Hammer underwear ...

MCA: We might end up in the Elvis Zone. But I don't think we're travelling on that spaceship right now.

That spaceship - you can conjure the passengers - has a statue of P.T. Barnum, arms open wide, mounted on its dashboard. It never loses a dime underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The good ship Beastie Boy, however, runs by reverse physics (not by cynical economy). It's made money, loads of it, by treating the audience for popular music as fundamentally intelligent and curious. And that's why, if you look up and down its aisles, you'll see 14-year-olds sitting shoulder to shoulder with rock critics - everybody smiling. Over the cabin door a message flashes. It's a motto copped from a novel about music and fans. It reads: ''Word - nothing articulates the mundanity, despair and joy of existence like a mad mission to the record store.''

Outtakes:

ORGANIZATION MEN

PULSE!: Do you really keep a black book for writing down rhymes?

ADRock: Every rapper keeps a black book.

MCA: I'm the most organized on this last record that I've ever been. I kept all of the rhymes that I wrote from this last album in one book. Usually, I just write on scratch paper everywhere. This time, I had one book and made a point to bring my book everywhere I went.

Mike D: I have to be honest. My book is a mess.

MCA: You don't even have a book!

ADRock: Mike's got a pile of paper. [To Mike D] I'm not dissing you.

Mike D: I have a book, but I have all loose pieces of paper that are folded up that I stuck inside the book. They're kind of all in one place. But then they fall out.

ADRock: Mike's book is a mess!

MCA: It's terrible!

Mike D: It is a mess. The cover has fallen off my book. Fortunately, the album's done now. I want to publicly acknowledge this bit of organizational skill that Yauch taught me. I was getting frustrated, thinking, ''What am I saying here? I want to say something new.'' Yauch said, ''Start a new section in your book.'' He put a piece of tape on the paper. So I got a whole new section, and, then, I rocked to the whole new section. That was a nice trick.

MCA: You know where I got it from? From the Frugal Gourmet.

ADRock: Yauch is the most organized member of the band because he has everything he owns in a small room somewhere in downtown Los Angeles.

MCA: I just came about realizing this. While we were on tour, I put all my shit in storage. I started living out of a suitcase - for a couple of years now. But it actually works out well because all that shit, it just drags you down. You think you need all that shit. It's just hectic. I'll be giving shit away now. Fuck it! You don't need drawers. Only thing I kind of miss is having access to a record collection. If I could get the whole record collection, if I could shrink it down really small, keep that shit in my pocket.

Mike D: That's the future. You'll load your whole collection onto one little one.

LOOPY TUNES

MCA: Something that you find out about music from sampling - and working with loops - is that it's not like you can just write that piece of music and give it to anyone, and they can make something that has the same feeling off of that. It's about much more the minute detail, than 12 pitches or quarter notes or eighth notes. It's like one-millionth notes and overtones. It's the feeling, just the feeling that's in the sound.

Mike D: Mario rolls the tape a lot and, then, we just go to where the feel is right on the tape. There might be a lot of mistakes and stuff, but you go to get the feeling.

WORD UP

PULSE!: Roland Barthes, a theorist I really care about, once said that people have ''manna'' words - words that are magic to them, even the sound of them. Do you have such words?

MCA: ''Fluid.''

ADRock: There's words that I use a lot. I don't know if they have significance to me.

MCA: To me, fluid is just a focus word. It's about everything, about snowboarding or playing basketball or about rhyming or whatever.

Mike D: This next thing might be a bad example, and it might get me in trouble. But I would say the word ''funk.'' When you really hear the funk, and it's really on, then that's everything. The problem is, the word is so misused, misapplied right now in terms of music, that's it's almost hard to keep the meaning. It's kind of like Adam [Horovitz] was saying to me yesterday. He was talking to this guy about the song ''The Payback'' by James Brown. And the guy was trying to say that the guitar was playing nothing. But see, I figure, well, if the guitar is playing nothing, then that means the entire band is playing nothing. But, then, that's the best playing ever on like any song. And they're all playing nothing. That's the best shit. To be able to do that, that's the funk. Unfortunately, people confuse the funk with a lot more superfluous musical activity.

ADRock: I like the word ''knickerbocker,'' as in the New York Knicks.

Mike D: I like that - love that. You know what I realize, actually, what my word is? I don't want to offend anyone at the table, but ''doo-doo.''

ADRock: I was about to say ''shit.'' For some reason.