Beastie Boys dismantled their gold record plaque | Hacker News Reader

Beastie Boys dismantled their gold record plaque

djmag.com

121 pointsiancmceachern65 comments

Projects like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAudio and https://www-cdf.lbl.gov/~av/JAES-paper-LBNL.pdf are quite interesting in this context - while I doubt that any methods have been tested that assume a pane of glass between the camera and the phonograph, it seems quite plausible that there could be non-destructive ways to verify the actual audio data on a gold record plaque.

Separately, though, it's a bit disappointing that the OP article didn't try to track down any sources other than the band members for comment on whether this was a wider phenomenon. I'd speculate that the time pressure for this type of article leaves very little time for investigative journalism, and it's a shame that's the case.

Makes me think of the very relevant Dezel Washington clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3pV_Mw4mrM

Wise words

It would seem trivial to test that the album is probably fake by just looking at pics of the gold album and counting the tracks/widths.

There are 100's of pics of artists gold albums on the internet.

> When asked by O’Brien if this was common for all gold record plaques, Ad-Rock replied, “I don’t know about anybody else...” while Mike D speculated that major stars like Barbra Streisand or Donna Summer probably received plaques with their actual records.

This is what I'm most interested in. Is this a one-off or does it happen to other artists? Is there some master record they use and nobody gets their own gold album? If so, how'd they pick the track list? There's gotta be an interesting history here. If Beastie Boys were somehow treated as lesser, they ought to fight for their right to parity.

> If Beastie Boys were somehow treated as lesser,...

Once the evidence is in, it'll help decide if it's a mirage, or ... it's sabotage.

In 2005 the drummer for Semisonic wrote the book So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star. In it the band received a record plaque and asked the record company rep if it was their music. The response was no, it was probably some left over Sinatra LP that had been painted.

The "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend" podcast posted video for this segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSjdYkqY5WI

Good find, the original article is simply a blogspam/summary of this video.

Direct link to this segment: https://youtu.be/eSjdYkqY5WI?t=326

The move is now to sample it and make new music!

I feel like it would have been suiting of the Beastie Boys to follow up with a Manilow remix beat on a track.

I always assumed it was generic for all artists and it didn’t occur to me it was even playable.

I think the original idea was that they were using one of the (now retired) metal masters (the moulds for the LP). It makes sense - "you've sold so many records that our master has worn out, so have the old one as an award".

Then later as the convention of the awards stuck, they just metallized an LP.

What, would make it non-playable anyway.

Worn records can play. The quality wouldn't be as good.

It's the master, the mold, the negative. It's an inverted record.

Just play it in reverse then ;)

And with a forked needle - not actually a joke.

Yes, they're negatives of the printed LP; they can be played but require a special needle. There was a video where Jack White (of The White Strips) bought an old Elvis master and explained how to play it.

I never really thought about the awards and what they mean in an era where everything would have been digital (and that's a long time now). Of course a lot of artists do commission LPs these days (though has that gone out of fashion? - there was a resurgence there in the 2010's at least) so you can imagine that the masters could be handed out as souvenirs.

The Grateful Dead's first gold album was apparently a Johnny Cash album. So yeah, record companies.

"Upon inspection, they found that instead of `Paul's Boutique', the vinyl contained piano versions of songs like Barry Manilow's music and Morris Albert's `Feelings'."

Sounds like a practical joke.

Now the question becomes: did the plaque producers (RIAA) have a license to distribute those songs?

They make the law, so yes. /s

I think this falls under first sale doctrine. Specifically under disposal. So get a record, you own it (hopefully it was paid for, this might be issue). Paint it and now dispose it to artists...

I've also seen someone on tiktok trying to play a small platinum record that just had someone playing some guitar chords in a loop.

Rally up, ain't no fake hanging on Beastie walls. Time to turn what ever plastic they hung up real for the actual players.

It's a ceremonial plaque, was it always supposed to be the same literal recording but golden?

Somewhat meta, but this feels like the kind of story I’m going to see tomorrow in my The Hustle email. Then it will be highlighted on Apple News, then probably in wired, and finally as a shirt segment on the Today Show. This seems to be a trend that certain topics are going oddly viral in a not-quite-viral way.

I'm surprised it took you this long to realize how deeply the propaganda machine runs

what would be the goal of this specific propodanda?

Views, clicks to ads, subscriptions, a false feeling of being hip and "on the inside".

is that propoganda? whats the political view its pushing?

Beastie boys greatest hits album coming out? Interviews and “cute” stories that aren’t really news suddenly hitting the media is usually some kind of PR or marketing effort.

Sure, but marketing and PR arent propoganda unless they are pushing a political cause or point of view right?

Yes, good point, propaganda does connote promoting an ideology.

sorry, I used propaganda in the original latin sense of "something intended to be propagated", which includes all the others too :)

I too hate propaganda from Big Anti-Gold Record industry.

Sarcasm aside, what reason does which 'propaganda machine' have for considering this story relevant to anything they might care about?

Don't you scenario-test your processes? /s

30th anniversary rerelease of Ill Communication, on vinyl? https://www.turntablelab.com/search?type=article,page,produc...

It's an age of demagoguery. Distrust of the press has been curated and weaponized. People have been trained to exercise distrust as a relfex rather than skepticism as a tool. There's always people in these threads virtue signaling distrust and cynicism.

The parent poster is getting downvoted, for I think obvious reasons (instantly bringing a broader topic to a narrow political hot take), but I don't think they are wrong.

From what I can tell the mainstream media (which unfortunately has blended itself into a stew of "real news" and opinion pieces through their own outlets and through various readers) exists to serve a couple of interests.

In this case, I think this would be called "earned media" in marketing speak. A "journalist" or someone working in a news organization knows a bunch of PR associated people who have lines on what could be called lifestyle newspieces. The juicier the lifestyle piece the more clicks the org gets, so cultivating these relationships with PR firms that push this stuff results in revenue for the news org. That PR firm might push the segment onto multiple receivers, so you get a little critical mass.

The second interest, what the parent poster is alluding to, is the political party that the news organization and their journalists are aligned with. Since everything political now is so existential, the entire news organization ends up having this zeitgeist of pushing their political agenda. And obviously we are at where we are at in no small part by the shock outrage clicks political news headlines receive.

So, I don't think the parent is wrong, but it's more complicated than "it's all propaganda". Criticising the mainstream media has become popular in the last 10 years, but goddamn it's so easy to do because of how transparent the whole process has become.

At first "propaganda" referred indiscriminately to both the political and the economic variants; after WWI (née "The Great War") left a bad taste for the term, it was quickly rebranded, with the political version turning into "psychological warfare" and the economic "public relations".

Initially, "propaganda" referred to the Congregatio de propaganda fide, the congregation for propagating the faith, established in the 17th Century.

This is still a thing in other languages, Venezuelan Spanish still calls "propagandas" what Anglos call Comercials (I don't think I've heard it in other variations, maybe Colombian Spanish)

This is just some guy writing about a podcast he listened to to fill his article quota.

The idea that everyone not constantly reading about whatever political story I am obsessed with is distracted by propaganda and that’s the only reason social change doesn’t occur is frankly horseshit.

The issue is that article quota filling cattle are pushing whatever comes from upstream because it brings viewership and clicks.

Where is the narrow political hot take? Anyway, you made my point. Thanks

idk man, maybe people in general happen to like similar things and share them around

I heard this anecdote of theirs in a clip of whatever podcast they said it on, either on youtube or instagram, now I see it in a headline here, and as you say, going to be propagated out through all the different streams flowing to the grand ocean of readers.

Just your average pablum content designed to be mildly interesting to the general public, fill time/space & attract subscribers. Aka "The News", re-reported by each "news" org for their own viewers. Started pretty much after the first newspaper.

The meta part I find funny is that it's on HN, this supposed bastion of articles "interesting to hackers" or whatever. This is why I like Reddit subs... I can just subscribe to the general topics or themes I want to hear about and skip the pablum

I have a little insight into this (specifically through one of the media that you mentioned). It's easy to attribute this to conspiracy or planned news-creation, but this is, like so many things, an outcome of people's laziness and an environment that doesn't incentivize creativity from journalists and producers. They need to pitch articles or "news" segments, they need to pitch many, they need to pitch something that has some "social proof" (so it won't flop in the fake metrics), and they need to do this once or twice a week. What do they do? Look at their own phones and their own apps, and say, "This has been trending on a lower-tiered medium; we should cover it on our medium". The news and entertainment industries are atrophying and devolving quickly, with lower revenues, lower salaries (compared to market rates), lower head counts, and no incentive to improve because all publications are failing simultaneously.

FWIW, my main theory about it has always revolved around laziness of the editors.

Hacker News is a communal content fountain. Lots and lots of websites use the HN rss feed to stock content, and where that content gains traction, it gets propagated elsewhere. Slashdot, Reddit, tons of "news" aggregators, and so on, in a giant graph of relations where HN sits at the center, with the firehose of content getting actually curated and discussed here at the source.

It means your upvotes and downvotes on this site are exponentially more impactful than any site downstream, because anything making it to the front page here will automatically get reposted to hundreds or thousands of other sites.

There is virality, but there are also savvy content producers that know the overall graph of content dissemination, and they certainly utilize that to their benefit.

There are a handful of similar sites and content aggregators that sit in the center like HN that determine what goes viral and what goes stagnant. It's what drew me to HN in the first place, after all the sites I liked were essentially showing me the same thing, and I had to figure out where they were getting their links from.

> “So we’re at our studio here in California and I was smoking the pot,”

The use of the definite article before the word "pot" really gives that sentence a "How do you do, fellow kids?" vibe.

Pedantry: the theory th' interwebs give me is that the evil weed has also been known as "pot" since the 1920s, and its use, without determiner, is attested in print as far back as 1938, so I doubt that extraneous determiner would be anything but intentional.

Seems ironic to me but I’m not going to listen to the podcast to confirm.

Yeah I'd say it's almost certainly veiled in irony given the context. Something derived from reefer madness stylization. I do it as well, quite literally using that phrase. Tinges of unguided parentalism and the vogue surrounding it - otherwise ignorance.

Very Beastie of them - like in Johnny Ryall where they rap on how the titular character is "better off drinkin’ than smokin’ the rocks".

This is possibly intentionally referring to a singular group supply. Likewise, in a household or workplace, you could say that you had some of "the coffee", if you were partaking in the household or workplace group supply.

try saying "smoking pot". then say "smoking the pot". Listen to the rhythm. Which one sounds like a flow that a rapper would choose?

Rapper's are wordsmiths. It's an aesthetic choice.

whimsy is dead

reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

oh thank goodness

It was from a comedy podcast where Conan is always using intentionally silly terms for that. I think they were just riffing on that, intentionally making it sound stupid.

it's also a believable affectation.

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