1. Public Enemy, “Party for Your Right to Fight”–a brilliant inversion, turning “Party” into a noun, specifically, the Black Panther Party.

2. Coldplay’s live cover: a mournful joke (on both the Beasties and Coldplay), but genuinely moving.

3. Fight for Your Right (Revisited): a half-hour fantasia (directed by Yauch), released last year to promote Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, starring Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood, and Danny McBride as the Beasties circa 1986, and John C. Reilly, Will Ferrell, and Danny McBride as the Beasties of the future. Spoiler alert: They have a dance-off.

4. Baseball infographic artist Craig Robinson did a wonderful chart breaking down the vocals in the song.

5. Adam Yauch, in the liner notes to the 1999 compilation The Sounds of Science, remembers the track as “a joke that went too far.” The end of his thoughtful essay on the song as the harbinger of the early wave of Beastie fame:

But it was too late to turn in any other direction; we were caught up in the frenzy. The shows were sold out. It seemed like there was nothing to do but keep coming out on stage every night drinking beer and playing the role. The strangest part about it was that after a short time I think we actually became just what it was that we’d set out to make fun of. By drinking so much beer and acting like sexist macho jerks we actually became just that.

So I guess that the story could have a couple of possible morals. One might be, “Be careful of what you make fun of or you might become it.” But the other one, the one that I like is, “All of the sexist macho jerks in the world are just pretending cause they’re caught in a rut, and maybe, at some point in the future, when the planets line up in a certain way, they’ll all just snap out of it.”

I never met the man (although I did interview his bandmates last year). I’ve been remembering the times I saw the Beastie Boys play live. I missed the Licensed to Ill tour–no inflatable penis for me, apparently–but I did see one of the few shows they did to support Paul’s Boutique, an excellent secret gig at the short-lived New York club called The Building. (My future wife was also in attendance, although we hadn’t yet met.)

The last time I saw the Beastie Boys in concert was back in 1994–I had no idea it had been that long ago. I joined the Lollapalooza tour for seven shows, on assignment for Details. I was mostly writing about the technology tent, but I took a break every day so I could see a different act in the lineup (Nick Cave, the Breeders, A Tribe Called Quest, L7, George Clinton, the Flaming Lips–it was a very strong bill). The tent folded up in the late afternoon, leaving me at liberty to see the last two bands if I wanted. I never made it through more than a couple of songs by the headlining Smashing Pumpkins, but I saw every single set by the Beasties.

Their hour in Kansas City had one of my favorite moments ever at a concert (or in life), which wouldn’t have happened if the crowd had not been eating lots of personal pan pizzas, served by a vendor in small cardboard boxes. When the Beastie Boys started playing “Sabotage,” everybody went nuts–not only did the crowd pogo, but they threw the pizza boxes up in the air, and kept hurling them up for the duration of the song, making the field look like an immense popcorn machine. It was three of the most joyful minutes I’ve ever been a part of, and Adam Yauch was playing bass at the center of the maelstrom.

Bonus track! Morrison’s perspective on Iron Man:
The most popular comics characters right now are Iron Man and Batman, who are both millionaire playboys. That’s the dream man of our society–the guy who’s bigger than the military-industrial complex. He doesn’t have to answer to anyone because he’s got so much money, there’s nothing you can do to stop him. People don’t care about the socialist hero; these days, they want to be the socialite hero.

Apparently the word that’s been chiseled out is “savage.”

You take the staircase to the first floor

And thought it was an amusing Irish mistake–here in the U.S.A., pal, we walk through the front door right into the first floor, the way the founding fathers intended! But if I’m being fair to Bono (which I suppose I should be, since it’s a leap year), the song is about the heavy weight of America in an impoverished country; e.g., “across the mud huts where the children sleep.” (Apparently, it was inspired by a trip Bono took to El Salvador.) America is outside, but it’s not inside–so the song may describe a tesseract.

I wanted to revisit an issue from two decades ago, and see what grabbed my attention now. So, the February 1992 issue of Details.

The most amusing reflection of its era: an article (by Mark Lewman of Dirt (the Sassy spinoff for boys)) on snowboarding, clearly written as introduction for people unfamiliar with the new-fangled sport.

The spookiest moment: a Q&A Margy Rochlin conducted with Brandon Lee, who died a little over a year later, on the set of The Crow. Specifically:

Q. What drives you crazy?
A. Women and death.
Q. Because?
A. Women, well, that’s self-explanatory. And death because you can’t take it back.

The opening page of the Eyewitness section seems like a fairly obvious lift of the Harper’s Index, but the big newsy photos within still look good. Lineup of the articles in the Style section: snowboarding (as mentioned), cognac, straight women who sleep with gay men, baseball clothes, STDs, the urge for violence, and–this was so Details–Lloyd Cole on corduroy.

Rob Tannenbaum did a great article on his visit to the skeevy, skanky Hedonism II resort.

“This place is not at all what I thought it would be,” he continues. “I expected a supermarket of women. I expected girls would lift up their shirts and beckon you over. But you have to pursue them. That’s not hedonism.”

Opening line of Danny Garcia’s service piece on visiting Miami: “If you like the energy of cities like Paris or London, which were completed hundreds of years ago, Miami is not for you.”

Q&As in the feature well: Rebecca DeMornay, Susan Faludi, Brandon Lee, Emilio Estevez (“The truth is I did lose my virginity in a brothel in the Philippines.”).

The cover story is a typically excellent profile by Chris Heath (or “X Heath,” as his name always got truncated on office memos), of the not especially introspective Christian Slater. Discussing how Slater took up golf after he got sober:

His grandparents–his mother’s parents–gave him a set of golf clubs.

Where are they now?

He looks puzzled. “Grandma’s in heaven, and Grandpa’s in Trenton.”

I meant the clubs.

“Oh. The clubs are in my closet. They’re not coming out, ever. They’re history.”

The comic strip at the back was the incoherent but entertaining Wild Palms, which would eventually become a miniseries starring a miscast Jim Belushi. The two movie articles were on a young Steven Soderbergh (“still freshman-skinny and wearing braces on his teeth”) making his second movie, Kafka, and in a sign of the times, Sony’s efforts to find a movie for Michael Jackson to star in.

Which brings us to my home turf, the music section. There’s lots of record reviews that I have no memory of editing (lead review: The Shamen). There’s news items that I barely remember writing (I retain a vague impression of having drinks with Jody Watley). Features on Bill Graham (his last interview), Marc Almond, Big Daddy Kane, and Primal Scream (Bobby Gillespie to Sylvia Patterson: “What’s my gold shirt made of? Heh, heh. Rock ‘n’ roll.”). I wrote a sidebar on the heights of various rock stars: it was misery to research and not that interesting once it was on the page.

Oh, yeah: I went to Germany to write about Nirvana, traveling with them from Berlin to Hamburg to Frankfurt (with young photographer Juergen Teller, who ended up being a big deal in his own right). I had gotten an advance tape of Nevermind and been raving about it at a high enough volume that I got the assignment when the album started to rise in the charts. (I also had an advance copy of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video–one day when we were closing an issue, I gathered up the junior editorial staff once an hour on the hour. We’d all go to the conference room, watch the video, and then return to work, convening again an hour later.) When I read the article now, there’s a lot that makes me wince, mostly stemming from my inexperience, but there’s also moments that make me happy, like Kurt Cobain writing a response to some misogynist graffiti: “You will be strung up by your balls and submerged into a vat of razor blades and sperm.” Or the story of Smith College’s radio station playing “Teen Spirit” 67 times in a week, including one spin by a reggae DJ. Or Dave Grohl sifting through garbage on the floor of the club after the show, looking for jewelry. Or Grohl meeting Martin Chambers of the Pretenders, with this aftermath:

Dave notes that since he actually liked the Pretenders, he found the situation much less awkward than the time he looked offstage in Vancouver and saw Loverboy’s drummer pumping his fist and saying, “Go, man! Go!”

Good times.