A book for hip-hop heads.

I stumbled upon Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies by Brian Coleman and immediately added it to my to-read list. The premise of the book is simple—Coleman talks with the artists behind some of the best hip-hop album albums of the 80’s and 90’s. His objective is to backfill the detailed liner notes that are often absent from many hip-hop albums.

You can read an excerpt from the book about the Beastie Boys‘ album Check Your Head. Apparently the B Boys were huge mix tape nerds while making the album …

There was another DJ angle to Check Your Head, as Yauch explains. “Back then we had kind of a battle with different pause-tapes [homemade DJ mixes made without an actual DJ mixer, using the pause and record buttons on a tape deck to simulate a cut-and-paste-style DJ mix] we were making and playing for each other. The tapes we were making would jump around with different styles, just quick parts of different songs. Hip-hop to jazz to funk and whatever else. And in a way, Check Your Head ended up being like one of those pause-tapes.”

Mario C agrees with the pause-tape description, and recalls, “Every night when we’d hit G-Son, it would be like show-and-tell, because we’d all be trying to come up with the best tape. Eventually, everybody would show up with a whole record bag instead of a tape, and we’d all take turns showing off records we had just found. That album is definitely one big mix-tape, because it evolved from bits and pieces of everything, from them playing live to all the new samples we were using.”

Tags: beastie boys