Singer tweets about the session, which also included producer Polow da Don. By James Montgomery Chris Brown Photo: Jason Kempin/ WireImage Chris Brown is branching out. His F.A.M.E. album sees him expanding his repertoire, and he’s already straddled the line between R&B and dance with “Beautiful People.” Now, he’s looking to push things even further. Though, to be honest, we’re not exactly sure in what direction. Brown recently logged studio time with the unlikely combination of M.I.A. and Polow da Don, a collaboration he broke on his Twitter account. “Was in the studio with the incredible M.I.A. and Polow,” he wrote. “Amazing artist[s]! Real talent!” Polow further confirmed the collabo on his Twitter account, and, from the sound of things, the music they made was revelatory. “In the lab wit the great Chris Brown and the incredible M.I.A.,” Polow wrote (in ALL CAPS). “Thank you dear lord!” Polow added , “I’ve waited on this moment my whole career … I feel this song in my soul!” For her part, M.I.A. remained silent about the music, but did mention that she was “shootin’ hoops” with Brown and the producer. It’s not known if the music they collaborated on is meant for a re-release of Brown’s F.A.M.E., the follow-up to M.I.A.’s 2010 album MAYA or something else entirely. Emails to reps for both artists were not responded to by press time. Brown is currently on tour in Australia, where, judging by his Twitter feed, he’s taking time to see a whole lot of movies and playing basketball with the Adelaide 36ers of the National Basketball League. What are you expecting from a Chris Brown/ M.I.A. collabo? Let us know in the comments! Related Artists Chris Brown M.I.A.
Star-studded film is packed with nods to the Beasties’ past and present. By James Montgomery John C. Reilly, Will Ferrell and Jack Black in the “Fight For Your Right Revisited” video Photo: Capitol Records By now, you’ve probably watched — and subsequently re-watched — the Beastie Boys’ new “Fight For Your Right Revisited” film, which premiered at midnight Thursday morning (April 21) on MTV2, mtvU, VH1 Classic and Palladia. In theory, it’s a tongue-in-cheek retrospective on the Beasties’ early License To Ill days, picking up where their sublimely stoopid “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” video left off, following Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA — as played by Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood and Danny McBride, respectively — on a drunken spree that culminates in an epic dance battle against their future selves (John C. Reilly, Will Ferrell and Jack Black, just in case you’re keeping score at home). But really, it works just as well as a rather-involved exercise in cameo spotting, as seemingly everyone in the universe pops up for a frame or three. Thankfully, the Beasties were nice enough to include a list of co-stars in the closing credits. Our favorites include Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci as the bewildered parents who interrogate the Beasties post-party, Will Arnett as a businessman who gives a shout-out to “Arrested Development” (“COME ON!”) and Orlando Bloom’s inexplicable three-second cameo as a window washer in a Def Jam windbreaker. But there seems to be a batch of uncredited cameos too — we’re pretty sure we saw Danny Masterson and Zach Galifianakis in there. In fact, outside of some of Michael Jackson’s biggest videos (“Liberian Girl” and “Remember the Time” come to mind), “Fight For Your Right Revisited” might very well be the most celeb-heavy video of all time. But, as we said, “Fight For Your Right” is also so much more. And while you were busy trying to keep track of all the cameos, you probably failed to notice some of the film’s subtler moments — nods to the Beasties’ past and present, the majority of which pass by with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed. Here are five we’ve noticed. And while we’ve watched the thing no less than a dozen times, we’re sure there are some we missed. Let us know in the comments below! Chateau Ted el Michel D
With ‘Fight’ short film set to premiere Wednesday (April 20), here’s a look back at the beer-soaked history of the 1986 video. By James Montgomery Adam Yauch, Ricky Powell and Mike D in 1986 Photo: MTV News You get the feeling that, back in their hell-raising License To Ill heyday, the Beastie Boys derived some sort of perverse pleasure from blindsiding unsuspecting interviewers with profanities or non sequiturs. Or at least by dumping beer on them. Sufficed to say, they’ve mellowed some in recent years ( their vocabulary has improved , too), but back in the day, the Beasties lived to torment the media, and they did so by any means necessary. Take, for example, this rather revelatory bit of tape shot on December 31, 1986, at MTV’s 6th annual “Rock ‘N Roll New Year’s Eve Ball” (a party so huge that both Brian Setzer and the Georgia Satellites were in attendance). In it, a poor MTV News field producer corners the Beasties and attempts to ask them about their plans for 1987 — plans that included a headlining tour and a new video to shoot for “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” — and gets doused by a Budweiser, making a valiant attempt to shield the microphone from a soaking, with little success. And while it’s oddly compelling to watch a train wreck like this unfold, the reason we dug the tape out of our archives occurs just moments later, when the same producer, still wet with cheap beer, asks the MCs about their infamous “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” video — the same video that serves as the inspiration for the band’s “Fight For Your Right Revisited” short film , which premieres Wednesday (April 20) at midnight on MTV2, mtvU and Palladia. Specifically, the interviewer asks the Boys about casting “the geeky guys” for the video, which gives them the opportunity to introduce “the man who played the main nerd,” their photographer-friend Ricky Powell (presumably right around the time “your girl got di–ed” by him.) And then, they pour beer on his head, too. But not before Powell curses on-air and then professes his love for “Black women with blonde hair.” So, yeah, it’s a pretty amazing bit of tape, even 25 years later. In celebration of just how far the Beastie Boys have come — and in anticipation of “Fight For Your Right Revisited” — we’re rolling it out for you right now. Enjoy — and wear a poncho! Don’t miss “Fight for Your Right Revisited” on Wednesday (April 20) at midnight on MTV2, mtvU, VH1 Classic and Palladia. Related Photos Beastie Boys: A Career Retrospective Related Artists Beastie Boys
With their new film set to premiere at midnight, Bigger Than the Sound looks back at the Beasties’ authentic but odd history. By James Montgomery Danny McBride, Seth Rogen and Elijah Wood in the Beastie Boys’ “Fight For Your Right Revisted” video Photo: Capitol Back in the summer of 1992, I wasn’t really concerned with the Beastie Boys’ legacy. I wasn’t aware of the seismic shift they had undergone with Check Your Head or the to-the-brink-and-back journey they’d taken just to make the album. Instead, I was focused on getting my Dickies to sag just so and tracking down a pom-pom beanie like MCA wore on the album’s cover. So deep was my Beastie-mania that I was willing to wear a knit cap and khakis in July. In Florida. And I wasn’t alone (at least not in my high school). Because in 1992, everyone I knew lived and breathed the Beastie Boys, and their fantastically rattling comeback album Check Your Head. Of course, at the time, none of us really knew it was a comeback album; we just thought it was the coolest thing we’d ever heard — a fuzzy, funky think that sounded like nothing else on the radio — and, by proxy, the Beasties were the coolest guys on the planet (or, at least, the coolest guys in suburban Orlando). They dressed like skaters, they were obsessed with the ABA and creaky badasses like Richard Holmes and the Ohio Players, and they channeled the swagger of everyone from Columbo to Dolemite. They were, whether they knew it or not, the underground railroad of hip. If you wanted to know what was cool, and you wanted to know before anyone else, you went to the Beastie Boys. It’s only years later that I realize that prescient coolness is what has made the Beastie Boys what they are today: a band whose career rivals any other. They have been together in their current incarnation for nearly 30 years and have released a slew of albums, the overwhelming majority of which are very good (their latest, The Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, is due May 3), but it’s not their longevity or their back catalog that have earned them respect; it’s their unerring ability to continuously reinvent themselves, seemingly at will, and without ever getting snagged the way so many of their contemporaries have. In 1986, with License to Ill, they were party-hearty terrors. On 1989’s epochal Paul’s Boutique, they were stony sample-meisters. Check Your Head saw them zigging at a time when others were zagging; rather than join the debate over just how the ’90s would sound, they decided to head back to the ’70s ( Head remains a decidedly lo-fi thing to this day). Sure, 1994’s Ill Communication was in the same vein, but there also emerged a newfound consciousness, one they’d explore more fully with their series of Tibetan Freedom Concerts. In ’98, with Hello Nasty (and the accompanying “Intergalactic” video), they got a jump on the Kid Robot “designer toy” fetish that broke through to the mainstream late in the 2000s. And on 2004’s To the 5 Boroughs, they returned to their hip-hop roots and celebrated the city in which they live (though, to be honest, the less said about this album the better). In between all that, they released EPs that saw them dabble in hardcore punk and jazzy instrumentals (to name just a few), but never once did anyone bring up the question of authenticity. And there’s a reason for that — the same reason they’ve become the revered act they are today. No matter how they reimagined themselves, it always came from the same place: the heart. There is an unquestionable authenticity to everything the Beastie Boys do, because they’re not doing it to be contrary or successful; they’re doing it because it’s what they want to do. And it’s only now that people seem to realize just how influential that authenticity really is. At midnight Wednesday — on MTV2, mtvU, VH1 Classic and Palladia — they’ll premiere “Fight for Your Right Revisited,” a short film/ career retrospective that includes plenty of nods to their past — it tells the wholly imagined story of what happened after 1987’s legendary “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)” video — but also features cameos by a whole lot of “f— it, let’s do something funny” actors like Will Ferrell and Danny McBride, who were 19 and 11, respectively, when the original video premiered and probably couldn’t help but have been influenced by its sublimely stoopid sentiments, not to mention everything that came after. So, in a lot of ways, Ferrell and McBride are a lot like you or I. They were drawn to the Beastie Boys because they sensed in them something revelatory and real, and they stuck around because neither of those things ever changed. Of course, leave it to the Beasties to turn the convention of career retrospection on its ear. Rather than release some deluxe edition of License, they’ve instead made an incredibly insular short film that rewrites history with each frame. It’s deceptively brilliant, really. And the same can be said for the B-Boys themselves. Without really trying, they’ve fashioned the kind of anti-career that many aspire to, yet few ever attain. And no matter where they go from here, you’ll know it’ll be someplace else entirely. Even if they’re just doing it for themselves. Don’t miss “Fight for Your Right Revisisted” on Wednesday at midnight on MTV2, mtvU, VH1 Classic and Palladia.
Some say the movie chronicling Conan’s ouster from NBC is funnier than his show. By Eric Ditzian Conan O’Brien Photo: Noel Vasquez/ Getty Four months removed from the debut of his TBS late-night show, Conan O’Brien swept into the South by Southwest film festival over the weekend, a bit reluctantly, to promote a documentary cataloguing the fallout from his “Tonight Show” firing and his subsequent creative resurrection via a live comedy tour. Called “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop,” the doc begins by recapping his NBC ouster and follows the comedian and his team as they come up with the comedy tour idea, build it from the ground up and then head out on the road. O’Brien has already largely moved on from these sordid events, but for one evening, he was compelled to relive the juicy late-night scandal and his reaction to it, which was not always as high-minded as he might have hoped. A few reviews, as well as O’Brien’s own comments about the project, have already hit the Web, so read on for some early insight into “Can’t Stop.” The Overview “What starts out as a sanity-restoring make-work project evolves into a highly entertaining cross-country extravaganza during the course of ‘Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop,’ an up-close account of the former ‘Tonight Show’ host’s two-month, 32-city comedy-and-music variety-show tour shortly after he parted ways with NBC in 2010. But the biggest laughs and most intriguing revelations are provided offstage in this slickly produced documentary, as O’Brien — often pushing himself to the point of exhaustion before, during and after performances — plays for keeps while playing for laughs.” — Joe Leydon, Variety The Laughs “Conan O’Brien should take some satisfaction in the thought that Jay Leno will never earn as much laughter in half an hour as he and his crew does in the first third of ‘Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.’ To be fair, O’Brien’s TV talk show was rarely if ever this full-tilt hilarious, either, which might have something to do with why he seems to have so many more supporters than the program had viewers. But ‘Can’t Stop’ is as entertaining as any showbiz doc in recent memory and could draw a nice audience of Team Coco followers in a limited theatrical release.” — John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter Conan, In His Own Words, Part I “I personally have trouble watching it because it’s a time in my life that I don’t like to go back to. I’m happy where I am now. I don’t really need to go back to it. But I made a commitment.” — O’Brien, in an Associated Press interview Conan, In His Own Words, Part II “I’ve done thousands of hours of television, and they get a sense of you, but you’re really only on TV for an hour, and this is seeing these other sides of me. It’s funny, because my staff, they saw this and they said, ‘Oh, we get to see a little bit of Mean Conan.’ And they said, ‘Mean Conan, he’s our favorite, he’s the funniest Conan.’ Which is weird. There’s a way in which, after our meetings sometimes, I’ll talk about the show and I’ll just go on these long riffs, which are over-the-top, sarcastic about everything, and people will be laughing really hard while I’m saying negative things about the show. I’m really hard on myself, I get very dark. I tease people constantly. I physically fight my writers, and they fight me back. And so it’s this gear I have that I’ve used sometimes on television but really hardly at all. There’s all of this stuff there that I think, well, if not now, when? Might as well let people know he exists.” — Conan O’Brien, in a New York Times interview
Long-awaited album will drop May 3, Adam Yauch and Mike D announce. By Gil Kaufman The Beastie Boys’ Hot Sauce Committee Part Two Photo: Capitol After several delays caused by member Adam Yauch’s cancer battle , the Beastie Boys are ready to unleash their long-awaited Hot Sauce Committee Part Two album. Yauch made the announcement Sunday on the band’s official website , writing, “Since the dawn of time, and perhaps even before, there was a silent order who were tasked with a mission. They held their secret tightly. On May 3rd the Hot Sauce Committee Part Two will be unleashed on the general public. Hold fast ye heathens.” Mike D followed up on Monday with a post that revealed the album’s cover art, a series of colorful geometric shapes that looks like a pixilated collage. As previously reported, the track listing for the group’s seventh studio album is: “Tadlock’s Glasses,” “B-Boys In The Cut,” “Make Some Noise,” “Nonstop Disco Powerpack,” “OK,” “Too Many Rappers (feat. Nas),” “Say It,” “The Bill Harper Collection,” “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win (feat. Santigold),” “Long Burn The Fire,” “Funky Donkey,” “Lee Majors Come Again,” “Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament,” “Pop Your Balloon,” “Crazy Ass S—” and “Here’s a Little Something For Ya.” The trio recently made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival, where a short directed by Yauch called “Fight for Your Right Revisited” debuted. The remake of the iconic 1987 video stars Elijah Wood, Danny McBride and Seth Rogen , and features exact replicas of the Boys’ outfits from the original house partying clip. After being diagnosed with cancer of the salivary gland in the summer of 2009, Yauch underwent surgery and treatment and said last spring that he was ready to get back to work. “I feel better,” Yauch said last March . “It was touch and go there for a while, but I am finally getting my energy back.” Yauch announced on July 20, 2009 that the discovery of the cancer would necessitate the canceling of all of the Beasties’ planned summer-festival appearances and push back their new album, then called Hot Sauce Committee, Part One , while he underwent treatment. According to a band spokesperson, because the cancer was discovered early and localized in an area that does not affect Yauch’s vocal cords, it was believed the surgery was successful.
‘The way that it will fit in will not infringe upon the integrity of ‘The Hobbit,’ ‘ actor tells MTV News at Sundance. By Eric Ditzian Elijah Wood Photo: MTV News Elijah Wood has long maintained that he’d never suit back up as Frodo Baggins — the role he pioneered in the Oscar-winning “Lord of the Rings” trilogy” — in an adaptation of “The Hobbit” unless the appearance avoided gimmickry and fit within the larger context of J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendary creation. Well, now Wood is officially returning to Middle-earth, and in what might be his first public comments about the upcoming project, the 29-year-old actor told MTV News that, although Frodo was never in Tolkien’s “Hobbit,” the character’s appearance in the movies makes sense for Jackson’s adaptation. “It’s a very small piece, and I think that’s the most appropriate,” Wood said when we caught up with him at the Sundance Film Festival , where he was promoting “Fight for Your Right Revisited,” a short film by Beastie Boys MC Adam Yauch. “Obviously, Frodo’s not alive within the context of ‘The Hobbit’ piece. So I jumped at the chance to be a part of it and see everyone and have a little reunion. It’ll be surreal.” While Wood didn’t delve into detail about the exact nature of his role — rumor has it he’ll appear in the beginning of each of the two films — he emphasized that Tolkien fans should not be worried. “I’d heard about it a little while ago,” he explained of the concept. “It’s an idea that Fran [Walsh] and Peter and Philippa [Boyens], the writers, came up with. The way that it will fit in will not infringe upon the integrity of ‘The Hobbit.’ It’ll fit and it’ll be appropriate. “It’s just a gift,” he added. “It’s a gift to be able to go back to New Zealand. It’s largely the same crew, the same creative team. It’s seven years since we finished on the last film, and it’s an opportunity to go back and have a reunion with everyone.” Check out everything we’ve got on “The Hobbit, Part 1.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com . Related Videos MTV Rough Cut: 2011 Sundance Film Festival 2011 Sundance Film Festival Video Highlights Related Photos Meet The Cast Of ‘The Hobbit’ Celebrities Hit The Ground At The 2011 Sundance Film Festival
