One of the biggest selling points of Apple Music is its fantastic artist-curated radio programs. From Dr Dre to Drake, from Corey Taylor to Haim, some of the most eclectic and respected artists in the world curate regular programs, with interviews, stellar song mixes and plenty more. Now, one of the most intriguing names to date – Mike D of the legendary Beastie Boys – is set to make his radio debut.
The show is set to be titled The Echo Chamber, and is described as a “freeform program,” a bi-weekly program that will feature one guest per show, with whom the rapper will discuss music, play tunes and more. Confirmed guests include Blood Orange, Slaves and Cassius, with plenty more to be announced. There’s no rhyme or reason to the music discussed, with selections ranging anywhere from Chance the Rapper to Arthur Russell. Having recorded the first episode in his Malibu pool house, he explained the opportunity to Rolling Stone as “a little bit like a fantasy that I’ve had since basically I started buying records as a 13-year-old… I’m still the same music fan. I would save my lunch money and go buy a seven-inch singles at the time, ’cause I was into punk rock. That evolved, ’cause I got turned on to different weird music like Liquid Liquid and ESG, different New York things, and then rap. So to actually be able to cut out the middle man and play records and have it be somehow part of a vocation is some weird wish fulfilment. And ultimately, like any other musician, I feel like the shit that I like is better than the shit that anybody else likes *laughs*.”
Speaking out the music he’ll be playing, he explained that it will “evolve over time… I vacillate between what’s current and things that I think have influenced me a lot. The show also depends on records that I’m working on at this moment as a producer.”
Speaking about his decision to work with Apple Music, Mike D said that it “works for me schedule-wise. I wouldn’t want to have to do it every day. Power to the people who do do it every day; I wouldn’t want it to be, like, my job-job. So the amount of work I have to do works for me, as I’m sure it does for the other artists with shows, whether it’s Dre or Josh Homme or Ezra [Koenig] or Q-Tip. Apple also makes sense to me, in terms of the shows being archived so people can access them when they want to. I don’t think the relevance of my show ends that Friday night.”
An “echo chamber” in this context, is a metaphorical term for ideas, and in this case music being bounced around, built on and amplified through discussion and exploration. However, Mike explained that it’s pronounced with patois, as in, “Echo Chamb-ah,” a kind of homage to dub music.
You can read the full interview with Mike D here, which also talks about the 30th anniversary of the Beastie Boys classic Licensed to Ill.
Image: Yuri Hasegawa