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I was today years old when I discovered that the gold and platinum records handed out by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are meant to be exact replicas of the records released by the bands receiving the coveted awards. This makes sense, of course, but myself and countless others have long assumed the gold records were just generic gold records and not replicas.
Mike D and Ad-Rock from The Beastie Boys dropped this revelation on Conan O’Brien’s new podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, where they tell a story about learning their gold record for Paul’s Boutique given to them by the RIAA wasn’t a Paul’s Boutique record at all and only had 4 songs and was an entirely different artist.
This Beastie Boys story has started to go viral over the past 24 hours as myself and countless others learn that platinum and gold records are actually meant to be replicas. Their story comes around the 5:30 mark in the video below:
In the story, Ad-Rock says “we had a gold record on the wall. It was our record Paul’s Boutique, and I was looking at it. I could see it had our label and nine songs on one side. But when I looked at the gold record itself, it only had four songs.”
At that point their curiosity had overtaken so they only had one thing left to do. Ad-Rock says “Mike broke the glass, took the record out and we put it right on the record player.” When they threw it on the record player they didn’t hear ‘Egg Man’ or ‘The Sounds of Science’ from Paul’s Boutique, it was the smooth sounds of Barry Manilow.
Mike D went on to say “I’d like to think that for artists like Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer, it was actually their record. But in our case, it seemed like it was somebody’s record that was spray-painted gold or something.”
After that revelation, Conan O’Brien said there needs to be a massive ‘Quiz Show style investigation’ where every every gold record ever handed out by the RIAA needs to be checked for authenticity. Conan called this “the most important thing facing America right now, at least for the next couple of months.” Hard to argue with that…