Re: Beastie Boys

There are several historic musical moments that are probably destined to make my generation (hitting our mid-30s/early 40s now) the most annoying generation to hear wax poetic about the music of our youth since the Baby Boomers. One of those moments is the mainstreaming of rap and hip-hop: Licensed To Ill (along with Run DMC’s King of Rock) was one of the first albums I felt I little afraid of, that I had to listen to quietly and hide from my parents, because music was dangerous and misunderstood, and prompted soul-churning debates among my elementary school and junior high nerd cohort about what constitutes “music” – while Bon Jovi could clearly play their instruments, the Beastie Boys were “just saying stuff”. My first (ironic airquote) “band” (unairquote) started in the 4^th grade, reaching our commercial peak in the sixth – at which point we decide we should actually learn to play instruments, prompting me to pick up a guitar for the first time. We reached the lunchroom consensus that “rap” was not “music” and therefore we did not like it – and almost immediately we started writing raps. Licensed to Ill was funny, groundbreaking, dumb, and exhilarating. I once had a cassette with Paul’s Boutique on one side and I have no idea what on the other, because I fast-forwarded through Side B every time to get back to Paul’s Boutique. Check Your Head challenged expectations during a time of ever-changing expectations, inspired everyone I knew to start wearing stocking caps year-round, and was a great record. Ill Communication was one of the albums that completely defined the Summer of 1994, my first summer after high school, in all its wonder and awfulness. My 20s arrived and with it a black cloud of depression – not the cool, teenage, Cure-listening, “this makes me more interesting” sort of depression, but a seemingly groundless and frequently debilitating void. I hid it from everyone I cared about, until about four years later, temping at a pharmaceutical I wrote to my brother: “I’ve been depressed.” I spent a little time working for my dad, primarily driving around replacing the fire extinguishers in a drugstore chain in all grayest cities in Upstate New York. It afforded my long hours in the van by myself, which was exactly what I wanted. Drifting between radio stations, I heard “Intergalactic” for the first time. It was that weird drifting time for the collective pop culture of music – hearing the song, which resemble nothing so strongly as the rhymes we wrote in my sixth grade band, with the time honored but dated flow of “Lead-MC-says-a-line, Everyone-else-shouts-the-last-word/the-rhyme” – I assumed I was hearing a Fun Lovin’ Criminals song. My cohort was graduating college and we were all deep in the funk of post-collegiate what-to-do, despite the fact that it was the Late 90s Internet Boom, and we gathered regularly at a local bar that serve 50-cent juice glasses of the local brewery’s bilgiest bilge, playing shuffleboard. Most of my friends were about to enter the cocoon of Law or Medical school – for the next couple years we’d have relateable stories for each other about middle-class subsistence living, but ultimately they emerged as doctors and lawyers, all at once burning the sweatshirts of their undergad universities and buying houses outside Boston about the same time that I – pursuing the music dream without any real gusto – moved into a hallway. Over juice glasses of beer, my friend Ryan, always savvier and smarter than me, explained to me why Hello Nasty was a great record – but it was too late. The nineties – our Goonies-time of chasing buried treasures hidden beneath the ordinariness of our lives – were nearly over, and I simultaneous hit the moment where I didn’t really care for the Beastie Boys and talking about music became a thing I did with my friends instead of listening to it. And so the Beastie Boy has taken me from the first flush of love at 11 years old, through danger, through angst, through unexpected beauty, and there I was at 22 – jaded and unhappy. Looking back, on my involvement in music as a very young man (say 16-26), I realize that I didn’t have the fire, the energy, the good taste, the skill, or the desire for it. Released from those dreams, as a person in my mid-late 30s – I can acknowledge how happy it makes me to be content with being a fan and a dilettante. But I was involved in the music scene, wherever I lived, and I’ve met some very talented people, people much more knowledgeable and skilled than me. Still, even the most famous band that ever travelled in my orbit is just barely famous - making their living on their fifth mediocre album of increasingly banal pop-punk; yet they were the ones who “made it” and in them I can very clearly see a drive for success and slightly brighter spark of talent than anyone else possessed. To that end, I cannot imagine how wonderful it must have felt to live life as Adam Yauch – to be there for those exhilarating moments (the birth of hip-hop, the birth of hardcore, the alternative explosion) and to have leapt into the fray in those moments, to literally be one of the people pointing the direction that the future of music would take. Perhaps because the Beastie Boys so frequently acknowledge – from the plain-spoken, self-centered, and boastful podium of hip hop – that they’re incredibly lucky; that they’re professional goofballs; that they won the lottery, I'm not bitterly envious. Their swaggering always belied an ever-present nervous shrug of “why me?”  As fans we wordlessly answered – in the face of their innovation, their refusal to play it boring or safe, and their open invitation to join them for the length of a record – “because you’re great.”