The Beastie Boys are one of those childhood treasures, like Disney movies, the 1986 World Series, and Roald Dahl, whose significance does not sink in until years later. Although I spent much of my junior high years poring over the liner notes of Paul’s Boutique–the Beasties’ second album–it was in the years to come, as my musical tastes expanded, that I came to realize the personal implications of that trio of Jewish kids from New York City, Ad Rock (Adam Horovitz), MCA (Adam Yauch), and Mike D (Michael Diamond).
Notwithstanding their hardcore punk rock beginnings, it was with Licensed to Ill, released in 1986, that most Beastie fans first encountered the trio. To my retrospective dismay, my nine-year-old ears were ill prepared. Of course, I heard snippets of “Fight For Your Right to Party,” but I wasn’t quite primed for the battle. It was not until 1990 that junior high and Paul’s Boutique coincided to turn me toward complete Beastie devotion.
To give credit where it is due, it was not the Boys’ music that first grabbed hold of me–it was its listeners. In seventh grade, two of the coolest people I knew rocked non-stop Beasties, and so I followed suit. Of course, part of what made these two pioneers so cool was their musical selections. Junior high was suffused with a mist of stultifying conformity; it was all Poison and tight-rolled jeans, and for most (myself included) the stakes were too high to buck the trends. But here were these two daring souls, one girl, one boy, who showed a little originality–they wore baggy pants, funky hairstyles, and listened to the Beastie Boys, a group that hung on the fringes of the MTV establishment, but clearly on its own terms. I was hooked before I even listened to the Beastie Boys, and doubly hooked once I did.
Being a hip-hop neophyte, just the mixture of solid beats and high-energy rhymes was enough to draw me in. What I took for granted in my early listening stages, though, was the Boys’ nimble lyrical interplay. I would later come to appreciate that no group so seamlessly shared the mic from verse to verse, even word to word. Paul’s Boutique quickly had me turning back to Licensed, where I discovered gems like “She’s Crafty” and “Paul Revere,” two of the greatest story rhymes ever composed. In retrospect, it seems like the Beasties had achieved the hip-hop triple crown of beats, rhymes, and flow (at least of the nasal variety). But to isolate the sources of my attraction to the Beasties misses the point.
I was drawn to the Beasties both for what they were not, i.e. the rest of the pop music world, and for what they were, which was, well, a lot like me. They were exposed enough to be accessible, creative enough to require a devoted ear, and white and Jewish enough to spare me the moniker of “wigga,” reserved for white kids in my junior high who dared sample from black culture. I could claim the Beastie Boys as my favorite group because it was, above all, believable.
Unbeknowst to me, the Beasties’ songs were inlaid with musical and cultural nuggets that I would harvest for years to come. The Beasties introduced me to the sound of a bong, White Castle, reggae, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash. Most of it went right over my head, or rather, got lodged in the back of my mind, to be reawakened when I was finally exposed to the referent.
Recently, the Beasties have drifted to the back of my CD case, less for daily listening than for a reminder; they are my musical great books, my first love from a time when I thought musical appreciation had to be monogamous. I, somewhat sheepishly, hardly touched their last few albums. They are most likely to get thrown in on a road trip these days, but I have the Beasties to thank for more than some raucous stretches of highway. My willingness to branch out into unfamiliar musical worlds has its roots in my Beasties immersion program, as does my continued devotion to a brand of hip-hop that does its best to reject the tropes of gangsta rap. And even if I never again hear Paul’s Boutique, my Beasties musical history will still be alive, when I vaguely recognize obscure ’70s tunes and realize, “Hey I’ve heard that before–oh yeah, the Beasties sampled that.” It still happens.
