I’m going stream of consciousness for a minute. Deal with it.
Here’s how I remember it: I’m in 7th grade Science class. Mr. Kemp usually lets us goof off for the last 10-15 minutes of class if we’re done with our work. Dave Baldinger, sometimes friend, constant troublemaker, has a new cassette tape. He tells me about these guys called the Beastie Boys. Dave says they are really funny and I have to listen them. Dave tells me to give him my walkman and cues it up to one song in particular, “Fight For Your Right To Party.” I figure he was right about how good Gensis’ Invisible Touch album was, so I’ll give it a listen.
Dave pulls the tape case out of his backpack like he’s doing something covert.
The tape has a Parental Advisory sticker on it. It’s the first one I’ve seen. The media at the time had painted a picture that music with that label was actually dangerous. There were stories of kids that killed themselves or had been driven to murder by they music they listened to. That sticker was in place to protect my developing brain from evil music.
Of course I want to hear it right now. I have my yellow waterproof Sony Walkman in my backpack. Dave hands me back my walkman and I put on the headphones and press play. I hear nothing. At first there’s the crackle of the way a tape sounds when there’s no music. I’m not sure how loud the walkman is so I turn the sound up thinking I might have the sound down, plus I think turning up music is just reflex to a teen-age boy.
BOOM!
There’s a loud as fuck guitar chord in my hears and a guy Screams “KICK IT!” and I’m berated with an awesome guitar riff. My brain is thumping.
Instantly, I love this.
I’ve heard rap before, but it never connected with me in any major way. My next door neighbor would occasionally play Run DMC for me when I was at his house trying to make out with his sister.
This was something different. This has connected.
A few days later I get my Mom to take me to the mall where I buy my own copy of License to Ill. I love nearly every song on it.
The best part is it’s funny. It’s really funny. Best of all to a teenage boy: It’s dirty funny.
It’s something you hide from your parents, and therefore immediately made more irresistible.
I literally wore the print off the sides of the tape. You couldn’t even read the song titles.
In time I moved on. The Beasties Boys became like the Fat Boys, or Weird Al. They were a joke band. A musical comedy act. Funny, but not real music. The Beastie Boys disappeared from my world.
I was not a bright child.
1994: I’m in college and I hear a song in someone’s apartment. It doesn’t sound like anything else. It’s loud. It’s aggressive, and it grabs you by the balls from the start. It was Sabotage. He tells me it’s the Beastie Boys. Huh? The funny guys? Rappers aren’t supposed to play instruments. They thrash like a punk band. Then he says I really need to see the video.
Boom.
My buddy copies the tape for me. This isn’t funny anymore. IT is, but it’s not a gag album. It’s real and these guys are not fucking around. A week or two later I see the video for “Sabotage.” It has this patina of 70’s cops shows and adventure shows I foggily remember from my childhood. It awakens an interest in a style of that era, and looking back at culture in a different way. It lands perfectly in the time of me becoming aware of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. The Beastie Boys were on the crest of a cultural wave during one of the most formative years of my adult life. They influenced fashion, art, music, music video. It was more than just music, it was a lifestyle. I had every issue of Grand Royal I could find. I was always seeing stuff I never knew existed.
They never left my my world again.
Thank you, Adam Yauch.
