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This sports talk radio guy that I listen to has expressed this take more than once that Beastie Boys were a parody. He thinks they were making fun of rap music. He thinks they were so bad that they couldn’t have been serious.
my senior year of high school, this would've been 99-00, my literature teacher was the basketball coach. which me being mr. smart and cool liberal arts man made me immediately prejudiced against him. turns out he is an incredibly thoughtful and brilliant guy. he was a reserved and serious person but his mind was wild, we spent the first half of the semester talking exclusively about existential philosophy. he was also strangely interested in murder and would ponder what it would be like to take another man's life a few times a week, to the point where it was like his catch phrase and we'd all get really excited and give each other knowing glances when he would go on a tangent about homicide.
that's a lot of unnecessary level setting, but to the point of this thread he was aghast when he found out we were all beastie boys fans, because to him beastie boys stole hip-hop from black people and were making fun of the art form. fwiw he was a very white man and it was the first time i'd ever heard this argument, and even though i strongly disagreed with him i'm glad he introduced it to me. we spent a class having the debate and eventually we as a class won him over. i don't remember our exact words but i think our basic argument was that even though the beastie boys started out as bratty little punk rockers, and as such we conceded how it could appear that anything they did was an act of derision, their approach to hip-hop came from a place of respect for the genre, not a desire to satire or ridicule, and that the respect they had from the music community and the longevity of their careers were indicative of the fact that they aren't just a gimmick band, especially given how quickly many other white rappers had failed in the 90s. the beastie boys didn't try and pretend to be somebody else, they were their authentic selves, and hip-hop is a great genre with which to be your authentic self.
so i do NOT agree with the infuriating take, but i am glad at one point in my life i heard a similar take and grappled with it.
Beastie Boys were certainly somewhat of a parody on License to Ill and being obnoxiously over-the-top but they weren’t making fun of rap music.
They were comical but not a parody. Comedy has always been a part of hip hop.
They we’re parodying frat guys on Fight for Your Right, Girls, etc. their tour for that album had a giant Budweiser can on stage. They’ve said they were parodying them but eventually the line got blurred and they became those guys. The doc does a good job summing it up.
my senior year of high school, this would've been 99-00, my literature teacher was the basketball coach. which me being mr. smart and cool liberal arts man made me immediately prejudiced against him. turns out he is an incredibly thoughtful and brilliant guy. he was a reserved and serious person but his mind was wild, we spent the first half of the semester talking exclusively about existential philosophy. he was also strangely interested in murder and would ponder what it would be like to take another man's life a few times a week, to the point where it was like his catch phrase and we'd all get really excited and give each other knowing glances when he would go on a tangent about homicide.
that's a lot of unnecessary level setting, but to the point of this thread he was aghast when he found out we were all beastie boys fans, because to him beastie boys stole hip-hop from black people and were making fun of the art form. fwiw he was a very white man and it was the first time i'd ever heard this argument, and even though i strongly disagreed with him i'm glad he introduced it to me. we spent a class having the debate and eventually we as a class won him over. i don't remember our exact words but i think our basic argument was that even though the beastie boys started out as bratty little punk rockers, and as such we conceded how it could appear that anything they did was an act of derision, their approach to hip-hop came from a place of respect for the genre, not a desire to satire or ridicule, and that the respect they had from the music community and the longevity of their careers were indicative of the fact that they aren't just a gimmick band, especially given how quickly many other white rappers had failed in the 90s. the beastie boys didn't try and pretend to be somebody else, they were their authentic selves, and hip-hop is a great genre with which to be your authentic self.
so i do NOT agree with the infuriating take, but i am glad at one point in my life i heard a similar take and grappled with it.
You always tell good stories. I don’t think you should have been greatful for his bad opinion. It sounds like your teacher was a very white guy that isn’t a fan of hip hop just like this guy on the radio.
There’s this guy Dante Ross that is a hip hop A&R and producer that was friends with Beastie Boys before they started rapping.Hip Hop was new at the time and they were fans of it immediately and wanted to try it themselves. He talked a lot about it on What Had Happened Was podcast with Open Mike Eagle.
my senior year of high school, this would've been 99-00, my literature teacher was the basketball coach. which me being mr. smart and cool liberal arts man made me immediately prejudiced against him. turns out he is an incredibly thoughtful and brilliant guy. he was a reserved and serious person but his mind was wild, we spent the first half of the semester talking exclusively about existential philosophy. he was also strangely interested in murder and would ponder what it would be like to take another man's life a few times a week, to the point where it was like his catch phrase and we'd all get really excited and give each other knowing glances when he would go on a tangent about homicide.
that's a lot of unnecessary level setting, but to the point of this thread he was aghast when he found out we were all beastie boys fans, because to him beastie boys stole hip-hop from black people and were making fun of the art form. fwiw he was a very white man and it was the first time i'd ever heard this argument, and even though i strongly disagreed with him i'm glad he introduced it to me. we spent a class having the debate and eventually we as a class won him over. i don't remember our exact words but i think our basic argument was that even though the beastie boys started out as bratty little punk rockers, and as such we conceded how it could appear that anything they did was an act of derision, their approach to hip-hop came from a place of respect for the genre, not a desire to satire or ridicule, and that the respect they had from the music community and the longevity of their careers were indicative of the fact that they aren't just a gimmick band, especially given how quickly many other white rappers had failed in the 90s. the beastie boys didn't try and pretend to be somebody else, they were their authentic selves, and hip-hop is a great genre with which to be your authentic self.
so i do NOT agree with the infuriating take, but i am glad at one point in my life i heard a similar take and grappled with it.
You always tell good stories. I don’t think you should have been greatful for his bad opinion. It sounds like your teacher was a very white guy that isn’t a fan of hip hop just like this guy on the radio.
thank you! and regarding the teacher you aren't wrong, but what i appreciated was that he was sensitive to the idea of what on the surface could look like a group of snotty white kids co-opting a black art form and ridiculing it. and i imagine that was his knee jerk reaction to seeing a beastie boys video one time or something, he likely didn't delve deep for an answer. his take kind of came out of nowhere when he overheard us talking about Hello Nasty or something. and i appreciate that when presented with facts from people who were knowledgeable about the subject he changed his mind.
we probably all have similar misconceptions about people or subcultures we aren't very knowledgeable of nor care about enough to do research on. like if you asked me to speak extemporaneously about something like how airplanes work i'd just talk about how scary take-offs are for me without knowing any of the mechanics about how take-offs work. i can share emotions and reactions but not facts.
Sigh.. here's the easiest part of this that is being missed. They were actually doing old school call and response raps between each other; while creating a style of dub and rock on the side; AND creating some of the most creative beats of all time. No one I know talks shit about the Beasties, they felt like a round circle rap tourney going off.
