A legend's influence on hip-hop is a very peculiar thing.
Hip-hop is one of the few genres of music (or anything really) that will consistently cite the same group of artists as the greatest. It's a near guarantee that you'll hear Tupac, Nas, and Jay-Z as the faces of the culture.
But at the same time, some of the music released today is so different in quality and value that one has to wonder how credible some of these name drops are. The radicalism and urban struggle of '90s hip-hop is dead, and it gets hard to find some of these past greats' specific influences. Biggie doesn't feel integral to the argument, but rather an important source to stick in the works cited page.
Unfortunately, we don't reassess just how important some of these greats are to today's hip-hop culture until it's too late. It's nobody's fault. It's just the way people are.
What eases the tragedy of Adam "MCA" Yauch's passing this Friday is that this wasn't the case. The community got a chance to honor MCA and his crew one more time at last month's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction. But the loss hurts even with that sense of closure.
There's so much that has been said about the Beastie Boys' impact on hip-hop, but there hasn't been enough to make praising them a clich?(c). I doubt there will ever be enough laudation for that to happen.
No hip-hop fan could be tired of hearing the Beastie Boys' lyricism. Sure it was cheesy sometimes, but that was the point. The early Beastie Boys were so absurd with some of their self-aggrandizing lyrics that you just had to have fun with it.
These Jewish kids from Brooklyn were all over the place. In 1989, MCA was dying harder than Bruce Willis ("Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun"), while just a few years later he became cooler than a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce ("So What'cha Want").
Nobody dies harder than Bruce Willis and cucumbers are irrelevant fruit (editor's note: seriously, they're fruit, check Google). But the Beastie Boys were far too cool for us to question their systematic similes and methodical metaphors.
The Beastie Boys were sort of a silent rebellion. In a time when rap represented an urban movement, the Boys decided to take a completely different route and elevate the art form. These Brooklynites blended punk and rap into something relatable to everyone with a pulse, and they essentially became an evolution within the revolution.
What I loved most about the Beastie Boys, however, was that they were never used as a symbol or scapegoat for anything. They weren't considered white rappers in a black genre, Brooklyn representatives, or anything of the sort. They were just the Beastie Boys.
MCA, Ad Rock, or Mike D's biography didn't matter. It was the music that impacted people the most. Most music aficionados dream about the true quality of music speaking for itself.
The power of the Beastie Boys' talent was described in Darryl "DMC" McDaniels' short essay on the Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time list:
"The first time we toured with the Beastie Boys was the Raising Hell tour in 1986: Run-DMC, Whodini, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. We were playing the Deep South - Crunkville, before there was crunk - and it was just black people at those shows. The first night was somewhere in Georgia, and we were thinking, 'I hope people don't leave when they see them.' But the crowd loved them, because they weren't trying to be black rappers."
The strength of their music hit me when I was a young boy in front of an MTV2 screen in the early 2000s. Growing up, I was exposed to a hip-hop culture that praised the shallow pursuit of aggressiveness, wealth, and women. But one afternoon, MTV2 decided to play "Sabotage."
It was insanity. I was watching "cops" in wigs doing the most ridiculously fake stunts, dolls being thrown off bridges and cars, and just the tackiest nonsense ever. Also, I was hearing this killer guitar riff and Ad Rock ranting about Watergate - something that I'd just learned in my middle school social studies class.
My lasting memory? The band yelling "WHY?" They were kicking so much ass in the music video that it didn't seem they had any questions to ask.
Nothing made sense in the video, but it ensured me that nothing was supposed to make sense. It was something new. That originality is what made the Beastie Boys one of greatest.
RIP Adam Yauch.
Email: brian.josephs@ubspectrum.com
Today in UB History
A look into The Spectrum's archives
September 2, 1994
Beastie Boys Ill Communication Review
Allison Stooks
The latest release from the Boys is a mix of jazz and enlightened lyrics that make your body groove. They are unique in combining an upright bass, guitars, drums, and smooth keyboards in a way that comes across to a listener as a collage of rhythms that's straight out of Brooklyn. Everyone has a different opinion on the feeling that this album inspires within them. The diverse instrumental tracks are thick with samples from blues and jazz labels which add flavor to the mix of hardcore and funk the Beasties are known for. "Sabotage" is the hardest track on the album, fittingly ending their phenomenal set at Lollapalooza this summer with an enormous amount of crowd anticipation. The majority of the other tracks on Ill Communication are more rhythmic and lack the distorted bass line that is the trademark of a well known Beastie's song.
Their lyrics are heavily influenced by their new found religion, Buddhism, with a portion of the proceeds from the tracks "Alright Hear This," "Shambala," and "Bodhisattva Now" going to the Tibet House and the Office of Tibet. They even went so far as to invite Buddhist monks to say an opening prayer at Lollapalloza this summer, with AdRock drawing crowd sympathy for them in his statement that these men could not pray in their own country. The majority of the songs' lines come across in a similar attempt to broaden other people's understanding with the words of their faith. But don't fear, they haven't lost their boyish charm, like AdRock's lame proclamation in "Get it Together" of his relationship with Ione Skye that, "she's the cheese and I'm the macaroni." Such rhymes are reminiscent of old Beasties on songs like "Brass Monkey,' which were fun simply for their stupidity.
Ill Communication, (their second album with 'Ill' in the title) in all its length and prowess, is an encompassing album that can be intimidating on the first listen. After a while, its overall quality is obvious, a trademark of the Boys from Grand Royals. I can remember being younger and screaming the lyrics of "Fight for your right to party." We're all getting older, which is evident by the Beastie's enlightened lyrics of today which remind us that, "It's about time, we've got to get together."
The Spectrum gave Ill Communication a 4.5/5 in this review.
Photo: Breadchastick / Wikimedia Commons
