Bad Day for Gen X

            On May 4, it was plain what had happened as soon as “Trending: Adam Yauch” appeared on-line.  Five minutes later, my mid-20s brother sent me a text telling me that MCA had died.  It wasn’t a surprise.  We’d known he’d had cancers and, when he hadn’t made the Beastie Boys’ induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame just about 10 days before, you had to know something very bad was going to happen.

            You’d have to work hard to find someone whose death would have had a wider impact specifically on the group of us that others tagged Generation X.  When we were kids, there were basically three musical explosions, before the Internet, before the idea of everyone hearing the same thing at the same time became quaint.  Michael Jackson’s Thriller, in 1983, was the first – when we were figuring how close to dance – and Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991 was the last – right as we were figuring out how to buy our own food.  The Beastie Boys hit in 1986, right in our teenage sweet spot.  Bon Jovi was unavoidable for a little while and U2 grew into the world’s biggest band, but Michael Jackson, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana were the ones who were everywhere, all at one.  But only the Beastie Boys were rap.

            It’s hard to reconstruct how new, disruptive and beautifully obnoxious rap was in 1986.  If you were a teen in 1986, then you had spent the better part of your life being told how amazing the Sixties, and especially Sixties music, had been.  Let’s have whole radio stations that are devoted to remembering how wonderful things were before you were born!  Not everyone got told that straight out, but that was the vibe.

            Rap was a screw you to all that.  It wasn’t exactly new – it had been around since the late 70s if you knew where to look.  But 1986 is when rap blew up, first with Run D.M.C.’s Raising Hell and then with the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill.  Older people hated it, which made it so much better.  A few years later, at a party, a guy in his forties said, “I didn’t think that they could make a kind of music I wouldn’t like, but then they made rap.”  Music to a younger generation’s ears.    They called rap stealing.  They called it noise.  And the Beastie Boys were very, very noisy on Licensed to Ill.

            I don’t remember the first time I heard the Beastie Boys, but remember clearly when I fully became aware of them.  It was the 1986 Student Council Christmas party.  The cool student body president was talking about how much he liked them, how funny they were.  Everyone agreed.  Well, I didn’t exactly because I remember thinking that they were too whiny, especially Ad Rock, and that I liked Run D.M.C. better.  Just after that, though, the Beastie Boys were everywhere.  “Fight For Your Right To Party” was everywhere.  The next summer, my cousin and I snaked our dads’ tickets to a charity golf tournament and spent the whole day puzzling out the Boys’ lyrics on a boom box in a golf cart.  I’m sure the group behind us just loved it.

            Licensed to Ill became the soundtrack for the rest of high school.  My two best friends and I spent hours driving around in one’s late 70s Lincoln Continental coupe – a 20-foot-long two-door – and the driver played Licensed to Ill on continuous loop.  For two years.  There was even a nationwide hoax that Mike D had been killed in a plane crash – that’s why there was a smashed plane on the album cover!  Eventually, I got sick of Licensed to Ill.  No matter how good “brass monkey, that funky monkey, brass monkey junkie, that funky monkey” sounds, it’ll wear you out the 1,000,000^th time you hear it.

            When I went off to college, I didn’t take the B Boys with me.  I was listening to, for my doses of rap, Tone-Loc – enabling me to still use the phrase “Cheeba, cheeba” in casual conversation – De La Soul and Public Enemy.  In 1989, though, the Beastie Boys released Paul’s Boutique and that was a new thing.  I can’t claim to be one of those who figured out that Paul’s Boutique was a classic right away.  But the music was different, built around an avalanche of samples, not the big guitar riffs like much of Licensed to Ill.  My strongest memory of it is one line in “Hey Ladies” and having to go back and catch There’s more to me than you’ll ever know and I got more hits than Sadaharu Oh.  I was a baseball geek, I knew who Sadaharu Oh was – he was the worldwide home run record holder, from Japan.  They rhymed off Sadaharu Oh?!?  Maybe there was more to the Beastie Boys than I thought.

            If they’d disappeared at that point, the Beastie Boys would been one of the big 80s acts.  They could’ve played county fairs with Flock of Seagulls for years.  It was then, though, that they grew into something much different.

            Their key year was 1994.  You’ve got to remember what 1994 was.  We’re in our mid-20s, trying to figure where we’re going.  We’re finishing school, we’re getting our first grown-up jobs, we’re getting married and having our first kids.   We’re figuring out where and how to make our lives.  1994 was also just when you could feel that something big was about to happen.  People were starting to have this thing “e-mail,” where you could talk to people through your computer, like Matthew Broderick in War Games or Ferris Bueller without the illegal hacking or risk of nuclear annihilation.  Within my first couple of weeks of law school in 1992, I was introduced to LEXIS, which had an unbelievable amount of information available through your computer.  All of this was out there?!?  I felt like some kind of superhero the first time I used it.  Info Man!  By 1994, I actually knew how to use the thing.  With a little Boolean code, I could find anything with my computer.  (A quick footnote: LEXIS and its competitor WestLaw use a business model similar to drug dealers – give law students free access in school, get them hooked and then charge actual attorneys a bunch of money to use their services.)  By 1994, we’d seen our first music revolution, when Nirvana and then Pearl Jam and the Chili Peppers and then the rest swamped Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul and the hair bands.

            We knew, though, that the future wasn’t necessarily so bright that we’d have to wear shades.  The hangover from the 1991-1992 recession lingered.  Jobs were not that easy to find.  When The Mermaid was born December 31, 1994, I was still looking for my first job as an attorney, a good six months after I thought I had that nailed down.  A few days after The Mermaid was born, my MIL babysat her and The Muse – still recovering from a rocket-propelled labor – so I could drive, at night and after class, through a driving rainstorm to Stockton for a job interview/dinner.  I wanted a job bad.  Culturally, 1994 was a tough year, too.  On April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain killed himself with a shotgun.  Around the same time, a strange guy named Beck had a big hit with his song “Loser” – Sooyyy un perdedor, I’m loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me? – which seemed like an appropriate follow-up to Radiohead’s song “Creep” – I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell I’m doing here? I don’t belong here – which was big just a few months earlier.  1994 was that time when we were figuring out that – like everyone else – would have to make our own way.  We had reached the point that Bridget Fonda’s character in the 1992 movie Singles described when she said, “I think time’s running out to do something bizarre.  Somewhere around 25, bizarre becomes immature.”

            Right in the middle of this – in May 1994, a month after Cobain killed himself – the Beastie Boys released Ill Communication, which included what, to me at least, are still their two best songs, “Sure Shot” and “Sabotage.”  What they’d done is keep the tight rhymes built upon crazy cultural references, laid them over all kinds of new music – sampling having become much more expensive since Paul’s Boutique because the samplees had started wanting royalties – and put them into the service of a new, almost grown-up vibe.  On “Sure Shot,” Mike D raps, at one point, I got more action than my man John Woo and I got mad hits like I was Rod Carew.  Think about just that one line.  In 1994, John Woo hadn’t yet broken through in Hollywood – other than the van Damme movie Hard Target – and was only really known by people who watched action movies from Hong Kong.  Rod Carew, on the other hand, was a Hall of Fame baseball player who began playing in 1967, collected his 3,000^th hit in 1985 and then retired.  How many people – pre-Internet – knew who both of those guys were?

            “Sure Shot” – the first track on the disc and therefore its declaration of purpose –  however, is much more than a collection of cool references (which also include Yoo-Hoo and Doug E. Fresh).  It screams “I’m in my mid-20s and I’m just starting to figure it out.”    Mike D. raps, Everyone just takes, takes, takes, takes, take, I gotta step back, I gotta contemplate, then later I’m a newlywed, I’m not a divorcee, later still You say I’m twenty-something and I should be slacking, but I’m working harder than ever and you could call it macking/So I’m supposed to sit on my couch watching my TV, I’m listening to wax, I’m not using the CD.  Right after Mike D’s bit about listening to wax, Ad Rock raps Well, I’m that kid in the corner, all fucked up and I wanna, so I’m gonna take a piece of the pie.  Why not? I’m not quittin’.  Think I’m gonna change up style just to fit in?

            You couldn’t get much of a better vision of where we were than that.  We’re getting married.  We’re supposed to be the Slacker generation, but, screw you, we’re not.  Not only are we figuring it out, we’re going to figure it out our own way.  We’re going to keep the good stuff – like wax – and we’re going to mix it up into something new.

            It’s MCA’s lyrics on “Sure Shot” that go a little deeper and really hit home.  I got more rhymes than I got gray hairs and that’s lot because I got my share.  Is there another rapper – another rock star – who would have said something like that?  MCA was 29 when Ill Communication was released.  When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were not quite 30, the Stones had their 1972 tour, during which they stayed for a while at the Playboy Mansion and Mick supposedly carried a gun because the Hells Angels were thought to have put a hit on him after Altamont.  Also on “Sure Shot,” MCA apologized for the B Boys’ prior treatment of women: “I’m going say a little something, that’s all I’m do.  That disrespecting women has got to be through.  To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends, I wanna offer my love and respect to the end.  The Beastie Boys had grown up, but in their own funky way.

            The “Sabotage” video was really the icing on this cake.  “Sabotage” is a great song, with sweet guitars that the band played themselves.  As someone whose first memory is of watching on TV the House Judiciary Committee considering articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon – I remember from when I was about three sitting on the floor of my first house with my dad watching long rows of people with the towering presence of a black woman among them, someone I determined as an adult to be Rep. Barbara Jordan – I especially appreciated how much of “Sabotage” was built from the line I’m a-set it straight, this Watergate.  The video, though, was genius, with the Beastie Boys reenacting – in terrible wigs and mustaches, driving those bad American cars that undercover cops always drove on TV – some unknown episode of one of those bad 70s cop shows that ran endlessly when we were kids and before there was cable.  If you weren’t watching reruns of The Brady Bunch, or got lucky and found some Looney Tunes, there was always a rerun of Barnaby Jones you could watch.  If you got really lucky, your parents would let you stay up to watch Starsky & Hutch.   The “Sabotage” video was the best goof on all of that you’ll ever see.

            Having set this trajectory, the B Boys stayed on it for the rest of their career.  They had massive success producing great goofy stuff that you weren’t going to fully get unless your formative years had included the 80s.  On “Body Movin’,” Ad Rock raps: If you pulled my card, you pulled the ace.  If you ask me, turn up the bass and, if you play Defender, rock a bridge to hyperspace.  What was it that Joel’s father noticed when he returned home at the end of Risky Business?  It was that Joel had pushed the bass on the stereo’s equalizer too high.  After all the underwear-dancing and Guido-the-killer-pimp-fleeing and Porsche-killing and bordello-making, Joel hadn’t put the bass back right.  And, if you’re male and aged 35 to 45 now, then you know you used hyperspace to keep from getting killed in Defender – one of the hardest video games I’ve ever played – at least once.  The B Boys’ “Intergalatic” video – directed by MCA – may top “Sabotage” in its sublime oddness, with shots of the group rapping through a Japanese subway in radiation suits intercut with scenes of a giant, popping robot fighting Godzilla.  Their 2011 disc Hot Sauce Committee Part Two contains, among other things, MCA’s offer that If you’re feeling chilly, I’ma get you a shawl.

            Now it’s seems like it would have been easy to stay on a track on which you already were successful, but it’s important to remember that rap changed completely around the B Boys.  Beginning probably with Dr. Dre’s 1992 solo debut The Chronic, rap went heavily gangsta.  Can’t say I’ve listened to a lot of it.  Some of the music sounds very cool – Dr. Dre’s and Snoop Dogg’s “Nuthin’ But G Thang” especially – but the messages were completely antithetical to what the Beastie Boys were doing.

            Most amazingly, the Beastie Boys became a way to connect with our kids.  In 2009, I took Enthusio – then 10 – to see the Star Trek reboot.  If you’ve seen it, then you know what I’m talking about.  Kirk’s first appearance – after his father heroically sacrifices himself – is as an 11- or 12-year-old kid joyriding in his jerk of a stepfather’s beautiful mid-1960s rag-top Corvette.  (Do not ask how a mid-1960s car survived in pristine condition until the 2200s or how a pre-teen in that century knew how to drive a stick-shift seamlessly.  We’re working with symbolism here.)  He takes this joyride to the tune of “Sabotage.”  The director – J.J. Abrams, born 1966 – thought the song was so crucial to the movie that he kept its line I got this fuckin’ thorn in my side – and thus dropped the only and only F-bomb he was allowed while keeping the movie PG-13.  Enthusio loved the movie and the scene and, partly for that reason, loves the song “Sabotage.”  I suspect teenage boys will always love that song, such a pure wail against the injustice of it all.

            So what I’ll submit to you is that the Beastie Boys, among all of the artists and celebrities we’ve seen – beginning with John Travolta and ending so far with Paul Rudd and Tina Fey – have come the closest to speaking for our crowd, the one that others decided to name Generation X.  I know that not everyone likes the B Boys.  The Muse still doesn’t, although she watched a repeat of their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction with me after MCA died.  People our age, however, tend to wear as a badge of honor the fact that not everyone likes what we do.  Think I’ma change up my style just to fit in?  The B Boys provided the rowdy soundtrack for our rowdy years, grew up in their own funky way just as we were trying to do and stayed goofy – stayed real – the whole time.  That’s just about what all of my friends and I have wanted to do all along.

            I’d been trying to write this since MCA’s passing, but couldn’t quite figure it all out until last weekend when I went to a class reunion for the high school class ahead of me.  At the end, at somewhere around 1 a.m., just before the DJ started playing the last song, he yelled, “I want all of the guys on stage right now.”  In our states, we complied.  Just as we hopped on the little stage,” the big, loud guitar hook of “Fight for Your Right to Party” blasted off.  And with that, fifty or so 40ish guys – including army officers, teachers, corporate higher-ups, attorneys and dads of all shapes and sizes – began yelling every word.  Livin’ at home is such a drag, nooowww your mom threw away your best porno mag.  Can’t really imagine another song that would have worked.

            RIP MCA.  RIP Beastie Boys.

Just a note: a lot of this was researched.