The Biz vs The Nuge/Sabotage. The Beastie Boys. 1999. Grand Royal.

 Rock and roll is always best enjoyed when you’re young. A conglomerate of dazzling illusions marketed to appeal specifically to the demands of your individual personality, rock and roll was at its most effective when used at those times you most desperately needed an escape out of reality. Youth is the narrative-without-end of that escape.  When we’re young, decamping from the routine is a norm that we hardly tire of subjecting to fanciful  elaboration. Sex and drugs, of course, are the well known pursuits of an adolescent and young adult imagination, but so are petty crime, fashion, paleontology, and television. Inasmuch as we are the consciousness-stricken reliquaries of our own death, it’s the young who’ve taken it upon themselves to cyclically  redefine the style of this grim predicament, sometimes with A-side gladiatorial panache. Beastie Boys worked in a tradition that went back to rock and roll’s very inception, at Little Richard’s unifying cry that introduces Tutti Frutti. Along with New York Dolls and Parliament-Funkadelic, these were acts whose artistic focus  went beyond rock and roll and mere marketable  genre in order to converse publicly with present reality; visionaries of immediacy, their best work challenges the most basic assumptions that prop the cultural conventions of their respective times, both the dogmas and the heresies, and their records are still alive with the roar of creative attack. These  records embraced the fluid juxtapositions that hegemonic cultures like to  claim don’t exist: the Beastie Boys were white Jewish New Yorkers fluent in the codified argot of black rap, P-Funk boldly indulged in mind altering drugs that gave its operational aesthetic a dimension that still resonates with audiences both sober and intoxicated, the New York Dolls were straight men who teased audiences with the drag trappings of seventies-era queer culture, and Little Richard was the ultimate Madame Androgyne who blew the lid off repressed 1950s gender conformity. “Listen all y’all, it’s a sabotage!” warns Ad Rock in a studio treated vocal that pitches his voice up into Robert Plant heights, while the band thunders behind him in a Zeppelin II inspired maelstrom. The eponymous sabotage refers to an added juxtaposition that all the aforementioned acts exploited during their extraordinary careers: offering the illusion of play, they were all some of the hardest working Americans of their time. Play is the great, untamed domain of youth, while work is the form our ineluctable maturity into mortality’s profound arc takes as we struggle to maintain a balance between the two. Before the damning collision of twenty-first century technology and marketing, which started sometime in the nineties, the resulting tension was once the rock steady wellspring of rock and roll itself. Taken from the 1999 Grand Royal anthology The Beastie Boys: The Sound of Science.

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