Earlier today, Friend of the Blog Matt Zeitlin tweeted that Latoya Peterson — at her Jezebel digs — made some crack at the Beastie Boys. And since the Beastie Boys are — hands down — one of my favorite bands, I decided to head over and see exactly what she said. In the midst of a post about electro-pop star Ke$ha and her hip-hopish song “Tik Tok,” Peterson excerpts Ke$ha and writes this:
Beastie Boys
Ke$ha does have some links to hip-hop: she sang the hook on Flo Rida’s “Right Round.” But even Ke$ha herself denies that she’s a rapper in the article:
“I love the Beastie Boys – that’s probably why ‘TiK ToK’ happened,” Ke$ha said. “Rap in general has never been my steez, but I like it.”
So why the rush to lump Ke$ha in with the less-than-luminous ranks of rappers whose main selling point was their skin color and a gimmicky hook?
The Beastie Boys have been called a lot of things over the course of their decades long career: frat rappers, practical jokers, socially conscious, and hip-hop purists. But you simply can’t be a popular music critic and credibly say that the Beastie Boys were “less-than-luminous” and relied on their whiteness and a “gimmicky hook” to sell records.
There are two critical differences between the Beastie Boys and say, Vanilla Ice. The first, and probably most important, is that the Beastie Boys can actually rap. I challenge Peterson, and anyone else for that matter, to listen to the Beasties’ initial trio of albums — License to Ill, Paul’s Boutique, and Check Your Head — and tell me that Adrock, MCA and Mike D were bereft of talent. The Beastie Boys weren’t just good at their craft, they were pathbreaking: Paul’s Boutique is widely held as one of the finest hip-hop albums ever produced, and if you give it a listen, you’ll see why (I wrote a brief review of the Paul’s Boutique reissue for Campus Progress a few months back.
The second critical difference between the Beastie Boys and Vanilla Ice — and the thing they have in common with shorter-lived acts like 3rd Bass — is that the Beastie Boys weren’t so much appropriating black music as they were trying to be a part of black culture. There’s a reason why older black rappers tend to have a fair amount of respect for the Beasties (so much so that they’ll appear on Beastie mixtapes and offer up awesome covers in their absence), and that’s because the Beasties have always been explicit about the debt they owe to Def Jam and its stable of artists and producers. Unlike Asher Roth — who actively tried to shy away from black rappers — the Beasties have always understood themselves as acting within hip-hop and not outside of it. Frankly, to casually dismiss the Beastie Boys and lump them in with folks like Vanilla Ice does a huge disservice to the group and their deserved place within hip-hop’s history.
