My grad school buddy Matthew Webber, a musician and writer and all around good dude, suggested I use this space on occasion to write about my record collection. To that end, today I want to tell you about the first time I fell in love.
From the first time I saw “Fight For Your Right (To Party)” on MTV, I was hooked on these three guys from New York City. I had nothing in common with them–I was eleven and felt I had little in common with anyone–but there was something in their anger that resonated with me. Their loud sound and fast rhymes, the way they could bend words to their will, shaping and attacking language like it owed them something, like if they talked hard enough anything could happen. The writer in me couldn’t get enough.
The first bumper sticker I ever bought was for Beastie Boys. I was in high school and the local record store/head shop/coolest place I’d ever seen–House of Sight and Sound in Salina, KS–had everything a budding music nerd could want. Boot leg cds, cheap albums, concert t-shirts, and yes–bumper stickers.
Then, in 1994, just a few weeks after my high school graduation, Ill Communication dropped. If you’ve never heard this masterpiece, please run and do so now. I’ll wait.
There’s no denying the power of that record, from “Sure Shot” to “Get It Together” to the ultimate “Sabotage”. I dare you to find someone my age who hears the opening bass line of that song and doesn’t immediately scream on beat “I can’t stand it / I know you planned it”. When I worked at LHS years ago, the homecoming candidates did shot for shot remakes of songs as their intro videos. Under the direction of an incredible film teacher, Jeff Kuhr, one pair did “Sabotage”. They got it so right that teachers still talk about it. That is the magic of Beastie Boys.
In college, I wrote a lyric from Licensed to Ill on the white board on my dorm room door. A cute boy came along and finished the whole lyric; I absolutely went out with him after that. The date didn’t really go anywhere, but “Paul Revere” has a special place in my heart forever.
I went with my brother to see Beastie Boys with Tribe Called Quest on the Intergalactic Tour at Kemper Arena in 1998 the summer our mom was diagnosed with cancer. I remember driving home from that show thinking that I’d spent nearly four hours not thinking once about how scared I was. I’d just been lost in the music.
Years later, a student knew I was a fan and said her parents also had a copy of License to Three at home, and she loved it. That sweet human had misread the cd case title–License to Ill (ill) does look like 3, after all. My friends and I have referenced that moment lovingly for years.
Early in the pandemic, Michael and I found the Beastie Boys doc on AppleTV (watch the trailer here). It was a love story and an apology tour and a memorial to MCA, the great Adam Yauch, who died of cancer in 2012. Though Michael is three years older than me, we had many of the same touchstones watching it; parties set to this music, listening and loving the language; feeling invincible whenever a certain track came on. We once spent an hour driving home playing each other our favorite Beastie Boys songs. We didn’t come close to hearing them all.
In addition to the bumper sticker at House of Sight and Sound, a store that closed in 2011 one year before Yauch died, I bought a Beastie Boys subway poster from another defunct record shop–Alley Cat in Lawrence. The record shops I’ve been in lately (and the record sections of antique stores) don’t have the same excitement or danger those earlier shops had. There was adventure in walking into those shops, pouring over things you’d never heard of, taking a chance on something. Now everything feels scrubbed clean, watered down, and predictable. Everything except Beastie Boys. When I go back to their records, it’s all there.
Maybe this sense of lack is a sign of age–maybe what passes for adventure and danger now doesn’t register as music so much as noise. Maybe there’s just so damn much content it’s hard to work out what’s good in the glut. If you have a recommendation of what I absolutely should listen to, I’d love to hear it.
All I know is that if I want to feel like the truest version of myself, I go back to the summer I turned 16 and got a cd stereo for the 1980 Ford F-100 I drove to work. Three on the tree blaring Check your Head, windows down, the whole world laid out in front of me on that Burma Road black top. I’ve loved Beastie Boys through every stage of my life, and I don’t see that love affair ending any time soon.
On Ill Communication, the song “Root Down” features this lyric:
We’re talking root down, I put my boot down (Boot down)
And if you want to battle me, you’re putting loot down (Loot down)
This is my love story; the band I’ve loved longest and with the most ardor. I put my boot down for them a long time ago, and I’m not going anywhere.
Shannon Carriger 