My Beastie Boys Summer

In an effort to calm him while he got his first dose of the Moderna vaccine last Saturday, the nurse asked my four-year-old son about his favourite song. Perhaps we could sing it together, she suggested. Was it “Baby Beluga?” she asked. “Old MacDonald Had a Farm?”

Unfortunately for the nurse, my son’s favourite song is “Get It Together” — a memorable bop from the Beastie Boys’ 1994 album Ill Communication, featuring Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest. In duress, I found myself unable to rap the lyrics to a song about “the rhymes that we bust on the topic of lust,” so my child kept screaming.

“Next time,” I asked him later, “would you like me to play the song for you on my phone while we’re at the clinic?” He nodded vigorously.

The Beastie Boys — the late Adam Yauch (who performed as MCA), Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) and Michael Diamond (Mike D) — met as Jewish teenagers in New York City and started as a hardcore punk band. They pivoted to hip-hop and started climbing billboard charts in the mid-1980s. They make the only music my son wants to hear right now. And we’ve been listening non-stop for three months straight.

Like all obsessions, it started innocently enough. One day this spring, I needed five minutes to respond to a work email or do something in the kitchen. I set him up with a video that I thought he might like because it features a robot that battles a giant squid. I scrolled my phone for the music video for “Intergalactic,” from the Beastie Boys’ 1999 album Hello Nasty. I went off to do whatever it was. In the moments that followed, my son was a person transformed. He asked to see it again. And again.

We quickly and enthusiastically moved through a bunch of their other music videos. For me, it’s fun to go back in time like this, to the dog that opens the video for “Sure Shot” that is so inexplicably 1994, and the excellent 1970s action-movie camp in the Spike Jonze-directed video for “Sabotage.” My son’s favourite is the video for “Alive,” where they’re wearing fleece onesies and goofing around against a still-intact Manhattan skyline.

Kids have an admirable ability to know what they love or hate immediately with fierce, rock-solid conviction. They are also skilled at taking on the aspects of your personality that you think you’ve sanded over with time or shame or personal growth.

This is what’s happening with the Beastie Boys.

We got rhyme selections in a wide array

I liked the Beastie Boys as much as the next kid who grew up in a mostly white suburb in the 1990s. My brother gave me their The Sounds of Science anthology for Christmas in 1999, when I was 16. I didn’t listen to them much beyond my late teens and early 20s; they were of a time, but they were also kind of dorky. But today, 23 years after The Sounds of Science came into my life, the double CD set is on heavy rotation in the car by my son’s request. And for all its ridiculousness, the work still holds up. The collection celebrates the range of their musical influences, taking us from hardcore to bossa nova and back to the hip hop that made them famous.

Their lyrics are bedazzled with a kid-in-a-candy-store assortment of cultural references, from DJ Jazzy Jay to the New York Knicks and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. They showcase the depth of their crate-sifting alongside the joy the group took in life itself. The playfulness radiating from all of their creative output — their zany music videos, the jumpsuits they wore onstage — was anchored by an enduring, obvious delight they took in each other’s company. How wonderful to live a life alongside your closest friends, making music together.

My kid finds this super inspiring. He keeps talking about the band that he wants to form with his friends when he grows up.

But like Rage Against the Machine on repeat on the radio back in June, listening to the same thing on a loop for an extended period of time, especially if the music borders on rap rock, gets kind of weird. It makes me wonder who I am.

I use the microphone like Picasso used clay

A looping flute sample blares on the speakers as I merge our 2007 Honda Fit onto the highway, driving to visit his grandparents in the suburbs. Is this the music that he’ll remember me by? Is this dad rock?

Like every parent who’s in over their head, I find myself speaking with false authority on a range of complicated topics. The music is prompting detailed questions from the backseat. I speak at length about the finer points of turntablism, hip-hop sampling and its related technologies, and the life and untimely death of Adam Yauch.

My son is keen to learn all about it. He’s also just a kid who, like most of his peers, takes things literally. The playful irony that comprises much of the Beastie Boys’ appeal is therefore lost on him. Instead, he’s listening carefully and earnestly to every fast-flowing rhyme. He keeps asking me to repeat what Ad Rock or Mike D or MCA just said because it’s frustrating: sometimes they rap so fast that his four-year-old brain can’t keep up. Their jokey references go over his head. And sometimes I think it’s better that way.

I skip over the obnoxious period during the Beastie Boys’ rise to fame with the release of 1986’s Licensed to Ill. On tour for the album, they’d perform the frat house anthem “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)” while dousing themselves in beer and becoming the caricatures of the meathead party bros they’d initially set out to punk. This era reached its height when they started closing out their shows by inflating a gigantic hydraulic penis onstage. “It seemed funny at the time,” Adam Horovitz wrote in their 2018 retrospective Beastie Boys Book. They’d spend years trying to reform the reputation that they’d constructed for themselves.

MCA issued an apology of sorts in “Sure Shot,” a single from 1994’s Ill Communication. “I want to say a little something that’s long overdue,” he rapped, “The disrespect to women has got to be through.”

This is where I get to revise history a little, if only for now. My son doesn’t yet know about the misogyny that dogged the Beastie Boys’ early days. Exerting a behind-the-scenes bit of parental control, I skip those songs.

He only knows about their work from about 1994 to 1999, the stuff I like best. I’m passing something on, I guess. Maybe he’ll look back and remember looking out the window while I drove us to Maplewood Farm, laughing to himself as he tried to decipher Mike D’s kinetic, smartass flows.

The party people scream oui oui, c’est vrai

Though my son hopes to one day see the Beastie Boys in concert, he knows that since MCA died in 2012, they’re no longer making music. I only have my memories to offer.

I saw them in concert at the Pacific Coliseum in September 2004, on a tour promoting To The 5 Boroughs. I was 21, and went with my friend and then-boyfriend. The tickets cost more than the usual shows we attended at smaller venues. We felt the show was important, but we also knew we were arriving too late — the performance was not of a group at the height of their influence, but of a trio in slow decline. No one yet knew that cancer would come for Adam Yauch, ending his life eight years later at 47. Everyone was riveted by the opening act, the real star of the show. Twenty-nine-year-old Talib Kweli strode across the stage in a white jacket and sneakers, destroying.

Lately my son has been asking more about Q-Tip (Kamaal Ibn John Fareed), who appears on “Get It Together,” his favourite song. I’m hopeful that this is a sign that he may be branching out. Maybe we’ll get some musical variety back into the mix. “Does it sound like Q-Tip is wearing glasses?” he asks. “Can you check?”

He delights in recognizing Q-Tip’s voice in A Tribe Called Quest, the now-defunct hip-hop outfit that defined Fareed’s career. “Can we listen to ‘Can I Kick It’ before bed?” my son asks. I’m more than happy to oblige.

I like to think this is something we’re doing together. But I’m limited in my powers. I’m just a guide, here to witness my son becoming himself. The music I’m sharing with him now is from a bygone area. It will feel lightyears away from his reality by the time he’s grown. Already, the moment is passing. Sometimes it feels like it’s already gone. Until he asks to hear it again.