Thirty Three Jones | Desktop Site
My freshman year of college, my roommate (Brian, holla at me!) was this kid from Long Island who listened almost exclusively to the Beastie Boys. He had every album and every rare remix, and was a complete Beasties stan. I had never really been checking for the Beasties up until that point, but it was the closest thing he had to any music I was into, so to head off any Higher Learning-type conflict, I listened to it with him for about an hour every day.
I never got into the Beastie Boys as much as my roommate did, primarily because they could not compete lyrically with the other stuff I was listening to at the time (not to date myself, but this would be a little bit after Gza, Mad Skillz and the Fugees were dropping albums). One thing I could not deny, though, was that they represented hip hop fully, they just represented it in a way I had never seen before. They didn't talk about how rough it was where they lived and they didn't really have the kind of swagger that I was used to from most rappers -- instead, they just rapped about the stuff they dealt with, which was usually just random, everyday things. They sampled guitar riffs more than most other rappers, but other than that, the samples and breakbeats they used were as authentic as any track from Primo or Dre.
So yesterday, to take a break from the Super Sweet 16 and Date My Mom marathons on MTV, I switched the channel to Fuse TV. I'm not sure if all the cable companies in the country offer this, so if you don't have it, all you need to know is its essentially a heavy metal/emo version of Mtv without the reality shows or the good looking VJs. Every now and then they have an hour long show where they do an in-depth look at one band and interview a bunch of musicians to discuss the impact the band has had. Usually they focus on stuff I don't listen to, but this time they did a show on The Beastie Boys.
Most of the groups that were interviewed on the subject of the Beasties were groups like the All American Rejects and Yellowcard. They went on and on about how much they loved the Beasties, and then this one dude from the All American Rejects (I'm not into them, I only know that's what group he was from because of the text on the tv screen) said, The Beastie Boys are so amazing, I hate to have to label them a hip hop group. The dude had the sourest look on his face when he said the words "hip hop." And this became a theme throughout the interviews on the show, that these people loved the Beastie Boys despite the fact that they were hip hop, and some of the groups went so far as to say the Beasties were something other than hip hop.
4/13/2006 10:10:22 AM posted by Fresh