So I don't want to say there's not a conversation to be had about the Beastie Boys' place in rap history, but I looked up where that article was from, and it's from a guy named Rich Cromwell for a right wing magazine called the Spectator, and it appears to be one of those shitty gotcha articles where they accuse liberals of hypocrisy. It's not a good faith article.
For what it's worth, I don't think Questlove is the only person in hip-hop or rap who has good things to say about the Beastie Boys and their influence.
So my phone showed me an article with a headline saying something about how Beastie Boys were cultural appropriation, and I read just like the first sentence which was complaining how "New York liberals" had named a street after them when they should not be honoured. (It also specifically mentioned them as being Jewish which kinda made me side-eye a little bit, but I digress.)
This was earlier when I was at work so I only glanced at it very briefly, and I now literally can not find the article, but I wanted some input.
My first instinct was that this was complete bullshit. I try to be as aware and sensitive to cultural appropriation as possible for a white guy, and obviously everyone knows that hip-hop was invented in Black communities, but this seems like a stretch. Especially given how unique their style was.
But again, I'm a white dude so my opinion doesn't really matter here. I would love to hear how other people feel about it.
Even if this article was in good faith a step I've made whenever accusations like this come up is to see if anybody from the culture being potentially appropriated is speaking on it. Obviously no culture is a monolith but if the conversation is all straight white cis people I feel pretty confident dismissing the claim. At worst it's outside agitators like this guy and at best it's people who may mean well but seem to be trying to condescend towards the people actually affected.
This is again not something that I can speak to personally because I am also white but when I've heard people talk about The Beastie boys and Eminem it's usually in a positive context in comparison to other white rappers. Both interacted with and showed a clear interest and respect for hip hop culture.
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facetiousa wit so dryit shits sandRegistered Userregular
So part of why I mentioned how I had only seen the article very briefly was because obviously the perspective and intentions of the person who wrote it mattered. That more or less lines up with what I guessed from that one sentence.
Again, not to say there aren't legitimate thoughts but... yeah.
"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde
I think the biggest thing is that with the Beastie Boys I 100% feel they loved making hip-hop, they loved the NY culture at the time.
Yeah they were white kids who used to have a punk band, who if I recall correctly ran their vinyls out of a college dorm with Rick Rubin (A man who worked with Jay Z and Metallica).
And they sort of created their own lane. They have their own style and flow, very staccato, they always kept the guitars around.
They didn't get into it as a cynical label cash grab, or some wild 'this is how I get rich' scheme.
Anyway hiphop won in the end in a way that was unthinkable in the 1980s.
the Red Hot Chili Peppers barely play music, as far as I can tell they've just got that one song
Their music and vocals always make me so angry for some reason whenever I hear them. Just like whenever I hear Billy Corgan's voice. It's irrational, there's plenty of music I'm not into that doesn't put me into a rage, but they do and I don't know why
Anthony Kiedis and Brett Dennen, according to my ears, fall into whatever aural range that they set the whistles to for dogs. It's like being physically assaulted
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HeadCreepsNOW IS THE TIME FOR DRINKING!Registered Userregular
RHCP are great, ya'll are crazy
Although I do agree their last few albums do kinda all blend together
Huh, well I did come here to make a comment on how rap And hip hop have intermingled with various other musical genres, And you can definitely see that with California bands where all the metal heads and rockers are living side-by-side with the folks saving up for 808s.
Hell, father thought the battle for los angeles was a poetry album
PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
the beastie boys formed in 1979
hip hop was barely a codified musical art form at that point, shit was still considered fairly experimental until the early 80s
just because the roots of the movement were fundamentally afro-carribean, doesn't mean some jewish lads from ground zero couldn't also be tremendously influential to it's development and mainstream popularization
hip hop was barely a codified musical art form at that point, shit was still considered fairly experimental until the early 80s
just because the roots of the movement were fundamentally afro-carribean, doesn't mean some jewish lads from ground zero couldn't also be tremendously influential to it's development and mainstream popularization
They wern't a Hip-hop band until 83.
Edit: Just for the record. Not saying you're wrong about the general point.
I'd never say there's no level of appropriation when there are white rappers, but I do think, that, overall, the people who make the most noise about how weird it is that a rapper is white are uh...other white people, for various reasons
+9
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TonkkaSome one in the club tonightHas stolen my ideas.Registered Userregular
The Beastie Boys were definitely a part of the NYC hip-hop community from near the beginning. Long enough to have some kind of (manufactured?) beef with RUN DMC. You don't get your faces on a Tribe Called Quest album for nothing.
Appropriation? From an outside perspective I can see that, totally, but I don't think the people they were surrounded by would have felt that way. That's just an old whiteboy's perspective.
because they didn't really 'break through' until Paul's Boutique and their post-Def Jam stuff I think people tend to associate them with that era, and therefore assume they were a bunch of kids who picked up on hip hop only as it was starting to get more appeal nationally and among white people as opposed to having been in it essentially from the beginning.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I had an epiphany about older humor that occasionally punched down a little
While it was hurtful, It could not be weaponized to to degree it can now be weaponized with today's technology.
The tiny tunes episode with drunk driving where 3 characters "die" was taken off syndication and that was it. I couldn't see that clip anymore I couldn't use it against anyone.
But now streaming services and everything, anything punching down gets remixed like the Oprah 9000 clip and spammed to people's phone. Plus with video editing on mobile apps, you could have some real hateful content remixed and dished out within the hour of its release
There's an important addendum you're missing when talking about the Beastie Boys and their cultural importance, beautifully illustrated by this liquor store:
I also think when it comes to appropriation you should take into account whether or not they attempt to elevate others with them that they used as a source of inspiration. And Beastie Boys definitely weren't shy about uplifting the people who inspired them.
I'd never say there's no level of appropriation when there are white rappers, but I do think, that, overall, the people who make the most noise about how weird it is that a rapper is white are uh...other white people, for various reasons
From the outside, it seems just racism, racists get really offended when other white people do anything that implies than non-white culture has any form of value, specially Black culture. So the small minority of negative non-white voices get signal boosted to hell and back.
At least is what I see from modern artists doing rap.
I'd never say there's no level of appropriation when there are white rappers, but I do think, that, overall, the people who make the most noise about how weird it is that a rapper is white are uh...other white people, for various reasons
From the outside, it seems just racism, racists get really offended when other white people do anything that implies than non-white culture has any form of value, specially Black culture. So the small minority of negative non-white voices get signal boosted to hell and back.
At least is what I see from modern artists doing rap.
I think this gets extremely highlighted when you look at someone like Elvis Presley. He owed basically his whole career to black musicians that history tried really hard to forget. In contrast, Beastie Boys did their best to be a part of the scene rather than define it around them. Beastie Boys get the side eye by some white people, and no one thinks to mention Elvis in anything but the most positive light.
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Johnny ChopsockyScootaloo! We have to cook!Grillin' HaysenburgersRegistered Userregular
I'd never say there's no level of appropriation when there are white rappers, but I do think, that, overall, the people who make the most noise about how weird it is that a rapper is white are uh...other white people, for various reasons
From the outside, it seems just racism, racists get really offended when other white people do anything that implies than non-white culture has any form of value, specially Black culture. So the small minority of negative non-white voices get signal boosted to hell and back.
At least is what I see from modern artists doing rap.
I think this gets extremely highlighted when you look at someone like Elvis Presley. He owed basically his whole career to black musicians that history tried really hard to forget. In contrast, Beastie Boys did their best to be a part of the scene rather than define it around them. Beastie Boys get the side eye by some white people, and no one thinks to mention Elvis in anything but the most positive light.
Depressingly, Elvis appropriated "black the devil's music", which undoubtedly angered the racists who sired the children that would wind up deifying him and carrying their parent's racism forward into the future.
PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
elvis grew up in a black community and went to a black church by choice and hung out with black people and frequently worked with black performers and artists despite frequent threats by white people
his legacy is extremely complicated
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facetiousa wit so dryit shits sandRegistered Userregular
elvis grew up in a black community and went to a black church by choice and hung out with black people and frequently worked with black performers and artists despite frequent threats by white people
his legacy is extremely complicated
He also tried to uplift artists when he could, at least early on. There is a clip I saw awhile ago of him early in his career in variety shows giving props to the performers he worked with that were black, or calling out a black guitarist as the best guitarist currently alive, etc.
Lots -- and I mean lots -- of localities have practices that effectively are the same thing. Public improvement districts (PID), municipal utility districts (MUD), etc., are all based on the ability of a neighborhood (really a group of properties) to levy an additional tax on themselves for use as they see fit. A lot of MUDs use this to incur debt against property owners that don't even live in a place yet in order to "build infrastructure" that is normally what your city or county should do but either won't or can't. This can work for a few years, but after a few decades that revenue that went entirely to paying down debt service then isn't sufficient to maintain the infrastructure, so the MUDs fall apart or go to the nearby locality for what amounts to a bailout -- and all the taxpayers of that locality pay for the infrastructure that only serves that small community.
PIDs are the same thing, but instead of just infrastructure you can actually apply it to a whole lot of shit. Private security, etc. It's wild. Here in Texas this system uses property taxes but you can do the same thing with sales tax and even income tax systems.
And the more I work in this field the more I realize that our fiscal federalist system is actually structurally undemocratic. It's not possible for the average, or even 95% of Americans to have the information to make informed decisions about their local politics, let alone even know when it happens.
elvis grew up in a black community and went to a black church by choice and hung out with black people and frequently worked with black performers and artists despite frequent threats by white people
his legacy is extremely complicated
He also tried to uplift artists when he could, at least early on. There is a clip I saw awhile ago of him early in his career in variety shows giving props to the performers he worked with that were black, or calling out a black guitarist as the best guitarist currently alive, etc.
That is interesting to me for a few reasons. Almost exclusively the people I see upset at the legacy of Elvis and black musicians are people of color so it feels different than some of what is happening to the Beastie Boys on that front. At the same time, I can't help but wonder how the era he lived in shaped the overall experiences. It would not surprise me if the modern vision we have of him has been rewritten to help push out some of those black musicians even further. The racist fuckwads writing the history could have very well written a version that makes Elvis look much worse than he was. Ultimately it would leave a legacy of appropriation and shitty racism because that is the narrative someone wanted to create.
I am no historian so I could be completely off base. It just seems like that would be the easiest route to reconcile attempts to be better with an end result that sucked for everyone not Elvis.
elvis grew up in a black community and went to a black church by choice and hung out with black people and frequently worked with black performers and artists despite frequent threats by white people
his legacy is extremely complicated
He also tried to uplift artists when he could, at least early on. There is a clip I saw awhile ago of him early in his career in variety shows giving props to the performers he worked with that were black, or calling out a black guitarist as the best guitarist currently alive, etc.
That is interesting to me for a few reasons. Almost exclusively the people I see upset at the legacy of Elvis and black musicians are people of color so it feels different than some of what is happening to the Beastie Boys on that front. At the same time, I can't help but wonder how the era he lived in shaped the overall experiences. It would not surprise me if the modern vision we have of him has been rewritten to help push out some of those black musicians even further. The racist fuckwads writing the history could have very well written a version that makes Elvis look much worse than he was. Ultimately it would leave a legacy of appropriation and shitty racism because that is the narrative someone wanted to create.
I am no historian so I could be completely off base. It just seems like that would be the easiest route to reconcile attempts to be better with an end result that sucked for everyone not Elvis.
Here’s a good article on the situation, with comments from black musicians who were contemporary with him. It’s essentially complicated, and people have complex feelings on it:
I'm sure there is a perfectly logical reason for this.....logic built upon proofs that 50% racist, 20% jingoistic, and 15% women are brood mares whose sole purpose is to birth new generations of the body politic
elvis grew up in a black community and went to a black church by choice and hung out with black people and frequently worked with black performers and artists despite frequent threats by white people
his legacy is extremely complicated
He also tried to uplift artists when he could, at least early on. There is a clip I saw awhile ago of him early in his career in variety shows giving props to the performers he worked with that were black, or calling out a black guitarist as the best guitarist currently alive, etc.
That is interesting to me for a few reasons. Almost exclusively the people I see upset at the legacy of Elvis and black musicians are people of color so it feels different than some of what is happening to the Beastie Boys on that front. At the same time, I can't help but wonder how the era he lived in shaped the overall experiences. It would not surprise me if the modern vision we have of him has been rewritten to help push out some of those black musicians even further. The racist fuckwads writing the history could have very well written a version that makes Elvis look much worse than he was. Ultimately it would leave a legacy of appropriation and shitty racism because that is the narrative someone wanted to create.
I am no historian so I could be completely off base. It just seems like that would be the easiest route to reconcile attempts to be better with an end result that sucked for everyone not Elvis.
There is an incredible number of hit songs from the 50s-70s that were originally performed by black artists before they were covered by white artists and gained popularity and glossed over the fact that it wasn't an original.
elvis grew up in a black community and went to a black church by choice and hung out with black people and frequently worked with black performers and artists despite frequent threats by white people
his legacy is extremely complicated
He also tried to uplift artists when he could, at least early on. There is a clip I saw awhile ago of him early in his career in variety shows giving props to the performers he worked with that were black, or calling out a black guitarist as the best guitarist currently alive, etc.
That is interesting to me for a few reasons. Almost exclusively the people I see upset at the legacy of Elvis and black musicians are people of color so it feels different than some of what is happening to the Beastie Boys on that front. At the same time, I can't help but wonder how the era he lived in shaped the overall experiences. It would not surprise me if the modern vision we have of him has been rewritten to help push out some of those black musicians even further. The racist fuckwads writing the history could have very well written a version that makes Elvis look much worse than he was. Ultimately it would leave a legacy of appropriation and shitty racism because that is the narrative someone wanted to create.
I am no historian so I could be completely off base. It just seems like that would be the easiest route to reconcile attempts to be better with an end result that sucked for everyone not Elvis.
There is an incredible number of hit songs from the 50s-70s that were originally performed by black artists before they were covered by white artists and gained popularity and glossed over the fact that it wasn't an original.
See also: the bulk of Led Zeppelin's hits. Which, to this day, fans will trip over themselves to find ways to excuse. "Those old blues artists stole from each other all the time" "those black artists were already ripping off white gospel music" "at least they brought them to a wider audience" "they credited them on some songs!" etc etc. It's all bullshit, of course.
minor incident on
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
elvis grew up in a black community and went to a black church by choice and hung out with black people and frequently worked with black performers and artists despite frequent threats by white people
his legacy is extremely complicated
He also tried to uplift artists when he could, at least early on. There is a clip I saw awhile ago of him early in his career in variety shows giving props to the performers he worked with that were black, or calling out a black guitarist as the best guitarist currently alive, etc.
That is interesting to me for a few reasons. Almost exclusively the people I see upset at the legacy of Elvis and black musicians are people of color so it feels different than some of what is happening to the Beastie Boys on that front. At the same time, I can't help but wonder how the era he lived in shaped the overall experiences. It would not surprise me if the modern vision we have of him has been rewritten to help push out some of those black musicians even further. The racist fuckwads writing the history could have very well written a version that makes Elvis look much worse than he was. Ultimately it would leave a legacy of appropriation and shitty racism because that is the narrative someone wanted to create.
I am no historian so I could be completely off base. It just seems like that would be the easiest route to reconcile attempts to be better with an end result that sucked for everyone not Elvis.
There is an incredible number of hit songs from the 50s-70s that were originally performed by black artists before they were covered by white artists and gained popularity and glossed over the fact that it wasn't an original.
See also: the bulk of Led Zeppelin's hits. Which, to this day, fans will trip over themselves to find ways to excuse. "Those old blues artists stole from each other all the time" "those black artists were already ripping off white gospel music" "at least they brought them to a wider audience" "they credited them on some songs!" etc etc. It's all bullshit, of course.
I love Zeppelin, but it is hard to reconcile that because they changed the sound of the songs, they're all presented as originals.
elvis grew up in a black community and went to a black church by choice and hung out with black people and frequently worked with black performers and artists despite frequent threats by white people
his legacy is extremely complicated
He also tried to uplift artists when he could, at least early on. There is a clip I saw awhile ago of him early in his career in variety shows giving props to the performers he worked with that were black, or calling out a black guitarist as the best guitarist currently alive, etc.
That is interesting to me for a few reasons. Almost exclusively the people I see upset at the legacy of Elvis and black musicians are people of color so it feels different than some of what is happening to the Beastie Boys on that front. At the same time, I can't help but wonder how the era he lived in shaped the overall experiences. It would not surprise me if the modern vision we have of him has been rewritten to help push out some of those black musicians even further. The racist fuckwads writing the history could have very well written a version that makes Elvis look much worse than he was. Ultimately it would leave a legacy of appropriation and shitty racism because that is the narrative someone wanted to create.
I am no historian so I could be completely off base. It just seems like that would be the easiest route to reconcile attempts to be better with an end result that sucked for everyone not Elvis.
There is an incredible number of hit songs from the 50s-70s that were originally performed by black artists before they were covered by white artists and gained popularity and glossed over the fact that it wasn't an original.
I grew up on a lot of Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and some other artists whose names escape me at the moment. My dad mostly referred to them via a generic, horribly offensive phrase. It has given me a much different view of classic rock to say the least. It also left me with an intimate understanding of what was progressive yesterday is regressive today for different reasons.
Brittney Hinnant, a Kenly resident, said she feels like the situation is a "race issue" given that Jones is Black, while the entire Kenly Police Department is White. Hinnant also said she doesn't think the police department supports Black people and she feels they often harass Black residents.
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For what it's worth, I don't think Questlove is the only person in hip-hop or rap who has good things to say about the Beastie Boys and their influence.
Looks like your first instinct was correct.
This is again not something that I can speak to personally because I am also white but when I've heard people talk about The Beastie boys and Eminem it's usually in a positive context in comparison to other white rappers. Both interacted with and showed a clear interest and respect for hip hop culture.
Again, not to say there aren't legitimate thoughts but... yeah.
Steam: Chagrin LoL: Bonhomie
Yeah they were white kids who used to have a punk band, who if I recall correctly ran their vinyls out of a college dorm with Rick Rubin (A man who worked with Jay Z and Metallica).
And they sort of created their own lane. They have their own style and flow, very staccato, they always kept the guitars around.
They didn't get into it as a cynical label cash grab, or some wild 'this is how I get rich' scheme.
Anyway hiphop won in the end in a way that was unthinkable in the 1980s.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Their music and vocals always make me so angry for some reason whenever I hear them. Just like whenever I hear Billy Corgan's voice. It's irrational, there's plenty of music I'm not into that doesn't put me into a rage, but they do and I don't know why
Hell, father thought the battle for los angeles was a poetry album
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
hip hop was barely a codified musical art form at that point, shit was still considered fairly experimental until the early 80s
just because the roots of the movement were fundamentally afro-carribean, doesn't mean some jewish lads from ground zero couldn't also be tremendously influential to it's development and mainstream popularization
They wern't a Hip-hop band until 83.
Edit: Just for the record. Not saying you're wrong about the general point.
Appropriation? From an outside perspective I can see that, totally, but I don't think the people they were surrounded by would have felt that way. That's just an old whiteboy's perspective.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
While it was hurtful, It could not be weaponized to to degree it can now be weaponized with today's technology.
The tiny tunes episode with drunk driving where 3 characters "die" was taken off syndication and that was it. I couldn't see that clip anymore I couldn't use it against anyone.
But now streaming services and everything, anything punching down gets remixed like the Oprah 9000 clip and spammed to people's phone. Plus with video editing on mobile apps, you could have some real hateful content remixed and dished out within the hour of its release
"Evil has always been proactive"
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
From the outside, it seems just racism, racists get really offended when other white people do anything that implies than non-white culture has any form of value, specially Black culture. So the small minority of negative non-white voices get signal boosted to hell and back.
At least is what I see from modern artists doing rap.
I think this gets extremely highlighted when you look at someone like Elvis Presley. He owed basically his whole career to black musicians that history tried really hard to forget. In contrast, Beastie Boys did their best to be a part of the scene rather than define it around them. Beastie Boys get the side eye by some white people, and no one thinks to mention Elvis in anything but the most positive light.
Depressingly, Elvis appropriated "black the devil's music", which undoubtedly angered the racists who sired the children that would wind up deifying him and carrying their parent's racism forward into the future.
Steam ID XBL: JohnnyChopsocky PSN:Stud_Beefpile WiiU:JohnnyChopsocky
his legacy is extremely complicated
Steam: Chagrin LoL: Bonhomie
He also tried to uplift artists when he could, at least early on. There is a clip I saw awhile ago of him early in his career in variety shows giving props to the performers he worked with that were black, or calling out a black guitarist as the best guitarist currently alive, etc.
Lots -- and I mean lots -- of localities have practices that effectively are the same thing. Public improvement districts (PID), municipal utility districts (MUD), etc., are all based on the ability of a neighborhood (really a group of properties) to levy an additional tax on themselves for use as they see fit. A lot of MUDs use this to incur debt against property owners that don't even live in a place yet in order to "build infrastructure" that is normally what your city or county should do but either won't or can't. This can work for a few years, but after a few decades that revenue that went entirely to paying down debt service then isn't sufficient to maintain the infrastructure, so the MUDs fall apart or go to the nearby locality for what amounts to a bailout -- and all the taxpayers of that locality pay for the infrastructure that only serves that small community.
PIDs are the same thing, but instead of just infrastructure you can actually apply it to a whole lot of shit. Private security, etc. It's wild. Here in Texas this system uses property taxes but you can do the same thing with sales tax and even income tax systems.
And the more I work in this field the more I realize that our fiscal federalist system is actually structurally undemocratic. It's not possible for the average, or even 95% of Americans to have the information to make informed decisions about their local politics, let alone even know when it happens.
That is interesting to me for a few reasons. Almost exclusively the people I see upset at the legacy of Elvis and black musicians are people of color so it feels different than some of what is happening to the Beastie Boys on that front. At the same time, I can't help but wonder how the era he lived in shaped the overall experiences. It would not surprise me if the modern vision we have of him has been rewritten to help push out some of those black musicians even further. The racist fuckwads writing the history could have very well written a version that makes Elvis look much worse than he was. Ultimately it would leave a legacy of appropriation and shitty racism because that is the narrative someone wanted to create.
I am no historian so I could be completely off base. It just seems like that would be the easiest route to reconcile attempts to be better with an end result that sucked for everyone not Elvis.
Here’s a good article on the situation, with comments from black musicians who were contemporary with him. It’s essentially complicated, and people have complex feelings on it:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/06/elvis-biopic-black-musicians/amp
Steam: Chagrin LoL: Bonhomie
I'm sure there is a perfectly logical reason for this.....logic built upon proofs that 50% racist, 20% jingoistic, and 15% women are brood mares whose sole purpose is to birth new generations of the body politic
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
There is an incredible number of hit songs from the 50s-70s that were originally performed by black artists before they were covered by white artists and gained popularity and glossed over the fact that it wasn't an original.
{Twitter, Everybody's doing it. }{Writing and Story Blog}
See also: the bulk of Led Zeppelin's hits. Which, to this day, fans will trip over themselves to find ways to excuse. "Those old blues artists stole from each other all the time" "those black artists were already ripping off white gospel music" "at least they brought them to a wider audience" "they credited them on some songs!" etc etc. It's all bullshit, of course.
I love Zeppelin, but it is hard to reconcile that because they changed the sound of the songs, they're all presented as originals.
{Twitter, Everybody's doing it. }{Writing and Story Blog}
I grew up on a lot of Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and some other artists whose names escape me at the moment. My dad mostly referred to them via a generic, horribly offensive phrase. It has given me a much different view of classic rock to say the least. It also left me with an intimate understanding of what was progressive yesterday is regressive today for different reasons.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Very mysterious graph
I remember a kotaku article that led me to gapminder
Basically school shooting coverage always shot up before the anniversary of columbine and christmas (because videogames)
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Self-abolishing police, you say...