#Review: BEASTIE BOYS STORY

Luther M. Siler

Man, it’s weird when rappers get old.

I’m in the odd position of wanting to review something that I’m pretty certain very few of you will actually be able to watch: the documentary BEASTIE BOYS STORY, directed by Spike Jonze, currently exclusive to Apple TV+. Which I only have because I bought an iPhone this year and you get a free year when you do that. So far we’ve watched this documentary and season one of SEE, which was entertaining and pretty and unbelievably, heinously dumb.

And the thing is, I’ve been a Beastie Boys fan for, functionally, my entire damn life. License to Ill came out in 1986, when I was nine, and if it wasn’t the first rap tape I ever got it was the second, since I don’t remember if I bought this or the Fat Boys first. (Also, Jesus, at least two of the Fat Boys don’t even scan as fat any longer. I’m bigger than all three of them, I think.) So it’s weird to see Adrock and Mike D on stage as, basically, two old dorky white guys telling terrible jokes and reading, mostly not especially compellingly, off of a TelePrompTer.

I was thinking this was going to be a more standard talking-heads type of documentary, but what it actually is is a two-man stage show, with Spike Jonze handling audio and video on a giant screen behind them and tons and tons of white people in their 40s and 50s in the audience. And while I definitely enjoyed watching it (and, perhaps more importantly, so did my wife, who doesn’t have remotely the attachment to hiphop that I do, and virtually none at all to the Beastie Boys specifically) I have to admit that there’s a certain bittersweet element to watching it, as MCA was absolutely and undeniably the brains and the soul of this group and he passed away of cancer in 2012. It’s as if Lennon got shot and the only members of the Beatles left were Ringo and Pete Best. The Beastie Boys didn’t have a Paul McCartney, y’know? Once Adam Yauch was gone, the group was over; there was never any chance of either of the other two even trying a solo career.

Seen as the artifact it is, this is definitely worth two hours of your time, especially if you have ever been a fan of either rap music or the Beastie Boys (and I can watch music documentaries all goddamn day long even if I don’t like the artists they’re about) but I did find myself wishing we could break away from the perspective of the two surviving band members from time to time. I’d like to hear what Rick Rubin or Russell Simmons have to say about the group’s split from Def Jam, or what Run-DMC had to say about their tour together, and oh my god this is what Rick Rubin looks like now:

Holy shit. Dude.

Yeah, well, point is, some other perspectives would have been nice, from time to time, and there are a couple of weird lacunae in what we get that could have used some shoring up– early bandmate Kate Schellenbach gets enough attention that you expect there to be some sort of payoff, which never really arrives, for example. But if you go in knowing what you’re about to see– Mike D and Adrock (who damn near never calls himself that; he’s “Adam” throughout the documentary, and Adam Yauch is “Yauch,” not MCA) talking about their lives on stage, mostly from a script, and some almost insultingly corny jokes from time to time, it’s not a bad way to spend two hours. Call it a B-, I guess.

4:49 PM, Sunday May 3: 1,154,340 confirmed infections and 67,447 Americans dead. Meanwhile, a whole lot of places open back up tomorrow, and … this is not going to go well, at all, for a whole lot of people.

Stuff what I don’t wanna write about

Luther M. Siler

CW: Sexual assault. Skip the first thing if necessary.

THING THE FIRST: I have been deliberately Not Writing About Tara Reade for … God, time is meaningless right now, but for however long it’s been since I first heard about her allegations against Joe Biden. Well, as it turns out, apparently John Cole and I are the exact same person, as he’s written basically the exact post I would have had I chosen to write about the situation, with the single absent detail that this is why I decided to go ahead and vote for Elizabeth Warren in the primary. I doubt Reade’s story for a number of reasons, but it’s always possible other, more credible allegations could surface. If anything, that’s the strongest argument against this: nobody who does what Tara Reade says Joe Biden did to her only does it once.

I tweeted this a couple of days ago:

Y’all, this is Jack Harlow:

And, dammit, I admit it: I read that Tweet I was responding to, genuinely thought that “Jack Harlow” might be Macklemore’s real name or something like that, and he actually has a song called “10,000 Hours“, and then Googled and found out that no, he wasn’t Macklemore, it was this dude. And if anything this dude looks even less like a rapper than Macklemore. And then I pulled him up on YouTube, because I was in the mood to make fun of a bad rapper, and now it’s two days later and I own two of this motherfucker’s albums. He’s not the best rapper in the world by any stretch, but the kid’s got bars, and I went from Oh, this is gonna suck to this isn’t terrible to God damn it I hate it when I’m wrong in, like, ten minutes. He’s got this great, laid-back, chill flow to his music, and in complete seriousness I think the last time I discovered new rap music that I liked this much was Rae Sremmurd.

Anyway, point is, give this a listen, but maybe do it with your eyes closed. More later today; I’ve got like three posts queued up right now.

12:52 PM, Friday May 1: 1,070,032 confirmed cases, 63,019 Americans dead.

Friday night classic hiphop dance party!

Luther M. Siler

I fell into a rabbit hole on Twitter last night, and for some reason I feel like preserving it here. Enjoy!

On sharing a moment

Luther M. Siler

It has been a succession of rough days. Several weeks of them at this point. I’m exhausted and crabby.

A complete stranger asked me how my day was going earlier today. And without thinking about it, I shrugged and said “I didn’t have to use my AK,” which is something I’ve literally never said out loud to anyone. Because why the hell would I?

And she got it, thank God, and she laughed, and somehow her reaction improved my day quite a bit.

I note that I used that phrase very different from the way Mr. Cube uses it; to him not using his AK is the capstone of an already good day; for me it meant “at least I didn’t have to kill anybody today,” which was pretty much the least I could expect from a typical Wednesday.

#Review: ON THE COME UP, by Angie Thomas

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I shouldn’t write this tonight. I am tired, y’all; there was no school on Monday because of Presidents’ Day and this week has still been at least six years long. I don’t even have to go to work on Friday because I have a training all day and I still don’t know how the hell I’m going to make it through the rest of the week. It’s just been bullshit on top of bullshit on top of bullshit on top of bullshit, and that’s just been within the walls of my building. It’s not like there hasn’t been substantial bullshit going on in the real world, too. There’s been plenty. I am as tired of white men and our bullshit as I have ever been in my life and the notion that I am almost by definition guaranteed to be less tired of white men than damn near every person of color and damn near every woman on earth is practically incomprehensible. I don’t know how any of y’all make it through a day without killing any of us. I really don’t.

You may remember that I liked Angie Thomas’ debut novel The Hate U Give quite a lot. In fact, it was my second favorite book of the year. I ordered her follow-up novel On the Come Up a few weeks before it released and was up far too late last night because I couldn’t put it down. (Note: “follow-up” is a decent way to describe the book, which alludes to the events of THUG and is set a year later and in the same neighborhood, but does not share any major characters. There are a couple of shop owners and neighborhood figures and the like who I think appear in both, but I’d need to reread THUG to be sure.)

On the Come Up is not as important a book as THUG, but I think I might have liked it more anyway. Bri, the main character, is a neophyte rapper and the daughter of a local hiphop legend who was shot and killed when she was very young. Hiphop was a big part of THUG, but this book is utterly drenched in it, and honestly I’d love to hear some of the raps she performs in this book actually recorded. My understanding is that Angie Thomas at least dabbled in rap herself, and I can absolutely hear this kid performing the lyrics she writes throughout the book. Let’s be real here; given my previous experience with this author and the subject matter, there was no chance I was going to dislike this book. The only question was how much I was going to love it. Will it end up at #2 on my year-end list? Perhaps not, because, again, this book doesn’t feel as important as THUG— which is less a criticism of Come Up and more of a statement that if you haven’t goddamned read THUG yet you should get off your ass and do it.

I look back over this and realize I haven’t really discussed the plot of the damn book at all; chalk that up to being tired. In lieu of me rewriting it, let me just post the blurb from the back of the book, which is a perfectly fair description:

Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Or at least win her first battle. As the daughter of an underground hip hop legend who died right before he hit big, Bri’s got massive shoes to fill.

But it’s hard to get your come up when you’re labeled a hoodlum at school, and your fridge at home is empty after your mom loses her job. So Bri pours her anger and frustration into her first song, which goes viral…for all the wrong reasons. 

Bri soon finds herself at the center of a controversy, portrayed by the media as more menace than MC. But with an eviction notice staring her family down, Bri doesn’t just want to make it—she has to. Even if it means becoming the very thing the public has made her out to be.  

Insightful, unflinching, and full of heart, On the Come Up is an ode to hip hop from one of the most influential literary voices of a generation. It is the story of fighting for your dreams, even as the odds are stacked against you; and about how, especially for young black people, freedom of speech isn’t always free.

Give it a read, y’all. Angie Thomas is a goddamn national treasure; you should be appreciating her while we’ve got her.