Beastie Boys reviewed

"To the Five Boroughs"
Beastie Boys
Brooklyn Dust Music/Universal Polygram International Publishing
2004

We always knew the white rapper Beastie Boys were political. With such vehement defenses of party, beer and porno rights in "Fight for Your Right" and obvious enjoyment of the party lifestyle as in "No Sleep Till Brooklyn"--we always had the Beastie Boys pegged as some staunch anti-authoritarians. It's just that we figured it stayed at that level--the pathetic and narrow world of many libertarians. It turns out that 18 years after their debut album, the Beastie Boys have gone political, as in against the u.$. wars and it looks like we have Bush in particular to thank for it. In "It takes time to build," the Beastie Boys call for a "shift on over towards the left" while bashing Bush on the environment, debt and military. "Why you hating people you never met? Didn't your mama teach you to show some respect?" That applies to why Uncle $am is bombing far away countries. Politically the Beastie Boys won us over to "To the Five Boroughs" with their anti-war and internationalist posture. For them it boils down to: "If you want love. . . we've got to give before we can get," which is a fine place to start. The album title refers to the Beastie Boys' praise of the artificial world of New York City where it appears to many that the peoples of all races and nationalities live together. The effect of songs like "Open Letter to NYC" is to stress the internationalism of the City relative to others. In contrast, we would say that it's a mistake to believe that the empire of capitalism is real internationalism. The measure of a strategy for internationalism is whether it can apply everywhere, and by this standard, New York City fails. Some minority of places like New York do have citizens of all nationalities, but the welfare state and infrastructure of New York City is built at the expense of Third World people--thanks to capitalism. The reason not everyone lives in a New York City is that it is not possible. Not every city can have a dominant world center of finance capital like Wall Street and therefore not every city or town has the taxes coming from that. New York City would quickly fall apart without the gravy train holding it together --the unique jobs and business partnerships possible in a few great cities in the world. It's true that even the non-Jewish whites in New York City have learned to live with other ethnicities to some extent. This fact causes many supposed communists to lose their bearings and substitute the minority of big-city whites for the white nation as a whole in their strategic thinking. It's easy to get a different sense of the world by sitting down in Greenwich Village, but if we get out among more typical white folk, we can obtain more of the truth about the dominator nation. Eventually we see that New York City whites are permitted to live their atypical lifestyles thanks to New York's exploitation of the rest of the world. In point of fact, suburban and rural whites who see blatant white lifestyle racism and chauvinism up close are more likely to come to an accurate view of the white nation and the world while New York City "communists" will be the last. The white leaders of a limited bourgeois internationalist integrationism will come from places like New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles--and they intentionally and unintentionally cause havoc in a political world where the vast majority of whites are simply not exploited people. New York City is like the corporate headquarters of the world. That headquarters may be integrated relative to other places in the world as the epitome of bourgeois internationalism, but every economic fact of life in New York that makes people there a little more civil to each other comes at the expense of other peoples globally. The Beastie Boys and "To the 5 Boroughs" continue previous albums' themes of parties, singing about their own band and referring to other rappers. Musically, there is no guitar to speak of here. The vocals are classic Beastie Boys, but some of the umph is missing. "Fight for Your Right" is still more rebellious than anything with more correct lyrics on this album, and that is sad. So there is a little mismatch of form and content. We would have preferred to see the musical form of "Fight for Your Right" attached to songs about the right to live a life free of capitalist militarism and terrorism instead of songs about not letting your mom throw away your Playboy magazine. On the other hand, "Fight for Your Right" was never for everyone and we are sure that many will delight in this vocals-centered album. Buy This CD Notes: MIM has explained that one might even "like" this music while knowing rationally that there is something wrong with it, maybe even profoundly wrong and evil. Being a Maoist means being a revolutionary scientist and that means having the ability to question everything that we like. See MIM Theory on feminism and gender issues.