The Electric Soul Potato[e]
Notes on the Beastie Boys — DAD / POP Mixtape #2
I had to be a freshman in high school when I found out about the guys with the Beastie Boys fanzine. My friend Chuck’s older sister Becky, who went to a different school, was friends with some other guys whose names are lost to me now. I heard tell of those guys and their exploits through Chuck, and their deeds became the stuff of legend to me. My memory around them is fuzzy, aside from my memory of how excited it made me to hear about people slightly older than me who seemed as if they had successfully translated their creativity and strangeness into something, somehow, cool. I think I remember that they did big, high-concept pranks. I either attended, or was invited to attend but was too scared to actually go to an ironic backyard wrestling party at one of their houses. What I do remember is that they had a fanzine about the Beastie Boys that they cut and pasted and printed out on copy machines at their dads’ work. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
To be clear, at this point, circa 1997, I had no investment in the Beastie Boys. I knew the “Sabotage” video from the hours I spent watching MTV. But I was not a fan, let alone enough of a fan to zine about it. I was, however, very invested in the idea of making a magazine. I wanted to write, I wanted to edit, I wanted to make things look like how I wanted them to look.
So Chuck and I started listening to the Beastie Boys, and we started our own zine. It was called The Electric Soul Potato[e]. The e in brackets was a joke about Dan Quayle misspelling potato a few years earlier, just to give you a sense of the kind of humor I was experimenting with at the time. The only thing I can remember writing for it was a review of a pair of blue Old Navy carpenter pants I had that I liked but would never choose to wear — just to give you a sense of the type of content I was experimenting with at the time — accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration of said pants. My main inspirations were the SPIN Alternative Record Guide and the collected oeuvre of Dave Barry.
We cut and pasted the layouts for hours, printed off copies at Kinko’s, and then distributed the issues at The Record Exchange and at any Starbucks whose manager would let us put them in the bin next to the Pittsburgh City Paper. If the general vibe of Chuck’s sister’s friends was “the cast of Jackass edit The Paris Review,” our zine’s vibe was, “two suburban boys who bowl on Friday nights and hang out at Borders Books and Music edit their school paper, unsupervised.”
It would be another couple of months before I first found out about the actual, real, radical zine cultures then proliferating amongst young feminist punks in the Pacific Northwest. (Not coincidentally, I eventually learned about Riot grrrl from the older friend of a different friend who went to a different school.) (Absolutely coincidentally, this is right around the time when Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill, and Adam Horovitz, of the Beastie Boys, started dating.) But, anyway, all that led me here, to this essay that I’ve cut and pasted into this app.
“It Takes Time to be a Man” // The Rapture
The second track on the DAD / POP mixtape is “Sure Shot.” My first Beastie Boys album — purchased on CD at the Record Exchange around the time of the first issue of Electric Soul Potato[e] — was 1994’s Ill Communication. “Sure Shot,” the record’s opener, was the first non-“Sabotage” track I’d heard. It’s remained my favorite and the song I most associate with driving around distributing the print run of the ESP (which, obvs, is what we called it).
“Sure Shot” is a pretty dadly song in a bunch of different ways, and it’s one of the tracks that came to mind immediately when I started to construct this mix. To begin with, it’s built around a jazz rock sample — jazz flute, no less — and jazz rock, alongside alt-country, is among the purest genres of dad rock. Sampling and looping a non-ironic jazz flute riff intensifies the ecstatic embarrassment. It also sounds great.
Beyond that, this song is a part of a lyrical micro-genre in which a vocalist, however young, bemoans the values of the wayward youths coming up behind them. The Ill Communication era found the Beastie Boys at the height of their principled anti-digital Luddism. This was as much about trends in the music industry as it was kids these days, but, formally, it fits. “I still listen to wax, I’m not using the CD,” Mike D raps in “Sure Shot.” But that’s not why we’re here. (And we’ll explore that tendency at greater length later in the playlist.)
We’re talking about “Sure Shot” because of MCA (Adam Yauch). There’s a throughline in the song about aging. MCA raps, “I got more rhymes than I got gray hairs, and that’s a lot, because I got my share.” Yauch had turned 30 the year Ill Communication came out, but MCA isn’t necessarily talking here about middle age so much as he’s talking about maturation. In the eighties, the Beastie Boys were frat rappers, piece-of-shit white kids too blithely confident to be embarrassed by their whole schtick. Their lyrics were sexist, violently misogynistic, homophobic, and all casually so. Their immaturity was a feature of their appeal.
Over their next two albums, they didn’t necessarily reform so much as tone that aspect down to a barely audible level. All the while, their sound evolved by leaps and bounds. Co-produced by the Dust Brothers, 1989’s Paul’s Boutique is a frenetic, sonic stunner; 1992’s Check Your Head begins the experiments with live instrumentation that would characterize Ill Communication. The Beastie Boys, rather quickly, sounded like they were growing up, even if it wasn’t clear what they thought about their juvenile dickishness.
“Sure Shot” is somewhat famous for being the track where they finally address their past. It’s MCA who raps:
I want to say a little something that's long overdue
The disrespect to women has got to be through
To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends
I want to offer my love and respect to the end
In the grand scale of things, it’s not that much. But, within the context of the band’s work to that point, it’s a startlingly earnest moment. (MCA is filled with them on this album.) Adam Yauch is sorry for what he said before. He knows it’s too late. But he’s trying to be better.
This speaks to a very specific vein of dad culture, a particular variant on the dad character: the reformed rake. Some dads were always dads, spiritually. Phil Dunphy, on Modern Family, for instance, is a well-intentioned doof, a bumbler, and, from what we can glean from his frequent delusional narrations of his own past, he’s always been this way. But there’s another kind of dad, a kind whose present-day softness is a hard turn from whatever kind of person he used to be. In the 2020s, the most accessible version of this is the “Girl Dad,” who has belatedly realized that women deserve, say, reproductive rights or pay equity, on account of becoming The Father of a Daughter. The worst version of this guy performs his newfound Male Feminism as a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card for past transgressions. You don’t need to evolve if you just automatically become a whole new guy the day your child is born. Right?
But there’s another version of this. To become a dad, in this mode, is to have the scales fall from your eyes, to come to terms with the existence of other people, to become aware of your own selfishness, to make amends, to say you’re sorry, to become embarrassed — constructively — by your own dipshit adolescence. And to change. You can’t, you won’t, and you don’t stop changing.
Stuff I Wrote
No links this week, but I’ve got reviews of both The Studio and The Rehearsal en route to you.
Shows I’m Watching
We’re three episodes into Tina Fey’s The Four Seasons on Netflix. It’s funny! Some of the set-ups are guessable right away, and the direction is a little stiff, but there’ve been a few surprises. Will Forte is great, as is Colman Domingo. But the reason to show up here is the joke-writing. It’s not laugh-out-loud every minute, but I’d say there’s an above average number of hits per episode. Fey co-created the show with Tracey Wigfield — #1 on the Tina Fey coaching tree — and Lang Fisher, who co-created and was the showrunner for Never Have I Ever, which, for my money, is one of the best traditional sitcoms of the past couple years. I won’t name names, but there are a few current and forthcoming critically-lauded comedies that get laughs because you, as the viewer, feel so strongly that that’s where a laugh is supposed to go. Lines are structurally jokes, and so, we agree to say that they are. We chuckle obligingly. It’s refreshing to watch a show that just makes you laugh.
Recommendations
One of my favorite writers, Alexandra Lange, won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism this week. I implore you to read her never-more-timely cultural history of the shopping mall.
Jessica Grose, the parenting columnist at the NYT, wrote a great piece about the statistical evidence that the pandemic essentially forced dads to become more involved parents in a way that seems to be sticking.
We saw Sinners, last week, which was terrific. I really enjoyed this knotty, expert discussion about what the film’s box office means from two of the smartest media industry scholars I know: Myles McNutt and Kristen Warner.
Steven Hyden somehow managed to invent a category — the “CD Album” — and then to construct an objectively correct canon for it. This is like a magic trick.
It’s easy to miss, amidst all the elite level posting, when Menswear Guy (aka Derek Guy) writes an actual essay. This, about the “alpha male aesthetic,” is just a perfect piece of cultural criticism.
For this week’s recipe, I’m just going to tell you something I do. This was the first week of grilling season, and something I started doing last year is this: in a grill-safe pan or just on a piece of foil, grill half a roughly-chopped head of cabbage. It should be in pieces — not wedges — and it should char and caramelize a bit. Meantime, in a bowl, press two cloves of garlic, and throw in a big handful of chopped herbs and a splash of olive oil. Parsley, chive, sage, rosemary, mint, anything. When the cabbage is done and still piping hot, throw it directly into bowl with the garlic and herbs, and mix it around. The cabbage essentially flash-sautes the garlic, and the whole thing blends together while you’re grilling whatever else you’re grilling.
Phil Communication,
Phil.
I feel like Dads who are 40-ish need to start bringing Beastie Boys merch back as the ultimate cool dad signifier, it's just sitting there waiting to happen!