While the Beasties may have changed and matured from the late 1980s, the city they were from didn’t always evolve at the same pace. New York has always been a city of the haves and the have nots, something perfectly personified by Donald T****, who made much of his fame and fortune in the city’s real estate industry during the band’s rise to prominence. While NYC’s wealth was being built up in the 80s, its racial divisions were growing stronger. The Beasties’ 1989 album Paul’s Boutique was released just three months after The Central Park Jogger case began, which saw five teenage males – four black, one hispanic, aged between 14 and 16 – wrongfully charged and jailed for the rape and assault of a white woman. Just two weeks after the attack, Donald T**** placed full-page ads in four New York newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated for the teenagers, an issue that reared its head again during his presidential campaign. Though this is just one example in the timeline of racial fracturing within New York, it acts as a stark parallel to the troubles across America today, and despite the message of unity that came from Sunday’s rally, T****’s name – whether spray-painted in Adam Yauch Park or printed in a newspaper – has once again become a signifier of the racism that’s always existed in a city that often paints a picture for itself as a liberal bubble within an ugly America.
In some ways this can be seen in the way that it treats its own champions, glorifying the names who they feel represent their city in the best possible way. While the Beastie Boys are more than deserving of their status as one of rap’s golden crews, contemporaries who talked of NYC’s underbelly haven’t always been acknowledged in the same way. While the Beastie Boys created art as seen through the eyes of three middle-class white kids, Nas, Jay Z, Lil’ Kim, the Wu-Tang Clan, Biggie, and countless others who turned injustice into artistry presented a different yet equally strong identity of the city. Yet they’re often seen to represent NYC’s past struggles rather than its current ones, and ignoring that side of the city makes what the Beastie Boys stood for futile.
That’s not to detract from what the Beastie Boys stood for. On the contrary, it enforces it. The Beastie Boys represent the bravado of a New Yorker – “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” and “An Open Letter To NYC” are odes to the city that created them – and their continued work as humanitarians showcase a community-conscious city formed by immigrants of different religious and racial creeds. As Horovitz said, “this is more than just someone in New York City.” Yauch and the Beastie Boys were not just a voice of New York, but the voice of the world, and if there’s one positive to take from the vandalism in Adam Yauch Park, it’s the importance of that message. The Beastie Boys urged us to fight for our right – let’s heed the call.
- Jack Needham, Dazed Digital piece on Yauch Park vandalism, Nov. 2016
