BY ELANA RABINOWITZ | The first rap album ever to hit number one was birthed in Brooklyn. From three Jewish guys — how was that possible?
I grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, way before any hipsters burrowed there.
The gritty outer borough, where my suburban Jewish camp friends didn’t want to visit, was where my liberal therapist parents bought a 14-room Victorian home for under $40,000 due to white flight. The only thing I enjoyed more than listening in on my mother’s sessions in our living room, was listening to the infectious music of the Beastie Boys.
I was a junior in high school when I first heard their music in the back seat of a tan Oldsmobile. I went with a group of seniors to the Kingsway Movie Theater in Gravesend to see “Top Gun,” when my friend put his white cassette inside the car radio. “Brass Monkey, that funky Monkey… .”
From the first riff, I was drawn in. Within minutes everyone in the car was singing and bopping their heads fiercely to the beat. “Got a castle in Brooklyn, that’s where I dwell. …” I liked it. I felt a little funky. At 16, I was just becoming me.
This group hit the world a few times over, but for us natives their beats resonated differently. Something about their mere existence, their baseball caps and boyish good looks, gave us street cred. Suddenly, our borough was not a mob spoof or big hair, it was three bright boyz from the county of Kings, and I began to feel like a queen, just due to my zip code.
We grew up in a different era, where you could go around the corner and get a Jamaican beef patty, then stop at a bodega to buy something to wash it down. No ID, we could still get a 40 or a Bartles & James wine cooler and sip it in a brown paper bag on a stoop in Park Slope with friends, chain smoking Newports. Getting whiffs of music pouring out of boom boxes passing by, smirking when a Beastie Boys song was playing.
I spent endless nights on the D train, going to see my older brother’s band in the city, forcing me to grow up sooner than I should have. My brother was the same age as MCA; both musicians, they hit the Downtown scene when CBGB was synonymous with the LES. They were white. They were Jewish. They were from Brooklyn and cool. Maybe I was.There were a group of us who didn’t quite fit the mold of how the media portrayed young Brooklynites to be. We wore black, but not in a goth way, and though we were white, we had a little color. We were bridge-and-tunnel before there were million-dollar lofts, but we were aight.
Like most teenagers of the time, I memorized every lyric to every song the Beastie Boys ever sang. As I got older and their music meant more, I felt like I was growing up along with them. Adam Yauch redefined himself, and like any good Jewish boy, became a Buddhist. I left New York, first for college, and then to travel the world. Yet, when “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” came on, no matter where I was, no matter who I was with, I danced and sang like I was home, clenching my fists and raising them high in the air.
When I heard that Yauch died, I felt a hole shoot through my body, so deeply that I thought I might not mend. I put on my black hoodie sweatshirt and danced my ass off, like I was 16 again. I danced for the memory of a man I barely knew, for a time that had slipped away all too quickly.
Today I conjure up these memories when my confidence wanes. I listen to the Beasties’ songs on my iPod and I am at peace.
When I visited the trendy Smorgasbord in Downtown Brooklyn, I found myself at Adam Yauch Park and I smiled.
