00011 · Car Thief
The Beastie Boys’ second album, Paul’s Boutique, was a fireworks revelation of hip-hop. For me, the album was a Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band experience, a new level of music production that threw out all the rules. The music is pure and weird pioneering expression. I couldn’t stop listening.
The songs are dense with tangles of samples and lyrics. The album dropped in 1989, in the sweet spot when sampling technology was just beginning to bloom, yet before you needed to legally clear the rights to every second of every sample. Hundreds of song samples and sonic snippets are strewn in the musical stew: the last nine tracks are grouped as “B-Boy Bouillabaisse.”
Hip-hop was still fairly new, and this album crossed the line of its existent boundaries. The album suffered poor sales, as no one knew what to do with it or how to react. Over the years, its reputation and sales continued to grow. It’s now considered one of the best hip hop albums of all time, and has gone double platinum in sales.
“I got nothing to lose so I don’t give a fuck,” raps Mike D on the song Shadrach. That manifesto is the essence of the album, and why I love it so much. As each song jumps from one disparate style to another, the Beasties gleefully destroy second album expectations, their own reputation, and the genre of hip-hop itself. Paul’s Boutique is a swaggering, momentum-filled romp of petty vandalism upon music and literature that leaves the listener breathless and full of admiration.
The song Car Thief holds a special place in my heart. On the flip side of the album as the eleventh track, one is all warmed up by the time you hear the song on a cassette or CD. In a crazy climax of samples, the song’s final verse includes the following:
“Space cake cookies, I discover who I am
I’m a dusted old bummy Hurdy Gurdy Man
Five-oh caught me, now I’m going to the mountains
Said good-bye to my girl, my lawyer and accountants”
Through some magical resonance, those lyrics seemed to speak directly to me. At the time I didn’t have a girl, but I was working for some lawyers. I was socking money away with plans to quit my paralegal job when my apartment’s lease came up, and then head to the higher lands of Arizona to live a biking and camping dirtbag life. This song was my siren call, and the lyrics sketched a vision of me in the ponderosa pines, a biking b-boy of one.
It all came to a head one rainy Arizona day when one of my bosses informed me she was firing the receptionist, who at the time was out of state for the funeral of both her mother and father. It was a despicable and underhanded move, and she was enlisting me to be part of the betrayal. I played along, and she thanked me for my loyalty. I offered to stay late to make sure we were all caught up on everything in this time of transition.
In actuality, I was getting her out of the office so I could clear my desk. I left a “I-quit-effective-immediately, you-suck, keep-my-last-paycheck” note on the law firm letterhead, packed my stuff in the panniers, and jumped onto my bike in the middle of a downpour.
The next night I would go to an open mic poetry reading and declare my dedication to a life of poetry. But this evening, biking away from that job forever, a car blasted me with gutter water as it drove by, and in my head all the sampling I’d done of my dream life came together—Space cake cookies, I discover who I am/I’m a dusted old bummy Hurdy Gurdy Man—in a rolling moment of baptismal reality.
This is now. Let loose thyself.
In the outer world, I appeared some poor schmuck caught in the rain. In my inner world, I felt like Clint Eastwood had traded a horse for a bike and joined the Beasties Boys. A high plains drifter reincarnated and reinvented.
I cherish the memory of the giddy rapture that bike ride. I felt the Beastie Boys were angels watching over me—Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego offering divine protection and encouragement. Through them the universe whispered, “Here’s your strange path. Whatever the fuck you want. What have you got to lose?”
