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But at least one time every session, a teenager would hand me a cassette that made me blanch. Madonna's "Like a Virgin," maddening not so much because of its sexual innuendo but because of the crass commercialism of the same. Anything by the later Depèche Mode, whose lead singer sang all too convincingly, and seductively, about depression and addiction. I think it was after a particularly difficult segment trying to tease out, and implicitly refute, the lure of suicide in Depèche Mode's synth-laden netherworld that a smirking twelve-year-old in an Oliver North for President t-shirt handed me a cassette of License to Ill, by the Beastie Boys.
Sigh. The Beastie Boys. Somehow I had never got around to listening to the Beastie Boys. Well, how bad could it be? I fast-forwarded the tape to the requested song—"Fight for Your Right to Party." My whiteboard was ready. Marker in hand, I pressed play.
Noise filled the room. Not just musical noise—semantic noise. The lyrics, declaimed in the rudest possible white-boy hip-hop fashion, made the astonishingly stale and puerile claim that adult hypocrisy and authoritarianism were stifling the youth of America. "You've got to Fight—for your Right—to Par—ty!" It was Holden Caulfield after several tokes of weed. It was Kerouac on crack. It was stupid. It was useless. I pressed stop. The twelve-year-old and his buddies grinned nervously.
"Why do you listen to this?" I said. I did not succeed in softening the edge in my voice.
" 'Cause it sounds cool," one of them offered.
"Do you have any idea what they're saying?"
"Naw, we just like the beat." The beat could best be described as hip-hop-metal-thrash. It was kind of cool. But the words—there was nothing there but stupidity. The Beastie Boys were stupid. Kids who would listen to music like this were stupid.
The premise of the Pop Music Workshop, you must understand, was that we would not prejudge the music. We would allow it to speak to us. We would assume that every human endeavor, no matter how cut off from relationship with the Creator, had some quality that could be redeemed.
In the harangue that followed I violated every premise of the Pop Music Workshop.
The adult leaders politely requested that I not join the group for the remaining sessions that weekend. I did apologize to the youth the next day, but the damage was done. The twelve-year-old flinched when he saw me in the dining room.
I led the Pop Music Workshop once or twice after that, but my heart wasn't in it. It was a surprisingly short trip from seeing pop as laden with meaning, however misplaced, to seeing it as the crassest form of cynical exploitation. Soon I left Georgia and the world of youth group retreats. My musical diet reverted to Bach and Bruce Cockburn. Grunge came and went. Hip-hop swept across America. Madonna revived her career two or three times. I ignored most of it. It was junk.
A few months ago, my friend Charlie Park sent me a link to a website called "The Beastles." "You might want to write an article about this," he said. The Beastles, the work of a Boston DJ who goes by the moniker dj BC, was the latest example of the growing musical genre called mashups. Rooted in the beat-mixing skills of dance club culture and inconceivable before the digital age, mashups take advantage of audio editing software like Pro Tools and Apple's Garage Band to remix familiar (or unfamiliar) songs into new musical works.
Mashup artists place a premium on unlikely combinations: the Who Boys combine British hard-rockers the Who and California surf-poppers the Beach Boys. The most celebrated mashup, DJ Dangermouse's 2004 The Grey Album, layers the spoken-word lyrics of rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album over instrumental riffs from the Beatles' The White Album. The Beastles follow in the footsteps of The Grey Album, but this time the rappers are the Beastie Boys. Their white-trash lyrics, as brash and shallow as I remembered, are juxtaposed with lyrical snippets of Paul McCartney's piano, George Harrison's guitars, and Ringo Starr's laid-back beats. After one track I was entranced; after two tracks I had started downloading all seven songs. The Beastles have been in heavy rotation on my iPod ever since.
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