"59 Chrystie Street" Revisited

The Beastie Boys' 1989 LP Paul's Boutique is arguably the finest hip-hop album ever made. A triumph of psychedelic sampling, it transcends hip-hop and can even be considered among the greatest records of all-time, regardless of genre. But Paul's Boutique is not perfect. It possesses one incontestable blemish within its final track, the 9-part song suite “B-Boy Bouillabaisse,” namely the first ninth, “59 Chrystie Street.” This segment is titled for the location of the prime Manhattan rehearsal space the Beastie Boys used during their early years, but its lyrical content describes something much more provocative. The track's aggressive, jejune sexuality would seem to hearken back to the frat-boyish aesthetic of the Beastie Boys' first album, Licensed to Ill, delving even lower than that album managed to stoop with some readily apparent misogyny (and perhaps even homophobia and transphobia). But if we allow our critical gaze to venture deeper into the cut, looking past its juvenile lyrics and into the very texture of its samples, we can argue that “59 Chrystie Street” is, if not as virtuosic as the rest of the album, at least defensible. It may even expound a vision of male sexuality that's rather profound.

Before diving deeper, it is necessary to detail the surface-level defects of “59 Chrystie Street.” We see these on full display in the first half of its lyrical content (the words in parentheses marking accompanying vocal samples), where the speaker or speakers manoeuvre a paramour into their home and/or rehearsal space:

There's a girl over there (aw yeah)

With long brown hair (aw yeah)

I took her to the place

I threw the mattress in her face

So already we ostensibly have a potential sexual partner being physically assaulted with a mattress (or, alternatively, being thrown down onto a mattress), possibly by all three members of the Beastie Boys, as they all participate in the rapping. The gang rap continues with its second half, a description of the mounting sexual encounter:

Took off her shirt (fresh)

Took off her bra

Took off her pants (fresh)

You know what I saw (wick, wick, whack)

The beat abruptly gives way to Adam Horovitz's braying laughter, and, with that, “59 Chrystie Street” concludes. What did the speaker (or speakers) see? In his 2006 analysis of Paul's Boutique for the 33 1/3 chapbook series, Dan LeRoy hypothesizes that the song “suggests a 'Lola'-esque encounter with a groupie.” By this reading, the speaker(s) saw a penis. If this is indeed the case, the track's narrative would seem to betoken transphobia. However, the bare-bone lyrics offer little confirmation as to the presence of the penis. We are left to project our own discriminations onto the big reveal, marking the track as cynically vague. Since all we have are feminine pronouns, your present author deems it just as tenable to assert that the speaker saw a vagina (as we'll see below). All we can say for sure is that “59 Chrystie Street” is an obtuse, nursery-rhyme rap about rough and impersonal sexuality. If the sexual conquest in question is a woman, then we can say the track is more than a bit misogynous, if not homo- or transphobic as per Dan LeRoy's penis reading.

And yet, peeling back the layers, more can be said about “59 Chrystie Street.” Certainly, a song is not just its lyrics. And the musical bedrock of “59 Chrystie Street”, like every track on Paul's Boutique, consists of a complexly woven skein of samples. What makes the segment salvageable, or perhaps something even better, is its thunderous drum sample. The track's unrelenting drums are those of a tribe in Burundi. The recording was originally made in 1967 by anthropologists Michel Vuylsteke and Charles Duvelle during their fieldwork in East Africa. Together, twenty-five male drummers can be heard on the recording. This particular anthropological recording would appear on a number of European and American compositions to follow, including Joni Mitchell's “Jungle Line” and “Burundi Black” by French composer Michel Bernholc (a Caucasian who really played up the “darkest Africa” angle, making for an album that hasn't aged especially well).

The predominance of this drumming turns “59 Chrystie Street” from a brainless sex rap into an incantation, of sorts, that's almost orphic in its outlook. The song possesses a certain ethnographic quality, not just in terms of 80s NYC hookup culture, but far beyond that, reaching eastward and touching on a kind of experience that's trans-societal and even transcendent. In the Burundi drumming, we have a form of musical expression that much of the American and European audience may very well consider “primitive” and “primal.” It will arouse, on some level, their stereotypes, projections, and fears regarding “darkest Africa” (as it apparently did for Monsieur Bernholc). It will evoke wild visions of an “uncivilized” country and continent (if the average Euro-American can even discern the two with regard to “Africa”). But these racist assumptions are immediately subverted, because the title of the song places the activity on a street in Manhattan, the putative capital of the developed world. The description of this all-American sexual encounter is undergirded by the forceful tribal drum. In effect, the track has collapsed the notionally insurmountable cultural distance between stereotypical “darkest Africa” and the presumptive center of Western civilization. And what has closed this cultural gap? It is the primal pull of the sexual encounter with a female—the desire for a vision of the vagina. This desire unites every male musician, no matter where on the globe he may be, whether he is a drummer in Burundi or a white rapper in late-80s NYC. (It may also apply to lesbians, though the choice of the sample and the lyrics in the present case would seem to foreground male sexuality.) For it is this vision of the vulva that stirs the Burundi drummer to beat his drum and compels the rapper to steal his drum samples. The persistent thud of male sexuality pounds on in both groups of men alike.

In seeing the vagina, all straight men are rendered one. We are all united in the vaginal gaze. Agape, we regard the vulva with thundering awe. We are gazing, after all, upon what Samuel L. Jackson rightly called “the holiest of holies.” Both the Burundi drummer and the white rapper shudder with Rudolph Otto's mysterium tremendum fascinans as they stare into that coral-petaled, vertical maw. And the vulva stares unblinkingly back at us, because it is not just a mouth, but also an eye. To be seen this way, this is what we drum for. The vulva may see and know us, but even if we can know it in a Biblical/carnal sense, can we truly know it? And so, Adam Horovitz's final line in the song echoes in our ear, sounding more and more like a question with each repetition. You know what I saw...? Does any man truly know what he saw after he sees the vagina? These are the questions that render all straight men throughout the world as a brotherhood. Fitting then, that the song should conclude here. For to snatch a glimpse—to glimpse a snatch—is to end the song—the ever-throbbing beat of male sexuality—and this vision is most likely what happens, your present author posits, at the end of “59 Chrystie Street.” The beat promptly stops, because the vision has been consummated. But the song suite is not over—it's never over, in fact—and the beat resumes anew, and the record plays on loop.

Thus, through its unabashed male sexuality undergirded by the Burundi drum, “59 Chrystie Street” has effectively overturned longstanding stereotypes about “darkest Africa.” The track has made a subtle testimony to the oneness of the human race—or the male race, at least—vis-à-vis the vadge, a vision quest, of sorts, that will forever quirt a man onward, regardless of his continent. For this reason, “59 Chrystie Street” shouldn't be considered an outright blemish on the nigh-perfect Paul's Boutique, but rather a mere peccadillo that, upon closer listening, is far from irredeemable. “59 Chrystie Street” is built on numinously fertile grounds.