"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.

The Slider - T. Rex

T. Rex is perhaps best known for their radio-friendly 1971 single "Bang a Gong (Get it On)" from their stellar Electric Warrior LP. That album was the band’s seventh (but their second after abbreviating their name from the less commercially viable "Tyrannosaurus Rex") and marked the height of the band's commercial success. Critics both contemporaneous and retrospective have taken Electric Warrior as the artistic apogee for T. Rex and its virtuoso frontman Marc Bolan, but this is up for debate. T. Rex's 1972 album The Slider proves itself far more expansive than Electric Warrior, benefitting from some of Bolan's most mystically and ontologically sophisticated songwriting.

The Slider starts off with "Metal Guru," one of the record's two singles. While "Bang a Gong (Get it On)" is undeniably top-forty bait, "Metal Guru" is something quite different. Its title belies its content in that it’s not a heavy, hardscrabble jam but rather a jubilant, sing-songy meditation on the titular phrase sung over and over again by a sizable chorus. On account of the cheery bombast and sheer repetition “Metal Guru” offers, it feels as if the album is starting with a vamp—that is, the kind of all-in close-out with which one might end a song or even an album. The reference to a "guru" in the title is apropos, as both the song and the album in its entirety possess a distinctly mantraic vibe. The Slider fixates on phrases as if determined to produce in the listener an altered state.

Marc Bolan, virtuoso

Bolan follows with "Mystic Lady," a song featuring an odd time signature which doesn't just slow things down, but actually confounds the listener in an intriguing way. "Rock On" reclaims the pace with intimations of roadhouse rock, but this song is also given to fits and starts. Bolan wants to defy expectations not just for lyrics but for song structure as well.

The titular track showcases Bolan's psychedelic lyricism at its best. "I could never understand/The wind at all/Was like a ball of love//I could never never see/The cosmic sea/Was like a bumblebee." Here Bolan appears to be collapsing perceptual and linguistic distinctions between phenomena in hopes of moving toward a mystic, quasi-Vedantic state. The bumblebee, then, can indeed be the cosmic sea, when one lets go and proceeds "to slide." As Bolan attests, "And when I'm sad/I slide ." This song, then, is a sonic replication of a psychological and/or religious state. It's an invitation for the listener to slide all the while. Drugs likely were and are implicated in conceptualizing and realizing this state of "The Slider." Knowing Bolan, the main suspect here is cocaine.

With "Baby Boomerang," T. Rex hearkens back to the jaunty, infectious pop stylings of Electric Warrior. Bolan slows things down again with "Spaceball Ricochet," an ode to various instruments integral to the speaker’s self-expression: the titular space-themed game (possibly a pinball variation), a Les Paul guitar, and books—many books. The bibliomania broached here is just one among several writing and reading references on The Slider, as these activities are obviously crucial tools for perpetrating creative escapes. These elements have also paid more ethereal cognitive dividends for the song’s speaker. Calling back to "The Slider," Bolan proclaims early on that he now “understand[s] the wind/And all the things/That make the children cry." His interiority is fast progressing. 

"Buick Mackane" marks another milestone track on The Slider. Is it about a girl or a car? It may very well be both. Certainly, sexual opportunities and car ownership are closely imbricated, at least in the 20th-century English-speaking world, and Bolan is well aware of this inevitability. Sexualization of automobiles figured into several prior T. Rex tracks, including “Bang a Gong (Get it on)”: “Well you're built like a car/You've got a hubcap diamond star halo.” With “Buick Mackane,” the girl and the car have become virtually indistinguishable, once again dissolving a perceptual boundary and speaking to an underlying monistic substrate. By now, Bolan's mysticism has taken on sexual valences. As conceptually complex as "Buick Mackane" may be, its musical arrangement is one of the finest on the album, with authoritative, clangoring guitar work that gives away to grooves at its close. This vamp involves a multilayered wall of sound, culminating in an orchestral jam session that is itself semi-numinous. Evidently, "Buick Mackane" inspired Guns N Roses, as a cover thereof found its way onto The Spaghetti Incident?, in this case as part of a song suite with "Big Dumb Sex" by Soundgarden. The explicit Soundgarden vamp—"I wanna fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you, fuck you" serves to accentuate the sexual undertones of Bolan's original composition.

"Telegram Sam" served as the initial single from The Slider. It's upbeat, the guitar hook highly reminiscent of "Bang a Gong (Get it On)." The lyrics deal with some curious characters, including not just the titular man but also one "Jungle-Face Jake" and a "Golden Nose Slim." Judging by their names, these individuals don't sound like personages one would want to meet. Despite his relatively upstanding name, Telegram Sam is hardly any better. He is, in actuality, T. Rex's manager, Tony Secunda, and Bolan labels him as his "main man," in that Secunda was their primary drug supplier. Undeniably, there would be no "Slider" without the efforts of "Telegram Sam."

"Rabbit Fighter" aspires toward some amazing scope early on before making an involution into bluesy rock throughout its verses. But in the end, Bolan telescopes back out to re-acquire that grandiose sound. For "Baby Strange," Bolan strips it down all over again, getting sexual and quirky on the strength of a simple, neurotic electric-guitar riff.

The best song on The Slider is "Ballrooms of Mars." Here Bolan gets balladic, tenderly and deliberately delivering beautiful, wistful images of seduction by way of poignant maunderings. Bolan sings of how "Your diamond hands/Will be stacked with roses/And wind and cars/And people of the past." Here again Bolan collapses the permeable boundaries between people and cars and wind, the elemental aspects of the album. Bolan yells "Rock!" to inaugurate each of the masterful, siren-like guitar solos, and his one-word command is fully realized in his fretwork, which serves as an apt synecdoche for all that rock and roll can be. He even references other rockers by name, specifically John Lennon and Bob Dylan, neither of whom could hold Bolan's jock in terms of raw creativity. Of course, Bolan lacked the Dylanesque and Lennonesque attunement for mass appeal. "Ballrooms of Mars" is too capacious to make mainstream waves. Nonetheless, it's not just the highlight of the album, but a high watermark for the rock and roll genre.

With "Chariot Choogle," Bolan offers up another precarious rock anthem, with heavy guitars laid out over yet another non-conventional time signature. This song teeters on the brink of collapse all throughout its verses, but with each chorus it gives way to jubilation and upliftment, at least momentarily. After the nervous verses, the sudden build to orchestral strings gives the listener some release—some temporary deliverance. Perhaps our deliverance comes by way of Bolan’s reassurance: "You know who you are," he murmurs. All told, the trepidations of the verses feel like they've been allayed, and the song has effectively resolved itself.

The original pressing of The Slider finishes with "Main Man." Here, Bolan slows it down with a bass-heavy backing track. Spacey effects give the vocals a dreamy quality as Bolan sets into his refrain: "Are you now? Are you now?" he asks repeatedly. Bolan talks intimately to the listener, asking "Are you frog man?" and, going back to the record’s pervasive preternatural undertones, reports that "Heaven is hot, babe." By this endpoint, the writer has even brought himself into the mix: "Bolan likes to rock now," he says over and over. We've come full circle, for here, it seems, is our metal guru speaking to us from outside the surrealistic prisms that have veiled him throughout the album. Bolan goes on to sing about laughing in childhood and crying as an adult, and then reflects on his sanity. This is not at all out of place on this album. As he approaches the end, Bolan has moved toward casting doubt on the status of "Telegram Sam" as the true "main man." Bolan, it seems, is the only viable main man left, and such a conclusion is not out of character, as Mark Bolan was reputedly a narcissist of the highest order. Of course, some narcissists truly earn the right to be as self-involved as they are, embodying in full the undisputed main man or main woman, and Bolan is one such person.

Future reissues of The Slider provided further additions to the initial thirteen songs, none of which take away from the original arrangement. The track "Cadillac" brings back the car motif, benefitting from another sturdy rock riff that is augmented by the liberal use of maracas. "Thunderwing" also rocks, ornamented by nursery-rhyme lyrics. "Lady" makes for an even better finish to this record than "Main Man," arguably. In offering up a dreamy appreciation of Lady Luck via some country-fried rock and some of Bill Legend's finest drumming, T. Rex takes it home with a smooth groove, delivering us into a space much less manic than that in which we began. "Lady" also makes for a satisfying conceptual capstone, for in this alternative conclusion, Bolan simply gives his pain to Lady Luck—whether or not everything’s all derived from one essence in the end, from day to day she's our main woman.

In sum, The Slider helps the listener toward realization of a psychologically and mystically complex umwelt. Bolan's writing covers a lot of conceptual territory in just 53 minutes, making for a jamboree of strangeness that inevitably complexifies the interiority of the auditor, just as it has for the composer. The Slider embodies a weirdness that transcends era. It's less a rock album than an extended meditation with delightful psychoactive effects. And yet much of The Slider hinges upon building a song around a simple riff and then giving way to an orchestral chorus and/or an orchestral vamp at the end. It's an effective formula, but the album is in no way formulaic. Indeed, it's verily mantraic in its commitment to repetition. This is rock and roll as high-end abstract art, and Bolan is a Warhol whose oeuvre is comparably much easier to take. Yet The Slider's many confounding, oceanic elements are mollified by the fact that it rocks well. If Electric Warrior is stellar, then The Slider is nothing short of cosmic. 

NFR - Lana Del Rey

To this point, the songs constituting the Lana Del Rey oeuvre can be divided into two major categories: the “bangers” and the “stinkers” (as well as third category of unremarkable songs in between). The “bangers” are the signature hits: “Summertime Sadness,” “Cola,” “West Coast,” “High by the Beach,” and the list goes on and on. The “stinkers” are the songs that didn’t work, and they are much less frequent.

Del Rey’s previous record, Lust for Life, had a few true bangers, including “Love" and "White Mustang,” but it also had more than a few stinkers (viz. anything with A$AP Rocky or Shaun Lennon in it). Moreover, Lust for Life was marred by a lawsuit that deemed the song “Get Free” had plagiarized Radiohead’s “Creep.” The plagiarism is debatable; the real travesty of justice is how lifeless British tripe like Radiohead remains relevant.

Del Rey’s latest offering, titled NFR (or Norman Fucking Rockwell in full) is something of a bounce-back record. Or perhaps it is a finale. The songs are darker and longer, the lyrics elegiac and rambling. This is not a negative, however. While there are no real bangers on the album, there aren’t really any stinkers either. The album is eminently listenable from start to finish, even if it isn't built around patent singles. There certainly are some standouts on this album, perhaps most notably "Venice Bitch," a 9-plus minute track premised on a pun paralleling that of LMFAO’s 2008 offering “I’m in Miami Bitch” (although in a considerably maturated iteration). Nonetheless, the album is best appreciated as a single, cohesive whole. Its rambling verses are integral to the artistry, as they read like poetry. 

Quite fittingly, given the nature of the lyrical compositions, there are several Sylvia Plath references. Often, Del Rey speaks in finalizing terms. “The culture is lit, I guess this is it, and I had a ball/I guess that I’m burned out after all,” she offers on “The Greatest,” a resigned, poignant, but ultimately self-satisfied eleventh track that could have aptly closed the album.

Will this be Lana Del Rey's last kick at the Pepsi Cola can? Probably—hopefully—not. This haunting, wandering album leaves us wanting more. It doesn’t feel like an ending, exactly, but rather like the ushering in of a new dispensation—a Lana Del Rey who has fully evolved out of her poppy past, and is now in full-on poet mode, very much like the bearded, pot-bellied Jim Morrison who lends his voice to An American Prayer. With Del Rey, it seems as if it is not going to be about “bangers” and “stinkers” anymore. It’s going to be about poetry and melody over protracted instrumentation.

If it wasn’t obvious before, it's clear in listening to NFR that, apart from her trademark murdered ennui, there is now a palpable frustration in Lana Del Rey. Perhaps she’s feeling a futilitarian exasperation from a career of being variously characterized as a plagiarist, an anti-feminist, and an oversexed Lolita, among other things, when she is not really any of these. Perhaps contemporary critics got so singularly fixated on “getting” and subsequently labelling Lana Del Rey that they missed that she is ineludibly so much more—a poetess of vision so profoundly abysmal that it’s almost ineffable. Had the aesthetics of the era not been so obsessed with commercial popularity and political correctness, Lana Del Rey would be the Cobain or Morrison of her time; instead, incorrigibly poppy divas like Lady Gaga or Beyoncé inexorably occupy those stations. As such, Del Rey has been consigned—or has consigned herself—to the role of a Sylvia Plath: overwrought and underappreciated.

Sylvia Plath deserved a better ending, and so too does Lana Del Rey. Hopefully she will get the appreciative finale that she deserves, but not for decades.