"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 Most Precious Substance on Earth

Shashi Bhat's The Most Precious Substance on Earth (McClelland & Stewart, 2021) is a picaresque coming-of-age novel that starts strongly. It chronicles the youth of a South Asian high school student from Halifax named Nina after she experiences a sexual assault. It then jumps ahead to her experience of graduate school in creative writing at Johns Hopkins (Bhat's alma mater), a section that is particularly well-crafted.

Here, Bhat's descriptions are at their most acute. Describing a graduate of the program and published author who still shows up at events, Bhat's narrator offers the following: “In profile, his hair is a tilde” (90). Then, when this famous ex-student encounters lower-ranking staff members, the narrator offers: “his eyes flit past them for someone more important to talk to” (90). In this way, Bhat encapsulates the privileged graduate student, and how it can feel to be around these sorts of people when you are not so privileged and well-connected.

With the subsequent chapters, which are less plot-driven and read more like vignettes from the narrator's life, the observations continue, but they become less insightful and more embittered. While these sorts of observations are at first familiar in literary and Seinfeld-ian terms, as the book lurches along they feel like more of a crutch. Soon, it seems as if inadequacy is the narrator's singular approach to the world. Consider some of the following examples:

After graduate school, Nina gets a job teaching high school, and in order to develop professionally, she records herself teaching. She reacts as follows “...as soon as I saw my ogre face, and my Humpty Dumpty Body, and the stretch marks on my upper arms, and my shoulders rounded like those of a cartoon vulture, I turned the video off” (155-156). The level of self-loathing is almost parodic. Later, while giving an extemporaneous speech at a Toastmasters meeting, Nina verbalizes the following to the group: “'I'm trying to remember high school Physics. But all I remember is failing'” (158). By the later stages of the book, depressive sledgehammers like these swing freely on virtually every page—sometimes there are several in short succession. And so, as the book crawls on, this style of observation makes the experience seem like you are reading not so much a novel but rather a book-length defense mechanism. Bhat's narrator manages to become self-deprecating beyond tolerable literary levels, to the point of being self-eviscerating.

This is most salient in her explorations of relationships. Of a boyfriend Nina is seeing but apparently not really into, she notes that “He is frustratingly good at sex” (199). Later, with respect to dating, she claims that “coffee dates might as well be job interviews—except you must marry the interviewer and have sex with him for the rest of your life” (224). Your present reviewer will be the first to criticize the innumerable faults of marriage, but this quip makes for a depressingly narrow vision of that institution. These sorts of wisecracks become less witty and more depressing as the book continues. At one point, Nina goes on a date with a doctor who is somewhat eager to get physical down by Halifax's waterfront. In the aftermath, she says “For weeks after, I search The Coast for news of murders” (226).

At times, it seems like it's not all doom and gloom for Nina. Soon enough, she meets a guy she describes as “the kindest person I've ever met” (231). The guy wants to commit, so much so that he deactivates his online dating profile. This prompts the following response from Nina: “I deactivate my account, too. I picture marrying him under strands of twinkle lights and white mayflowers on the roof of the Seaport Market. I know my parents would like him. But I put off answering his latest message. It goes unanswered, and so goes the next. I ghost him. I'm a ghost” (232). By this point, the reader is left to wonder if this is not just the stream-of-consciousness of someone who is unhappy, but rather that of someone who cannot be happy. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is inadequacy porn.

But the book ends strongly. In the last vignette, the narrator starts a blog and soon finds that she has a troll. Rather than ignoring him, she actually tracks him down and schedules a meet-up. This may seem improbable and heretofore unforeseeable in the narrative, but it actually makes for a very fitting conclusion. After all, the narrator has effectively been trolling herself for the entirety of the book, and now she gets to meet a living, breathing (and rather pathetic) internet troll. Finally, Nina shows some nerve and stands up for herself like an adult. Still, it's not enough to convince this reader that Nina is anything approaching a well-adjusted grown-up. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is almost like a coming-of-age novel where the principal character doesn't actually come of age. Perhaps this marks the toll of Nina's sexual assault. The reader, sort of like the narrator, ends up waiting for something to happen to mark some kind of progress, but both end up just waiting.

A few memorable vignettes might not be enough for the majority of readers. All told, The Most Precious Substance on Earth seems to suggest that a life dedicated to language and storytelling is inherently depressing and unfulfilling and incomplete. But does it have to be? I'd recommend reading Bhat's novel to answer that question for yourself. The book serves as a great litmus test for your tolerance of how many maimed, melancholy thoughts you can stomach in one reading session.  

X-Ray (1982)

If you consult a typical reviewer's take on the 1982 film X-Ray (a.k.a. Hospital Massacre), you will inevitably get a negative diagnosis. What you need, however, is a second opinion, as these reviewers are quacks. X-Ray is a well-conceived, well-executed slasher that benefits on two fronts. First, it depicts the harrowing process of dealing with hospital staff and trying to get information therefrom in accurate and Kafkaesque fashion. Secondly, it benefits from a memorable and convincing villain, a masked surgeon who absolutely massacres his victims. With his heaving breaths and medical mask-and-hood combo, the killer is simultaneously reminiscent of Kane Hodder's Jason and Mortal Kombat's Sub-Zero. But he's also something quite unique unto himself, as he hacks people to death with an unbridled fury not often seen in conventional, non-exploitation slashers. In this way, he's in contradistinction to the stereotype of the surgeon as methodical, precise, and dexterous, proceeding with a reckless abandon that makes Jason and Sub-Zero look downright surgical by comparison. Moreover, some praise is due for the female lead, Barbi Benton (pictured), whose acting sometimes gets a bum rap because she's a former Playboy Playmate. In X-Ray, she's convincing in her frustration and exasperation as both the confused patient and then the killer's prime target. That said, the scene in which a male doctor examines her while she's in the nude goes on exploitatively long and ends up being more uncomfortable than alluring. Still, this isn't enough to pull the plug on X-Ray. My diagnosis: X-Ray is a salubrious slasher that's essential to a healthy horror-fan lifestyle.

The Cult of Trump

True to its title, Stephen Hassan's 2019 book The Cult of Trump attempts to establish that Donald Trump has effectively conducted himself like a cult leader, especially during his presidential campaign and reign. While the hallmarks of cult behavior can be identified in many of Trump's methods (repetitive speaking, good vs. evil narratives, malignant narcissism) and among his followers (lack of critical thinking, trance-like states at rallies, etc.), it's hard to be completely convinced that Trump's political movement was and is tantamount to a cult like that of Scientology or the Unification Church (the latter of which Hassan defected from). At most, Trump's movement is cultish. That said, this book should not be considered a failure. In fact, its perspective is prescient. In the later stages of the book, Hassan makes reference to Jim Jones and the mass suicide at Jonestown. Very judiciously, he writes that "[i]t may seem to be a leap to mention Jonestown when writing about the cult of Trump." Perhaps it did in 2019, but since the publication of this book, we have seen the January 6th riots and the assault on the Capitol. Hassan basically predicts the final months of the Trump presidency in the second-last paragraph of the book: "If Trump runs again and is not reelected in 2020, he might claim that the election was rigged. Who knows what he might call on his followers to do in that case?" (233-234). So while Hassan may not have been entirely convincing in his argument for there being a “Cult of Trump,” he can at least be praised for his foresight.