We need to talk about sexy Jewish punks.  Why don’t we talk about them more?

After all, this year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Ramones releasing their debut, eponymous, groundbreaking album. But of persisting American-Jewish stereotypes, one of the least-prevalent is that of the grimy, ragamuffin kid causing trouble around town.

Well, let’s call it an archetype; there are others based on fact; we remember the Bugsy Siegels, so-called “Tough Jews,” bad men who did bad things, like, ya know, murder. But too-often we forget the, well, punks, teenage boys in leather jackets who smoked cigarettes that you would never take home to mom but fooled around with under the bleachers whilst skipping class.

(I never experienced anything remotely like this, but with the Ramones it was fun, and easy, to pretend.)

But for Pete’s Sake, who do you think was hitching a ride to Rockaway Beach? It’s fairly common knowledge that two of the original Ramones were Jewish (Tommy was even the son of Holocaust survivors), but their grungy rock personas weren’t created out of thin air. They were an ethnic minority, kids or grand-kids of immigrants, living in New York City and causing trouble.

Jews didn’t stream out of the tenements and onto manicured lawns; there was often in-between. The Ramones’ Forest Hills neighborhood of their youth, for example, was heterogeneous, and even for their more well-to-do peers, it was still somewhat urban.

In “Only the Good Die Young,” Billy Joel is the scruffy Jewish kid from the wrong side of the tracks seducing the nice Catholic girl. But he’s really convinced people that he’s Italian (I hear it all-too-often), because of his time hanging with blue-collar crowds growing up on Long Island. (Remember, the Ramones had the Italian persona, too, with that stage name.)

While this reality isn’t extinct today (blue-collar or lower-class Jews are a thing, people), maybe we started to drift away from it as one wave after another rose socioeconomically. After the Ramones, we got the Beastie Boys, and while they were scruffy and petulant, too, they were a bit more winking, and they tended to hail from more privileged families than the Ramones.

Pouring through Jewcy‘s old “Jews Who Rock Wiki,” it’s really amazing how many punk or rock bands we’ve helped forge.  So why are these groups seen as anomalies, as “Hey, did you know at least one Jew participated in rock and roll?”

“Punk is Jewish,” Steven Lee Beeber says in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, “Not Judaic. Jewish, the reflection of a culture that’s three millennia old now. It reeks of humor and irony and preoccupations with Nazism. It’s all about outsiders who are ‘one of us’ in the shtetl of New York.”

So why does Jewish sex appeal today have to be of the quiet, nerdy variety, or the goofy, dorky sort? Andy Samberg’s musical career comes from the humorous juxtaposition of an awkward weirdo-persona making the music associated with being suave or tough. Lou Reed was suave enough on his own, thank you very much.

Listen, there’s nothing wrong with loving a Motel Kamzoil, but don’t forget that Perchik is there, too, and he’s bringing the revolution.

So it’s forty years since the Ramones. And for someone born only five years before they broke up, they’re undeniably retro. But my crush on these old-timey (to me) hooligans is part of my New York Jewish identity. I barely went out to anywhere but school, synagogue, and USY when I was a teenager. But it’s fun to pretend that the bad boys next door (a mixed group of Jewish and not) would sneak me out of the house for a different, equally authentic Jewish experience.

(Except for Johnny. Forget that Nazi-obsessed weirdo.)

Image via Wikimedia

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Sunday marked the second yahrzeit of the late, great Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, who died on May 4, 2012. Last year, the little park in Brooklyn Heights where he learned to ride a bike as a kid was rededicated in his honor. This year lifelong fan Frank Anselmo, creative director of advertising firm KNARF New York, orchestrated a tribute with a bit more levity: four breakdancers dressed as monks (Yauch was a Buddhist) performing on a makeshift dancefloor in the middle of Union Square:

Friday’s mini-monk-dance-mob was part of the promotion for the third annual MCA Day, which took place on Saturday. Anselmo told the New York Daily News that the robes were ordered directly from Nepal, and that a surprising number of people had asked him if the dancers were actually monks. “Of course they’re not real monks,” he clarified.

For Anselmo, who started listening to the Beastie Boys at the age of 11, the project combined his work and passion in equal parts: “They’re a New York band and I grew up with them. There are not a lot of bands you can grow with. My whole life I’ve had their music. It’s part of my DNA.”

Image: Knarf New York

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Last week, over eight million people watched a video of three cute girls singing about science and playing with a Rube Goldberg style contraption. The ad was for a start-up toy company called GoldieBlox, whose goal is “to show the world that girls deserve more choices than dolls and princesses. We believe that femininity is strong and girls will build the future — literally.” Everyone loved the video besides the Beastie Boys, who sued GoldieBlox for copyright infringement. GoldieBlox maintains that the ad is protected satire and will fight the case. Today the Beastie Boys released the following letter:

Like many of the millions of people who have seen your toy commercial “GoldieBlox, Rube Goldberg & the Beastie Boys,” we were very impressed by the creativity and the message behind your ad.
We strongly support empowering young girls, breaking down gender stereotypes and igniting a passion for technology and engineering.

As creative as it is, make no mistake, your video is an advertisement that is designed to sell a product, and long ago, we made a conscious decision not to permit our music and/or name to be used in product ads.
When we tried to simply ask how and why our song “Girls” had been used in your ad without our permission, YOU sued US.

The lyrics to their original song “Girls” has been criticized for its sexist lyrics (“Girls, to do the dishes. Girls, to clean up my room. Girls, to do the laundry”), so it’s no surprise that some of the public prefers the new version. Even if it is selling something.

Watch the ad here:

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• Rachel Shukert pays tribute to the late Marvin Hamlisch.

• Check out Russell Crowe as Noah in Darren Aranofsky’s new biblicly-inspired movie.

• NPR’s Ira Glass will take your ticket and sell you concessions if you go see his new movie.

The Beastie Boys are suing Monster Energy Drink for using their likenesses and songs in advertising campaigns.

• Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s daughter, Arabella Rose, is really cute.

• Careful, Zake! Gyllenhaal shot live ammo for his new movie, End of Watch.

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• Late Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch’s will states his image and art can’t be used for advertising.

• Katz’s Deli is the manliest sandwich shop in the United States, apparently.

• For his 65th birthday next year, Billy Crystal is writing a memoir about aging. We’d totally see the movie that it will inevitably be turned into

• Would you pay $20,000 for a one-hour photo shoot with Howard Stern? It’s for charity…

• Celebrate Dustin Hoffman’s 75th birthday (yesterday) with these laid back pictures of the actor.

• At her Moscow concert, Madonna wore a black ski mask and had the words Pussy Riot written on her back in support of the imprisoned Russian punk bank:

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• Can director Etan Cohen trick Bill Murray into signing on for Ghostbusters 3?

• We’re a little upset that Tom Cruise was only a footnote in Amy Levin’s analysis of the five tropes that plague media coverage of religion.

• Zomg, Scarlett Johansson gets paid more per movie than Angelina Jolie.

• Watch Howard Stern and Howie Mandel duke it out on America’s Got Talent over contestant Big Barry.

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• Henry Winkler is in talks to play an aging porn star in new Broadway comedy, “The Performers.”

• Did Mario Batali’s partner in NYC eateries Babbo, Del Posto, and Eataly, invent the everything bagel? If so, how do we thank him?

• Jewcy’s Margarita Korol offers some helpful ideas for a new flag for Greece’s neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn (which recently won seven percent of the vote in Greece’s national election).

• Here’s Senator Daniel Squadron introducing a resolution honoring Adam Yauch, the late Beastie Boy and activist who grew up in Squadron’s Brooklyn district:

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• Scott “Scooter” Braun, Justin Bieber’s Greenwich-bred, Emory-graduating manager, has a new gig with Universal Music Group, while little brother Adam is in the news for his non-profit, Pencils of Promise.

• SoHo’s newest tenant? A hip kosher restaurant called Jezebel.

• Real Estate website Curbed named this granny-chic, plastic-covered apartment the worst real estate listing in New York.

• Here are some kids reenacting the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” music video. They rule:

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I hear that before Twitter, nobody even cared when people died.

— Jonathan Shainin (@jonathanshainin) May 4, 2012

The past week we’ve learned of the deaths of the Beastie Boys co-founder and activist Adam Yauch and legendary children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, two widely respected public figures with generation-spanning followings. We’ve also experienced the resulting deluge of Internet tributes, broadcast most swiftly and simply through the medium of Twitter. Writing in Tablet Magazine about the late Yauch, David Samuels aptly summarizes what frequently occurs these days when a well-known person dies:

What’s the best thing about celebrity deaths? The million little masturbatory orgies they inspire under the oh-so-respectable blankets of news and analysis. When Billy Joel dies of a heart-attack-ack-ack, we’ll be on it—not because we care about the father of Alexis and ex-husband of Christie, but because we will have just been given a free pass to mourn our lost youths in Massapequa, Long Island, where we slow-danced to “Piano Man” at the prom. The phases of the competitive mourning cycle are all equally loathsome: shock at the loss of an icon, retelling of the heroic career, ironic distance to show that we are now grown-ups, etc.

During these times, it can seem like everyone in your Twitter feed is acting out this cycle at once, with all of the self-consciousness and deeply felt sorrow and homespun witticisms that can be mustered. There is a bludgeoning parade of RIPs—as if that term means anything—and quotations that will be repeated enough to empty them of any profundity.

Twitter is a funeral parlor’s side room for the cool kids. #RIPMCA

— Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) May 4, 2012

Media outlets are equally complicit, scrambling to link to all of their relevant material, assembling pages of remembrance, aggregating tweets from distraught fans and the celebrity’s longtime collaborator. The president might even issue a statement, if the celebrity is sufficiently mainstream.

In recent years, media theorists have seized on Walter J. Ong’s notion of “secondary orality,” which posits that new media reintroduces elements of oral culture similar to those found in traditional, preliterate societies. Secondary orality isn’t quite the same as exchanging news by the village well; instead, it’s “a more deliberate and self-conscious orality.” Nowhere is this more evident than on Twitter, where our speech is chatty, highly social, gossipy, ephemeral, and ironized within an inch of its life.

It’s a perfect representation of the Internet’s new tribalism, and when a celebrity dies, it’s raised to an insufferable level.

Between Yauch and Sendak, not a good week to be a Gen-Xer.

— Gal Beckerman (@galbeckerman) May 8, 2012

It makes for an all-day avalanche of mawkish sentiment and peacocking displays of authentic feeling (see: Samuels’ “competitive mourning cycle”). It reflects the worst side of what is often a great, and even useful and inspiring, medium. Not often have I found that I care what someone thinks of a dead celebrity—what Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” meant to your middle school experience or how Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are changed your childhood. Yet when a celebrity dies, we are all prompted to author our own mini-memoirs.

Much like in oral cultures, where there are no historical records except those passed down in stories, Twitter engenders a sense that if we don’t tweet it, it didn’t happen, we didn’t feel it. No one will know that we hurt, that this person mattered to us too. (And we can’t forget that too small endorphin boost that comes when our tweet, our little capsule of ego, is retweeted or favorited.) On a medium that rewards solipsism, there’s great pressure to be included in the digital shiva—at least until we return to our tweets about how much Mad Men paid for that Beatles song this week ($250k!).

One of Twitter’s flaws is that bad news is passed around with a velocity that can seem like eagerness, even if it’s actually melancholy

— Ben Greenman (@bengreenman) May 4, 2012

It’s not that I don’t care about these people, what they accomplished, or who they were (though the notion that we ever knew these celebrities as people, or had any sense of who they really were, has always seemed to be another one of the delusions driving celebrity culture). It’s that those feelings become denatured of meaning when aired in 140 characters, particularly when broadcast alongside links to articles about Bashar Assad’s latest massacre or the latest Girls think-piece. The delicate tissue of mourning, of negotiating one’s feelings about an artist or actor, deserves more time and circumspection; it should be shared in person with other human beings, somewhere where it doesn’t exist side-by-side with promoted tweets from Wal-Mart.

Of course, all this spleens amounts to little. This cycle will go on, becoming more cyclonic, more intensely confessional and, for some of us, unbearable. After all, grief is just another meme we pass around. So when the next wave of public mourning hits, I suppose it’ll be time to close the browser window and ignore the endless feed. Maybe I’ll think again about Maurice Sendak, who, in a much different context, once said, “I will be dead. I won’t give a shit.” Maybe I won’t. Either way, no one will know.

Must you ruin everything? RT @GwynethPaltrow: MCA forever.

— Lizzie O’Leary (@lizzieohreally) May 4, 2012

Jacob Silverman writes Jewcy’s ‘Culture Kvetch’ column, which runs twice a month.

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Paul’s Boutique starts off with “To All the Girls,” a slow beat, something you’d hear off a blaxploitation soundtrack. It quickly jumps into “Shake Your Rump,” the sonic equivalent of a roller coaster. A snare drum cuts in, MCA proclaims that he’ll rock a house party at the drop of the hat, that he’ll beat a body down with an aluminum bat. That little detail of aluminum makes you pay attention. The interplay between him, Ad-Roc and Mike D on the track is liquid, they flow into each other and could finish sentences if they wanted. There’s teasing, constant shout-outs to each other, and you can quickly see what Mark Richardson observed in his brilliant retrospective—that the “Beastie Boys are ultimately a celebration of friendship.” You can certainly witness that on Licensed, but it feels more mature here, like work was put into defining what that friendship means.

What made me pick up Paul’s Boutique in the first place was its back story of the Beasties fleeing New York, Def Jam, and Rick Rubin for L.A., where I happened to be living. While there, they hooked up with producers the Dust Brothers, and were able to convince them to use already-made instrumental tracks as backing rap beats. If Licensed to Ill sought to match rap with 80’s hair metal, the beats for the 1989 Paul’s Boutique feel like a blueprint for the Girl Talk remix culture that would spring up nearly two decades later. You’re never quite sure which of the 104 samples will come next, how exactly the beat will change (although this website helps). It still felt limitless, and was my first true realization of the endless scenarios and possibilities music can create.

There’s still a cockiness to Paul’s Boutique, a smarter-then-thou joking that’s a clear ancestor to Das Racist. There’s also an undeniable, inescapable horniness mixed with bravado, the same type you see on Licensed. But if that album is based around “No Sleep Til (Brooklyn),” then Paul’s is centered around “B-Boy Bouillabaisse,” a twelve-and-a-half minute suite that closes the album. For some reason, the 20th anniversary edition of the album splits each of its nine parts into different tracks, which is a shame. Taken all together, they intertwine the type of love for New York that only a self-imposed exile brings, along with their own personal growth. It starts off with a kind of gross description of a triple-team strip down of a girl, but quickly jumps into pure braggadocio and then even quicker into scenes from a cartoon-sized New York, bumping into a trigger happy Bernhard Goetz, funk parties in Jamaica, Queens, and liquor stores pushing porn magazines in seedy parts of Brooklyn. There’s nothing that you’d qualify as serious, but the twelve minutes snowball, picking up new ideas and building into “A.W.O.L,” the last segment which mimics the end of a live show. It then jumps back to the opening blaxspolation opener.

It works as a nice metaphor for their–and especially MCA’s–career. From being a partying jock in License to working towards freeing Tibet, Yauch never stopped changing and growing, letting new ideas build on top of old ones. That type of constant change is rare and special, and easily visible on Paul’s Boutique. So much so that it inspired a 17-year-old me to give License to Ill a second chance. And you know what? Flaws and all, it’s pretty damn good.

David Grossman is a writer currently living in Brooklyn. You can follow him on Twitter at @davidmeirrobot.

(photo credit: Thos Robinson/Getty Images)

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