The Montage of Hip-Hop

Rick Rubin, legendary music producer and noted meditator, talks with the Beastie Boys on a recent episode of the Broken Record Podcast. He was with them at the beginning of their career but they hadn’t spoken in 20 years. Towards the end of the episode they talk about how when they were all recording Licensed To Ill together, they filled it with the little words and phrases they heard that meant almost nothing but cracked them all up. “Brass Monkey” for example.

This reminded me of the in-jokes and nonsense phrases I’ve shared for decades with my high school friends. At this point they’re only funny because they were funny when I was a teenager. Pita burger, for example.

Rick Rubin describes all of this and more as “the beauty of the montage of hip-hop, recontextualizing things you find in the world.” This isn’t the first time I’m sure that someone has described hip-hop as montage but I’d always thought of it in terms of samples, not the language. I had heard the ephemeral language, the puns, the crass jokes but never thought of it as the palimpsest of everyday life. Now I hear it and and it creates a link in my mind from hip-hop to so much more, including David Letterman’s obsession with the sounds of phrases and with the poetry of John Ashbery.

The interview with the Beastie Boys: https://brokenrecordpodcast.com/episode-51-beastie-boys-and-spike-jonze/