Caught up in the Frenzy

I remember years ago in high school, my church small group leader told me to read the liner notes for "Fight For Your Right" on the Beastie Boys' The Sounds of Science anthology. I did and I was kind of blown away by it. As the years went by I realized just how true of an observation it was. I guess Nietzsche said something very similar along the same lines, but I'm a much bigger fan of hip-hop than I am of unstable, German philosophers. So I think I'll stick with what I've got.

Anyways, here's the excerpt:

We thought that a history of the band would be incomplete without this song. Because, oddly enough, I think that it is still the work we are most well known for. The reason I say oddly is because, by my recollection, it was a joke that went too far.

. . . It began in clubs. We were drinking Budweiser on stage and playign the role of these snotty kids. No one expected us to act that way so it seemed really funny.

But as the record began to explode, things changed. People did begin to expect us to act that way. . . We found ourselves playing in the same arenas that we'd opened for Madonna and RUN-DMC in. But now they were filled with a new fan base, frat kids. I remember looking out at concerts and seeing these huge drunken football jocks pushing their way up to the front and screaming the lyrics to our songs, and thinking "What the hell is going on here?"

But it was too late to turn in any other direction; we were caught up in the frenzy. The shows were sold out. It seemed like there was nothing to do but keep coming out on stage every night drinking beer and playing the role. The strangest part about it was that after a short time I think we actually became just what it was we'd set out to make fun of. By drinking so much beer and acting like sexist macho jerks we actually became just that.

So I guess that the story might have a couple of possible morals. One might be, "Be careful of what you make fun of or you might become it." But the other one, the one that I like is, "All of the sexist macho jerks in the world are just pretending cause they're caught in a rut, and maybe, at some point in the future, when all the planets line up in a certain way, they'll all just snap out of it."

Reading this now, year later, I'm struck by a few things. The first is that the line about becoming what you make fun of is just as true then as it is now. More true, I think. Maybe its the state of our culture or maybe it's that I just know a wider array of people, but I know these kinds of people intimately. It's a lesson that's stuck with me forever and that's because I keep being reminded of it, sometimes even by myself.

The second is that I never remembered what the second moral from the passage was. And now that I think on it, I think that's the one I like, too.

I'm also struck by the fact that the single clearest and most practical lesson I learned from my years in church was from the Beastie Boys.