The Skills to Pay the Bills: Book Review

The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys
by Alan Light

You know, for years I would sit around and wonder which was Bono's favorite rap group. Come to find out, it's the Beastie Boys, though I wonder if he actually likes their music, of if he's just a big fan of their principled stand against rape, which is wrong.

Indeed who would've guessed that the trio of prematurely old-looking Jewish rappers would go from spraying beer on go-go dancers in a cage and rappin' in front of a huge, inflatable phallus to attempting to free Tibet through the power of rock all in the space of about 10 years?

No Luther Vandross' corpse.

Alan Light's the Skill to Pay the Bills follows the rise of the Beastie Boys from their days as a shitty high school punk band with a girl drummer to the height of their fame during the Licensed to Ill era all the way up to their current status as shitty, aging protest rappers.

It's sort of unconvential in that it's made up entirely of quotes from over twenty interviews in Vibe, Spin, and Rolling Stone magazine. They're pieced together in chronological order, and it actually ends up reading like one of those specials on VH1, like Driven or Behind the Music.

You get to hear from pretty much everyone, including the three Beastie Boys themselves, the chick drummer they kicked out early on and a few of their other bag handlers, Def Jam cats like Russell "Angel Dust" Simmons and Lyor Cohen, as well celebrities like Bono and Madonna.

More so than anything else, this book is an amazing feat of packaging. It spans about 200 pages, but I'm sure on a large enough sheet of paper, you could fit it on like five. I'm pretty sure some of the shittier stories in the New York Times Magazine have actually taken longer to read.

If you're pretty familiar with the Beastie Boys and their oeuvre, it could very well be the case that there isn't anything for you to learn here, but younger kids could probably learn quite a bit. And they should, since there aren't any groups around today that are particularly worth reading about.

Think about it.