The Beastie Boys & A Theory

First, one of my favorite Beastie Boys tunes, and one of my all-time favorite videos:

I wasn’t blogging last week when MCA (a/k/a Adam Yauch) passed away, and I don’t think I would have said much about him had I been: The Beastie Boys were never a big influence for me, and despite being a teen in the early 90s, I wasn’t their target demographic. Something about how I didn’t think, at least at the time, that anyone needed to fight, as such, for their right to party. (That and I did, and still do, find a lot of their early stuff to be mired in easy misogyny, but let’s not speak (too) ill of the dead.)

That said, I realized that this would be a perfect time, albeit two years late, to propound on one of my favorite paradoxes involving The Beastie Boys. That being, if they’re around in the Star Trek universe, for young Kirk to be listening to in his step-dad’s car in the latest Trek movie, how can they refer to the fictional Mr. Spock in their song “Intergalactic”? I think the lyric specifically is “like a pinch on the neck from Mr. Spock.”

And the answer actually came to me pretty quickly, because in Star Trek IV, Spock is referred to by name in public and… knocks out some annoying punk, to applause, on a city bus with a pinch on the neck. And then it kind of writes itself. Spock and Kirk and company aren’t aware of it, but “Mr. Spock” becomes a sort of folk hero in San Francisco in the late 80s and 90s, big enough to come to the awareness of MCA, et al., and it’s just the kind of obscure, local, subculturish thing they’d include in one of their songs.

Dumb and unnecessary, but I thought I’d share anyway and let that little bit of geekery stand in for a proper tribute to Yauch.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.