Music for Desks: "Prep School Bouillabaisse" by Sanibel Chai
I attended a prep school that valued tradition above all else. I studied Conrad, Hardy, and Kipling, learned Ancient Greek and Latin. As a teenager, I loved feeling like I was part of a rarefied intellectual in-group. But while this curriculum made for a wonderful education, it also saddled me with the idea that there was such a thing as capital “C” culture. This made art seem like something to be venerated but not touched, a roped-off, ornate hall that shushes all voices. I needed art that subverted this image.
I came to the Beastie Boys because I had heard my peers talking about them, and I believed talked-about things were things worth knowing. My personal mission was to learn a little bit about everything I heard referenced, and to have at the ready my own opinion on each topic. The Beastie Boys joined a queue already populated by St. Augustine, Anaïs Nin, Hart Crane, Nas, and other greats I’d heard of and decided to track down. Each was a single coin of cultural currency in the wealth of knowledge I craved.
I downloaded To The Five Boroughs from the school library, and acquired all of the Beastie Boys’ other albums soon after. Breadth as an end in itself suddenly seemed vapid. Here were three Jewish teenagers who formed a punk band in New York City, pivoted to hip-hop, and then integrated their punk roots back into their art. They all played instruments. They all rapped. They were funny, self-referential, crude. Nothing seemed to be outside of their purview. That I couldn’t explicate this music in the way I was being trained to interpret literature was a big part of the appeal. I was falling in love with sounds I didn’t understand.
The album that spoke to me most was music history landmark Paul’s Boutique. By layering samples in an innovative way (the Beasties say De La Soul beat them to it), they created a collision of styles. The result is complex without being dense, clever without being try-hard. Paul’s Boutique may be a rap album, but its sounds and techniques are borrowed from funk, disco, jazz, dub reggae, and everything in between. “Shake Your Rump” is a good snapshot of the album’s omnivorous nature. Like fries dipped into a Wendy’s frosty, it shouldn’t work, but does. It includes samples from roughly fourteen separate songs. It’s noisy, the type of song you’d expect to be blaring from a teenager’s car, and obnoxious, with lyrics like “Got arrested at the Mardi Gras for jumping on a float,” but these traits somehow combine into an undeniable sophistication. The listening experience is multisensory. If I could hold the song in my hands, it’d be a hoberman sphere: constantly contracting and expanding.
You know how friends always bandy about far-fetched ideas? We should drop out of school, move to Cabo, and open a bar. We should buy a warehouse, build a skatepark, and make it free for kids. Paul’s Boutique is that energy converted into music form. What if we made a song about Humpty Dumpty over the bass line of “Superfly?” Given the album’s audacity, it’s no coincidence that around the time I discovered Paul’s Boutique, I became a writer.
Deep into my twenties, Paul’s Boutique is still the album I listen to most. It has also become the soundtrack to the prep school novel I’m writing. There’s no obvious connection between my fiction and the Beastie Boys. It’s not that literal of an influence. You wouldn’t read my pages and think, This person was listening to “Hey Ladies.” If I adopted their style, transliterated it to prose, and called it my own, I wouldn’t have learned the lesson they were teaching me.
My prep school upbringing creeps into and threatens to overwhelm my writing frequently. I’m forever in danger of pretention. I can’t resist a classical allusion. I wantonly wedge SAT vocabulary where it doesn’t belong. I’m often at risk of failing Norman Mailer’s turd test, which he outlines in The Spooky Art: you enter a townhouse, remove your hat, and discover a turd resting on top of your head. Can you write this scene? Or are you so prudish/proper/uptight that this scene would never make it into your writing in the first place?
The Beastie Boys don’t just pass the turd test—they are the turd test. I listen to Paul’s Boutique when I write because it chips away at my instinct to self-censor and minimizes my fear of being inscrutable. When you hear a song like “Shadrach,” it’s clear that there was no attention paid to whether anyone would “get” it. One verse refers to Mario Andretti, Alfred E. Neuman, and Jerry Falwell—on top of the song’s primary conceit, which references characters from the Book of Daniel. The first twenty times I heard “Shadrach,” I had no idea who or what was being discussed, but that didn’t impede my enjoyment of it. Songs like this remind me that preciousness inhibits. They say not just, “Ignore the critics and their rules,” but “The rules are an illusion.” They say, “Go ahead and mix Mad Magazine with the Bible. You could end up with a masterpiece.”
It’s not just about following your instincts or mixing what doesn’t seem to match. It’s about mindset, about avoiding worshipping (and mimicking) the Great Art you’ve imbibed. In Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Tristan Tzara says, “It’s too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple-minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and necessity of being an artist!” The Beastie Boys answered this call to action. They didn’t set out to destroy. Destruction was a byproduct of their indifference to high-mindedness in art. They brought down the temple simply by refusing to acknowledge its sanctity.
Nowhere is it written that prep school novels must look or sound alike. A Separate Peace is a very different story from Sweet Days of Discipline, and neither resembles Old School. Despite their plot differences, though, many prep school novels do tend to use a formal tone that aligns with the supposed formality of their settings. I try to avoid these stylistic conventions myself, so that they don’t short-circuit my ability to describe my own experience truthfully. For example, people think of prep schools as clean—all dress codes and well-kept grounds and spartan dorm rooms—but prep schools are disgusting pressure cookers of hormones and social anxiety. Freshman lice outbreaks, abused basement sofas covered in stains, crimes against enemies’ toothbrushes as imaginative as they are foul. To access such grossness requires a willingness to be indelicate. And what better teacher than the group that wrote fine lyrics like Because you're pud-slapping, ball-flapping, got that juice?
I want to override the gag reflex that prep school novels often yield to, in order to show a side of something that hasn’t yet been explored. This is the important distinction that the Beastie Boys embody. It’s not rule-breaking for the sake of rule-breaking. It’s rule-breaking because you have something new to say and must create your own language to express it. When I write, I want to exercise my freedom to be alienating and repellent—to be so un-self-conscious that I ace the turd test. The Beastie Boys put me in a mode where I can override my impulse to comply with Standards and Good Taste, so that I can say more and, ultimately, mean more.
Sanibel Chai lives in Manhattan. When she's not working on her prep school novel, she writes for Hot New Hip Hop and tutors Latin.
