Sabotage, in Deed and in Song

• In Event: Democracy, Race, Education, Resistance (Virtual Session)

Abstract

In 1994, three Jewish guys from New York City released their fourth album. It was a reinvention of sorts, their fourth reinvention. This paper takes up the challenge of theorizing the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” the first single on their 1994 album Ill Communication through the lenses of race, reinvention, and anti-work politics including the quotidian forms of resistance that fit the label of sabotage, especially and including the practical and/or inside joke which the Beastie Boys themselves were quite famous for. These questions will be explored through the music that inspired the Beastie Boys and the music they inspired – dub, alternative, punk, and hip hop – alongside the anti-work writings of Kathi Weeks, Ulrich Beck’s work on reflexive modernism, and the cultural political thought of Joshua Clover and Sianne Ngai.

Author

• Scott Benjamin Ritner, University of Colorado, Boulder