Beastie Lyrics, under the Becky Microscope

You wake up late for school, man you don't wanna go
You ask your Ma please, but she still says no
You missed two classes and no homework
but your teacher preaches class like you're some kind of jerk

You've got to fight for your right to party

Your pop's caught you smoking and he says no way
That hypocrite smokes two packs a day.
Living at home is such a drag
Now your mom threw away your best porno mag (busted!).

You've got to fight for your right to party

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It was the battle cry of a VW-sign-stealing generation, of rebellious youths eschewing education, resisting parental repression, fighting for their right to party. The colloquial diction reflects this: it is the at times eliptical idiolect of youth and rebellion that would have parents everywhere wondering where a child of theirs learnt to speak in such a crude manner. The 'you' addressed in the lyrics invites empathy from the listener, assumes a shared set of ethical and cultural values, while the refrain calls for a collective fight against oppression of the young and advocates universal action to achieve a form of freedom. The internal rhyme of 'fight' and 'right' in the refrain show that battle and human liberty are intertwined, that one is achieved by the means of the other.

Yet the colloquial diction and the views expressed in this song can obscure the poetical structures and techniques at work here. The opening line of the song is a perfect Alexandrine, twelve syllables perfectly balanced into two hemistiches, showing the conflict of action and desire: 'You wake up late for school, man you don't wanna go'. Moreover, the opening verse employs the rhetorical device of anaphora: the repeated and insistent use of the word 'you' as the first word of the first three lines serves a variety of purposes: it insistently links the speaker's experience with that of the listener, emphasises the repetitive nature of daily conflict both in the home and the educational establishment, and looks ahead to the 'you' at the beginning of the refrain and its call for action. The use of rhyming couplets is appropriate: it is the most simple of rhyme schemes and thereby reminiscent of youth. But it is also an echo of a great literary tradition, a scheme used by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, and by Shakespeare to conclude his sonnets. Many of the lines are haunted by the iambic pentameter, but the metre is increasingly distorted until we reach the refrain line which, despite having ten syllables, defies scansion. Thus, the form of this song is haunted by structural and technical devices which are part of a great literary heritage, but the speaker subverts them, rebelling against formal constraints of poetry as much as he rebels against his parents and teachers. Moreover, the heavy stress of trochaic words such as 'classes', 'homework', and 'teacher' suggest a second voice, the use of free indirect style, which mean that his words are haunted by the persistent nagging of authority figures.

There are also echoes of something more sinister beneath the simple desire to party. The mother is linked with sex and also with rejection - she denies his plea not to go to school (and the opening allusion to waking up suggests that the plea the speaker makes is from his bed), she throws away the porno mag. The father is linked with authority but also with death: he is tyranically emphatic that the son must not follow in his footsteps by smoking, but the son already recognises him as a chain-smoking hypocrit. Thus, an Oedipal theme runs through the lyrics with the Freudian suggestion that in order to achieve full adulthood, the speaker has to kill his father and sleep with his mother. The free indirect speech telling the speaker he will be kicked out of his house if he does not cut his hair, betrays a repressed castration anxiety but also suggests that the parents are deliberately attempting to deprive him of his power, in a sinister echo of the Samson and Delilia story.

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... well, that's as far as I've got so far. Yes, as you can all probably tell, I have an essay due! Instead of writing about the Beastie Boys, what I should be doing right now is writing about Shakespearean tragedy and the Greek example. But this song came up on my ipod shuffle today, and it got me thinking. And thinking. And over-analysing. And then, as you can all see, it got me writing utter bullshit. This, dear readers, is what Cambridge does to you! It teaches the fine art of Craptical Priticism (see what I did there?) and procrastination - essential life skills, especially for people who wish to avoid writing Shakespeare essays.