The Beastie Boys’ 1998 album Hello Nasty was a sprawling heap of beautiful, genre-shifting nonsense that garnered the group two Grammy awards. Then, the world, both in music and at large, went into a mania-inducing string of tizzies, from the Columbine shooting, to the emergence of Eminem, to the propagation of file sharing, to Woodstock … Continue reading “The Beastie Boys’ ‘An Open Letter to NYC’: A Song Admirable Simply for the Obvious Extent to Which it Could Have Been Cheesy”