ABSTRACT
The Beastie Boys were the breakthrough 'white' rap group. One of author's interests is to think through how the Beasties, young middle-class Jews, took on a role typical of Jewish entertainers in the United States for almost a century, that of mediating between African-American music and a white audience. Def Jam's Jewishness made it an ideal platform for the Beasties with their ambiguous relation to whiteness. While the Beastie Boys mastered a black musical form, they did not perform it in a version of blackface. At the core of the perception of racism was the 'blackface' imitation of an African-American accent. The Beasties' whiteface could almost be for real. The Dictators, like the Beastie Boys a generation later, were discursively constructed as white, but remained Jews. Thus, the Beasties' music, most obviously '(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)', could be read either literally or as a humorous parody of white male teen behaviour.
