Before “Professor Booty” really begins, the Beastie Boys take us somewhere else. Not to G-Son Studios or even to 1992.
They take us back roughly a decade, to the streets of New York City captured in Wild Style—Charlie Ahearn’s extraordinary 1983 film about the still-forming culture of hip-hop.
We hear a group of guys arguing about a woman, graffiti writers and murals. One character finally delivers the punch line:
“I’d paint three of those murals for some of that ass.”
Then “Professor Booty” takes off.
It is funny, crude and completely in character for the Beastie Boys. But the sample is more interesting than the joke.
Because Wild Style was not merely some old movie the Beasties happened to sample. It was one of the foundational visual documents of New York hip-hop culture. The Museum of Modern Art calls it a “touchstone for hip-hop cinema,” noting that the film moves through hip hop’s artforms–graffiti writing, breaking, MCing and DJing–with actual pioneers of those scenes appearing on camera.
So before the Beasties deliver a single rhyme on “Professor Booty,” they have already told you something about where they believe their music comes from.
What Is Actually Happening in the Wild Style Scene?
The sample comes from an early scene involving Raymond “Zoro,” played by legendary graffiti writer Lee Quiñones.
Zoro is an underground writer—someone whose identity and reputation have been built largely through painting trains. His girlfriend Rose, played by Lady Pink, is also a graffiti artist, but she and her associates are moving in a somewhat different direction. They are painting murals and beginning to explore the possibility that graffiti might become legitimate work rather than something performed furtively on subway cars.
That difference matters.
Outside Connie’s Superette in the Bronx, Zoro encounters Chico. Their conversation becomes a mixture of graffiti gossip, sexual taunting and neighborhood trash talk. Chico needles Zoro about Rose associating with other graffiti writers and jokes about what he would be willing to paint to receive similar attention from her. The Beasties lift a portion of that conversation almost intact for the opening of “Professor Booty.”
On the surface, it is simply guys talking trash. Within Wild Style, however, the scene also sits inside a much larger argument running through the movie: What happens when an underground culture starts becoming visible?
Zoro represents one version of graffiti—the anonymous writer, the train yard, the illicit piece traveling through the city.
Rose and the other writers are beginning to see murals, galleries and paying jobs as another possible path.
The argument is not presented as an academic debate. It arrives as jealousy, jokes, competition and neighborhood conversation.
That is one reason Wild Style feels so valuable today. Ideas that would eventually become major questions about hip-hop—authenticity, commercialization, ownership, legitimacy—appear while the culture is still figuring them out.
So What Exactly Is a Mural?
A mural, in the simplest sense, is artwork painted directly onto a large wall or architectural surface. But in the world depicted by Wild Style, the distinction between a mural and other forms of graffiti carried additional meaning.
A graffiti writer might begin with a tag—a stylized signature or name. Writers developed more elaborate lettering, throw-ups and large “pieces,” particularly on subway cars. Reputation depended partly on style, originality, skill and how widely a writer’s name could be seen.
A mural could take that same visual vocabulary—bright colors, outlines, exaggerated lettering, characters and enormous scale—and move it onto a wall where the work might be commissioned, permitted and expected to remain.
That was a significant change. Instead of sneaking into a train yard, an artist might be standing on scaffolding painting in daylight. Instead of risking arrest to make a name visible throughout New York, an artist could theoretically be paid to transform a neighborhood wall.
The Connie’s Superette scene was itself connected to precisely this environment: Ahearn later recalled that graffiti artist Crash had painted a mural for the store, helping inspire material used in the film.
The mural therefore is not just scenery in Wild Style. It represents a crossroads.
Graffiti Wasn’t Standing Beside Hip-Hop. It Was Part of Hip-Hop.
This is an important point for people encountering early hip-hop history backwards through modern rap. Today, someone might think of graffiti artists, rappers, DJs and breakdancers as people participating in four separate artistic scenes. In early New York hip-hop culture, those worlds frequently overlapped.
The Smithsonian identifies four traditional central elements of hip-hop: DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti writing. That relationship was visible in the actual New York scene.
The Museum of the City of New York describes the 1981 “Beyond Words” event at the Mudd Club, for example, as bringing graffiti art together with performances by Afrika Bambaataa, the Cold Crush Brothers and the Fantastic Five. Fab 5 Freddy was particularly important in connecting uptown graffiti and hip-hop culture with the downtown Manhattan art world.
And Wild Style puts all of those people in essentially the same cinematic universe. There are graffiti writers Lee Quiñones and Lady Pink. There is the Rock Steady Crew. There is Grandmaster Flash. There are the Cold Crush Brothers. There is Fab 5 Freddy.
These were not actors hired years later to recreate what early hip-hop looked like. They were participants.
That is what gives Wild Style its strange power. It is a fictional movie that periodically starts feeling like documentary footage because so much of what appears on screen was actually happening around the filmmakers.
Wild Style Could Only Have Come From New York
That makes the Beasties’ choice particularly appropriate.Wild Style isn’t simply a movie about hip-hop. It is intensely about New York hip-hop.
The movie was shot around the South Bronx, Lower East Side and subway system, using the physical city as part of the story. Its landscape is not a generic urban backdrop. Subway yards, neighborhood storefronts, vacant spaces, walls and parks are essential to the culture the film records.
The New York of Wild Style also existed during a remarkably narrow historical window. Hip-hop was established enough to have developed its own stars, techniques, rivalries and aesthetic codes, but it had not yet become a global commercial industry.
Graffiti writers were beginning to enter galleries. MCs were beginning to make records. Breakers were beginning to attract attention outside their neighborhoods.
Downtown Manhattan was beginning to discover what had been happening uptown. The doors were opening. But the culture hadn’t completely walked through them yet.
Wild Style caught that moment.
And Then the Beastie Boys Sampled It
Which makes the opening of “Professor Booty” feel different once you know what you’re hearing.
The Beastie Boys weren’t simply sampling an amusing line from a movie.
They were sampling a piece of hip-hop’s memory.
And they were doing it on Check Your Head, an album that was itself fascinated with origins: old funk records, obscure breaks, live instruments, analog equipment, cheap microphones, punk, hardcore, dub, soul and the sounds that had shaped them before commercial expectations hardened around what a Beastie Boys record was supposed to be.
That makes Wild Style almost perfectly suited to the album.
Both works celebrate people figuring things out themselves.
Build your own sound.
Paint your own wall.
Invent your own style.
Find an abandoned or inexpensive space and turn it into something.
Don’t wait for an established industry to tell you what the rules are.
There is another wonderfully Beastie-like element to the choice, too. They do not begin “Professor Booty” with some grand historical pronouncement about hip-hop culture. They begin it with three guys talking filthy nonsense about graffiti murals.
That is far more their style.
The history lesson is hidden inside the joke.
From a Bronx Wall to G-Son Studios
There is something almost perfect about the journey of those few seconds of dialogue. A conversation filmed on a New York street in the early 1980s becomes part of a record made in Los Angeles roughly a decade later by three New Yorkers attempting to reinvent themselves.
The Beastie Boys had traveled a long distance from the New York they grew up in. But at the beginning of “Professor Booty,” they open a tiny audio portal back to it.
A graffiti writer.
A neighborhood store.
A mural.
Some ridiculous trash talk.
And behind all of it, the world in which hip-hop’s writers, DJs, MCs and b-boys were still close enough to one another that a movie could capture all four without needing to explain why they belonged together.
For anyone who hears only a funny movie sample at the beginning of “Professor Booty,” it lasts a few seconds. For anyone who knows Wild Style, those few seconds contain an entire city.
And a large part of the history that made the Beastie Boys possible.
