Beastie Boys sue GoldieBlox

In a slightly glasshouse/stone-move sample-happy Beastie Boys sue the makers of a parody of their song ‘Girls’ that was made for girls-empowering toys by GoldieBlox, in a quickly gone viral video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFpe3Up9T_g
Someone suggested on twitter last night that the reason could be that the Beasties do not want any of their songs in advertising. Not sure if that’s true? That’s something in which I usually am 100% on the artist site, as you might know. But of course it’s not that simple black/white subject.

If it comes to parody or creative remix use I’m on the parodists and remixers side though. This ad is an example of how good advertisement should be: It doesn’t feel like a commercial. It’s entertaining. It sells an empowering gender-role-crashing message just as well as its product.  The whole Rube-Goldberg-machine thing is brilliant but I actually like the use of the song even more:
The original song by the Beastie Boys is plain sexist, having lines like “Girls, to do the dishes, girls, to clean up my room, girls, to do the laundry, girls, that’s all I really want” or another nice line: “I asked her out she said, ‘No way!’, I shoulda probably guessed her gay”. It’s a sweet smart move to use that kind of song and have girls – not women (that makes it an even better reply to the original, by taking up the belittling way in which women are called girls) – and have them girls snottily shouting/singing fresh girl-empowering lyrics over that song: “Girls to build the spaceship, Girls to code the new app, Girls to grow up knowing they can engineer that, Girls, that’s all we really need.”

Hope the Beasties will think this over again.

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