Sunday Music: AI And The New Agency Style

My friend’s older brother dubbed us a copy on tape, told us it was cool, and that it was fun to sing along to, so we should start learning the words. We all knew “Fight for your Right” from MTV, and how that was a great jukebox/school dance singalong of an excuse to get rowdy. But the whole tape, it was a portal, and one of many building blocks that shaped my mid-90’s obsession with the mid-80’s burgeoning hip-hop scene.

There’s something about that first phase of hip-hop I keep coming back to when I think about AI. New tools, new sounds, new styles. New art, new culture. New rules - to be made and broken. Let me try to explain one corner of the connection to you and why I think it matters, inspired by a series of Seth Godin posts and me playing Beastie Boys to my nephews in the car recently.

“And on the cool check-in, center-stage on the mic / and we puttin’ it on WAX / It’s the newwwww styyyle”

In 1986, three New York City kids did what teenage best friends do best: they made each other laugh. Now, the trick - and it’s a timeless trick, to getting your friends to laugh - is you have to do this mix of surprising them AND calling back to other shared somethings.

You’ve got to hold it up, or, “hold it now,” and then - “hit it.”

It’s a game of constant pattern making and pattern breaking. One of the best part about the Beastie Boys’ lyrics, which make no mistake, there’s not a lot of poetry here, is reading it like learning a group of friends’ inside jokes to each other, and nothing more. I’m not trying to dismiss them as rappers or thinkers in any way, I’m just saying, they all wrote for an audience of 3, and no more, and it shows (and it’s honestly pretty amazing).

When you learn the lyrics, you’re part of the inside joke. It’s as simple as that. And, if you learn them with your friends, you have a meta-layer of inside jokes to build new stories on.

Get a friend (or a kid) and just experience this together for a moment:

“I got franks and pork and beans / Always bust the new routines / I get it, I got it, I know it’s good / The rhymes I write, you wish you would”

“October 31st, that is my date of birth / I got to the party, you know what I did? The Smurf!”

“Some voices got treble / some voices got bass / We got the kind of voices that are IN YOUR FACE”

“The New Style” is half their distinct version of a Run-DMC routine (which even houses a contemporary “Peter Piper” sample, not to mention, the two groups were all friends), and then half (a non-local!) sample/collaging rhythms mixed into the cracks between a super-charged drum machine loop (which, I tell the drum machine story here, but we should also shoutout Indianapolis legends Funk, Inc and D.C. legends Troublefunk - video links below).

I crammed way too much into that paragraph to prove how 3 goofy kids making each other laugh immediately turned into a multi-person experience when you add all those bands and, oh yeah, Rick Rubin who co-produced it with them, to the mix.

Friends sampling jokes from walking down the streets. Friends sampling songs and drum sounds. Friends mashing them all together as audio collages of, well, friendship, that other friends take and run with too.

It’s that style of exponential scaling - ever expanding circles of friends sharing a source experience - that I can’t not think about it when I hear the Beastie Boys.

And, I especially can’t help but think about it when I read a quote like this in my inbox the other morning from Seth Godin on the cultural movement underway in 2025 (my emphasis added)

Seth wrote this post on the heels of another, called “Agency and contribution” where he argued that:

1. Skill is always a choice (you practice to get good, which is related to but not the same as talent),

2. Responsibility is a privilege we must take (nobody entirely gives it to us, we have to accept/seize what it means for it to count), and

3. The benefit of the doubt creates connection (goodwill towards others, aka infinite games, aka learning how to repair connections keeps the world from falling apart).

I’m inclined to agree with where he lands these thoughts too, “Agency is our recognition of all three of these ideas, in one.”

But then, what’s an AI Agent and what’s it got to do with human agency, let alone creativity?

It’s like a sampler. Or, without making it overly complex, it’s like a drum machine.

A drum machine is not a drummer, but it’ll tell you how a drummer works. It’ll break apart the component parts and give you new ways to combine them. And part of the beauty of the tool is, you don’t even have to be a drummer. Playing with it will reveal that truth to you. And if you start to practice drumming or even drummer appreciation, the things you can start to do…

The Beastie Boys in 1986 are my mental model for what I want to do with AI today.

The Beastie Boys in 1986 are my mental model for what I want us all to remember matters in a world of emergent AI like we’re dealing with today.

The new tools reveal to us how creativity works. Cool(er) people are passing us dubbed copies of information in more formats than cassettes, thanks to the internet. All the quickly evolving revelations can’t erase one core truth:

You better be doing this with and for your friends.

The ones who want to practice with you. The ones who take responsibility for your friendship. The ones who give you the benefit of the doubt.

We have AI Agents and we have human agency. Have some fun. Make your friends laugh.

And teach some kids to learn a new lingo, you can still build on top of this, it’s as evergreen as Godin’s insights:

“Walkin’ down the block with the fresh fly threads / Beastie Boys fly the biggest heads”

And, one of my favorite stories ever, the $250 drum machine that changed music history:

Killer sample sources:

I mentioned it, might as well drop it in:

And the ultimate 3 brothers song (coming from the oldest of 3 brothers, who is currently plotting to teach it to my 3 nephew brothers):