Last time, you may recall, we took a break from the usual hostilities to focus in on several clips that we thought merited some attention from a positive point of view—you know, the one that shows up so darned infrequently here at “Video Video” central. We promised that our usual dander would be back up in time for this month’s column, since we’d just had our first peek at the Beastie Boys’ “You’ve Got To Fight For Your Right To Party” and knew that the old grist mill would be working overtime by the time four weeks had gone by. Sure enough, the Beasties have, in that short span, cursed on prime-time TV at the Grammy Awards, de-railed Soul Train, and hit the Number One spot on the Billboard pop album charts with their double-platinum LP, Licensed To III. And the more I keep seeing them, the farther I keep getting from that bandwagon so many of my fellow critics are merrily hopping on.

“Rap’s Three Stooges” is the way People magazine recently described the Beastie Boys, but you’re going to have to call me 55 years from now and tell me if Mike D, King Ad-Rock and MCA are still popular before I’ll go along with that particular assessment. To be honest, I had little against these guys before I saw the “Fight For Your Right” video; I may not be the world’s greatest rap enthusiast, but, having liked most of what RunDMC’s done, I basically had no problems with the Beastie Boys’ Run-DMC-derived rap-metalpunk fusion, or with their headbanging “I Wanna” philosophy (i.e., “I wanna get high, I wanna get girls, I wanna go crazy”) in which they’re the rudeboy kings of their own made-up world. We all know all this rebel without a cause, don’t tell me what to do, I wanna be free stuff has been,