dee_bee_76
06-17-2004, 05:01 PM
(Note -- Hey Khalil, it's HOROVITZ)
Beastie men
They're grown men now - been there, done that - but a new album proves there's still a bit of beast in the Beastie Boys, writes Khalil Hegarty.
Six years is a long time between albums. Few hip-hop acts could take a break for that long without being considered has-beens. Yet the Beastie Boys have done it. Their last full-length album, Hello Nasty, was released in 1998; now 2004 has rolled around, and their new album, To the 5 Boroughs, has been one of the most anticipated albums of the year. Even with a promised fix of new Beastie Boys material, the question fans have been asking of Adam Horowitz (Adrock), Adam Yauch (MCA) and Michael Diamond (Mike D) is: what have they been doing all that time?
In one interview earlier this year, Yauch liberally put forth the suggestion that the band had been kidnapped by a sasquatch, or Bigfoot, North America's mythical equivalent of the yeti.
Adam Horowitz, however, disputes the claim.
"A sasquatch can't be in New York - that's crazy," he says dismissively from downtown Manhattan. "How would that have happened? You can't believe what they say about us on the internet."
Unfortunately for Beastie Boys fans, the internet has been the only place where information on the group has been available, and even then it's been sparse. Without the constant MTV and Rolling Stone presence that hounded them in the 1990s, their fan sites have been riddled with stories of lawsuits and forthcoming album rumours for years. Add to that the folding of their record label, Grand Royal, a few years ago, and it seemed the New York-based trio were ready to throw in the towel.
But according to Horowitz, there's been many factors at work in their studio lives. The delayed completion of To the 5 Boroughs has more to do with the rare luxury of not having to finish it, rather than the pressure to get it done.
"We're in a very lucky position to be able to have our own studio," he says. "The record company lets us do what we want to do. There's no curfew. You just keep going and going until you have to put the album out. It's always difficult to finish for us. It's a basic lack of organisational skills and a lack of focus, and it's always been that way.
"Grand Royal started becoming like a business," he continues. "What started out to be something fun for us and our friends turned out to be a situation where we had people coming up to us saying things like, 'You have to pay for that, and if you don't then you'll have to do this'. It turned into a business and it wasn't really any fun, so we stopped doing it."
Indeed, where the Beastie Boys were in 1998 was nothing less than enviable. Hello Nasty reached quadruple-platinum sales and had come off the gargantuan success of 1994's Ill Communication and 1992's Check Your Head; their faces were associated not merely with the hip-hop scene, but also with the indie-rock scene; their video clips were unparalleled, launching the career of director Spike Jonze. In short, they were the epitome of cool.
But in 2004, things are different. The two things that galvanised their success in the 1990s - punk and hip-hop - have again found their way into the pop vocabulary, almost to the point of saturation. But Horowitz is nonplussed about hip-hop's new-found dominance.
"It's been huge for such a long time," he responds. "People forget about Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. It's interesting - I wouldn't have thought so 20 years ago or more than that. We wouldn't have thought punk rock would have been on Saturday morning cartoons, either."
There's a weariness in Horowitz's voice that suggests he's seen - and heard - it all before. It's not surprising, considering the band's history. They formed in 1982 on the back of punk before heading into hip-hop; they toured with Madonna in 1985 before releasing their debut album, Licensed to Ill, in 1986. Forget Eminem - they were the original white bad-boys of hip-hop, releasing their drug-laced ode to all things funky in 1989 with Paul's Boutique. Despite being 37 (Diamond is 38 and Yauch 40), Horowitz happily declares: "I don't feel like a grown-up." Still, he sounds like he's been answering the same questions: where the band have been, when they're releasing their next album, whether he likes Eminem, what he thinks of hip-hop in 2004 ...
"I don't love all of it, but there's a lot of great things happening," he says. "Rap just goes through so many phases, but the phase of hip-hop that I'm into right now is that of producers making interesting music. People right now - especially during interviews - are so concerned about how rappers are talking about money all the time, and that's the most important thing that's going on. But there's people who are just general weirdos in rap that are great. And there always are. I don't know why people discredit people like Missy or Outkast, who are just doing interesting things."
It's the maverick approach to hip-hop that garnered the Beastie Boys so much praise in the first place. Even now, in an American music industry where dissent seems to have been quashed, the trio have made a point of discrediting George W. Bush's election victory and writing An Open Letter to NYC, a thank-you note to a city that has suffered immeasurably of late. Yet the song isn't the obvious 9/11 lament people have been expecting.
"Sure, 9/11 was an awful tragedy, but in terms of changing the framework of the city, it didn't really change things," says Horowitz. "People are still living their lives and doing what they do or did. (Former New York mayor Rudolph) Giuliani was the most major thing to happen to New York in the last 50 years. Giuliani came in and arrested thousands of people for whatever reason he felt like and cleaned the city up and made it more safe. It's not that it got really bad, it's just a little nicer, which is 'nice', I guess. But the freestyle element of New York is slowly coming back."
To the 5 Boroughs is out this week on Capitol/EMI.
Beastie men
They're grown men now - been there, done that - but a new album proves there's still a bit of beast in the Beastie Boys, writes Khalil Hegarty.
Six years is a long time between albums. Few hip-hop acts could take a break for that long without being considered has-beens. Yet the Beastie Boys have done it. Their last full-length album, Hello Nasty, was released in 1998; now 2004 has rolled around, and their new album, To the 5 Boroughs, has been one of the most anticipated albums of the year. Even with a promised fix of new Beastie Boys material, the question fans have been asking of Adam Horowitz (Adrock), Adam Yauch (MCA) and Michael Diamond (Mike D) is: what have they been doing all that time?
In one interview earlier this year, Yauch liberally put forth the suggestion that the band had been kidnapped by a sasquatch, or Bigfoot, North America's mythical equivalent of the yeti.
Adam Horowitz, however, disputes the claim.
"A sasquatch can't be in New York - that's crazy," he says dismissively from downtown Manhattan. "How would that have happened? You can't believe what they say about us on the internet."
Unfortunately for Beastie Boys fans, the internet has been the only place where information on the group has been available, and even then it's been sparse. Without the constant MTV and Rolling Stone presence that hounded them in the 1990s, their fan sites have been riddled with stories of lawsuits and forthcoming album rumours for years. Add to that the folding of their record label, Grand Royal, a few years ago, and it seemed the New York-based trio were ready to throw in the towel.
But according to Horowitz, there's been many factors at work in their studio lives. The delayed completion of To the 5 Boroughs has more to do with the rare luxury of not having to finish it, rather than the pressure to get it done.
"We're in a very lucky position to be able to have our own studio," he says. "The record company lets us do what we want to do. There's no curfew. You just keep going and going until you have to put the album out. It's always difficult to finish for us. It's a basic lack of organisational skills and a lack of focus, and it's always been that way.
"Grand Royal started becoming like a business," he continues. "What started out to be something fun for us and our friends turned out to be a situation where we had people coming up to us saying things like, 'You have to pay for that, and if you don't then you'll have to do this'. It turned into a business and it wasn't really any fun, so we stopped doing it."
Indeed, where the Beastie Boys were in 1998 was nothing less than enviable. Hello Nasty reached quadruple-platinum sales and had come off the gargantuan success of 1994's Ill Communication and 1992's Check Your Head; their faces were associated not merely with the hip-hop scene, but also with the indie-rock scene; their video clips were unparalleled, launching the career of director Spike Jonze. In short, they were the epitome of cool.
But in 2004, things are different. The two things that galvanised their success in the 1990s - punk and hip-hop - have again found their way into the pop vocabulary, almost to the point of saturation. But Horowitz is nonplussed about hip-hop's new-found dominance.
"It's been huge for such a long time," he responds. "People forget about Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. It's interesting - I wouldn't have thought so 20 years ago or more than that. We wouldn't have thought punk rock would have been on Saturday morning cartoons, either."
There's a weariness in Horowitz's voice that suggests he's seen - and heard - it all before. It's not surprising, considering the band's history. They formed in 1982 on the back of punk before heading into hip-hop; they toured with Madonna in 1985 before releasing their debut album, Licensed to Ill, in 1986. Forget Eminem - they were the original white bad-boys of hip-hop, releasing their drug-laced ode to all things funky in 1989 with Paul's Boutique. Despite being 37 (Diamond is 38 and Yauch 40), Horowitz happily declares: "I don't feel like a grown-up." Still, he sounds like he's been answering the same questions: where the band have been, when they're releasing their next album, whether he likes Eminem, what he thinks of hip-hop in 2004 ...
"I don't love all of it, but there's a lot of great things happening," he says. "Rap just goes through so many phases, but the phase of hip-hop that I'm into right now is that of producers making interesting music. People right now - especially during interviews - are so concerned about how rappers are talking about money all the time, and that's the most important thing that's going on. But there's people who are just general weirdos in rap that are great. And there always are. I don't know why people discredit people like Missy or Outkast, who are just doing interesting things."
It's the maverick approach to hip-hop that garnered the Beastie Boys so much praise in the first place. Even now, in an American music industry where dissent seems to have been quashed, the trio have made a point of discrediting George W. Bush's election victory and writing An Open Letter to NYC, a thank-you note to a city that has suffered immeasurably of late. Yet the song isn't the obvious 9/11 lament people have been expecting.
"Sure, 9/11 was an awful tragedy, but in terms of changing the framework of the city, it didn't really change things," says Horowitz. "People are still living their lives and doing what they do or did. (Former New York mayor Rudolph) Giuliani was the most major thing to happen to New York in the last 50 years. Giuliani came in and arrested thousands of people for whatever reason he felt like and cleaned the city up and made it more safe. It's not that it got really bad, it's just a little nicer, which is 'nice', I guess. But the freestyle element of New York is slowly coming back."
To the 5 Boroughs is out this week on Capitol/EMI.