dee_bee_76
06-18-2004, 03:05 PM
The boys are back in town
Fifteen years before Eminem, the Beastie Boys made rap hip. Now, finds Angus Batey, they’ll fight for the right to be arty
“If you put a cold egg salad in a balloon and threw it at somebody, you could really hurt them.” Adam “AdRock” Horovitz, one third of the rap legends the Beastie Boys, looks pleased with himself. Sitting in Oscilloscope Laboratories, the group’s studio space in Greenwich Village, New York, he has good cause: his band have returned from a six-year break with a record that ’s worth shouting about. But the real reason Horovitz is happy is more immediate. Right now, he’s the only Beastie not wearing a ridiculous wicker pith helmet, and he has managed to derail with some panache a discussion about songwriting.
Most bands, even those that don’t enjoy interviews, at least play the game. Some may genuinely be unsure how their muse operates, so prefer not to discuss it; others simply find queries about their life intrusive. The Beasties fall into neither camp. When they get “on message” they are erudite spokesmen, walking encyclopaedias of popular culture, champions of causes such as the struggle for a free Tibet.
Yet interviewing the Beastie Boys can be like trying to join in an improvised routine with the Marx Brothers, or undergoing a surreal kind of psychoanalysis. Right now, for instance, control of the conversation has been ceded to the three wicker hats, worn at the insistence of Michael “Mike D” Diamond by himself, Adam “MCA” Yauch and your correspondent. Diamond has designated these “the stupid hats ”, and while they are worn, no serious topic can be discussed.
The key to understanding the Beastie Boys, why they are still together after more than 20 years, why they remain one of the most influential bands in the world, is here. To them, it’s not going to work unless they’re having fun. And when they’re together, they just can’t seem to keep straight faces.
The oldest member, 38-year-old Yauch, had mentioned that they had written a song in their early punk days about throwing eggs at nightclub doormen, hence this freeform discussion on launching egg-based projectiles. “To translate, you don’t really have egg salad in England, you have egg mayonnaise,” says Diamond, at 37 Horovitz’s senior by nine months. “And what would be nice would be to use hard -boiled egg that was still warm. First it would hurt, then they’d feel this warm, nasty egg mayonnaise all up on them.”
“I think we have a name for your article right there,” offers Yauch, the soul of helpfulness. “Egg Mayonnaise Balloon!”
“All our records, in a weird way, are a kind of internal dialogue,” Diamond admits a few moments later, his “stupid hat” removed.
“We’re saying shit that we’d probably talk about among ourselves, and a lot of times I think it’s a miracle that the audience for what we do goes beyond the three of us and our really immediate friends. I think that 70 or 80 per cent of the more silly, goofy or downright stupid rhymes that are on this record are part of those thoughts, but so are the 20 or 30 per cent that are more serious.”
In the six years since the Beasties last released a new album the landscape in which they operate has altered radically. Metaphorically, in terms of hip-hop music, which is now the biggest selling genre on the planet; and literally, when one casts a glance downtown from Oscilloscope to where the World Trade Centre stood.
A year after the Beasties released their last album, Hello Nasty, Marshall Mathers began his inexorable rise. Many of the allegations of cultural piracy that Eminem had to contend with, as a white man in the predominantly black world of rap, were ones that the Beasties had had to deal with more than a decade earlier. Eminem is a Beastie fan — he reportedly dropped in backstage at an MTV filming to meet them recently — and the feeling seems mutual.
“It’s pretty amazing to me that somebody who definitely is a rapper is the biggest pop star in the world,” Diamond says. “Ten years ago I don’t know that I would have foreseen a rapper existing on that level of celebrity. He reached people and made the impact that he did to a certain extent because of the colour of his skin, but to me it’s almost more of a wonder that it took that long for someone like him to come along.”
What’s not such a surprise is that To the 5 Boroughs, the new Beastie Boys album, finds them addressing their altered realities. Making a decisive move back to sample-based hip-hop after previous records found them dabbling with rock and live instrumentation, they’re keen to speak about the changed atmosphere in rap’s birthplace.
“We started this record about two years ago,” Diamond explains, “so every morning we were walking to the studio past soldiers holding machineguns in a post-9/11 New York City. So, of course, that’s gonna work its way in. For all New Yorkers after September 11, dialogue about the city became a much more prevalent topic. It was just more natural as your thoughts and conversations turned toward New York and what it means to us now, what it meant to us growing up as New Yorkers, and the future.”
Horovitz keeps his counsel through much of the interview, but wears his heart almost literally on his sleeve. About 18 months ago a friend decorated the inside of his right forearm with a three-inch black-and-white tattoo, depicting the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers. It’s all a far cry from 1986, when Licensed to Ill became the first rap album to top the US charts, selling seven million copies and causing a scandal as much for the group’s over-the-top stage show as for the fact that these brat-rappers were not black. A smart collection of snot-nosed anthems and puerile in-jokes, Licensed to Ill gave the band global infamy. They lived out the caricatures that they had created on records such as Fight for Your Right (to Party), touring with a 30ft (9m) hydraulically operated penis and caged go-go girls on stage, and living up to the image off it. Horovitz’s father, the playwright Israel, told the Los Angeles Times that he was “delighted beyond description — it’s like a kid taking over the family store”. But so whole-hearted was the Beasties’ embrace of their own shtick that audiences and onlookers often couldn’t see the joke. Do they ever regret anything they said or did?
“I’m sure there are some things I’ll hear that’ll make me cringe a little bit,” Yauch admits.
“You mean, like the song Girls, for instance?” Horovitz deadpans. Licensed’s more infamous moments, Girls has the nowadays avowedly anti-sexist trio dreaming of “girls who do the dishes, girls to clean up my room”. “But at the same time,” Diamond argues, “I’d say that what we went through and what we did was absolutely necessary. Point A was necessary to get to Point B.”
After almost 18 months touring the world and a legal battle with their label, Def Jam, they relocated to Los Angeles and recorded Paul’s Boutique on EMI’s Capitol imprint. An ambitious musical collage that sampled everything from the Beatles to Sly Stone, it sold 800,000 copies — excellent by most standards, but a flop after Licensed to Ill.
The relative commercial failure provoked a rethink. Three years later they re-emerged with Check Your Head, which went back to their garage band roots and won over an alternative music audience enamoured of their rebelliousness but turned off by the sexism of Licensed to Ill. Ill Communication two years later followed the same live-instruments-plus-samples template, and they also launched a record label, magazine and clothing line. In the ensuing years, the Beasties would host several huge Tibetan Freedom concerts in the US and Japan — a cause dear to Yauch, who had become a Buddhist. Their reinvention — from yobbish nerds to the coolest, most right-on brand in rock’n’roll — was complete.
In 1998, their fifth album proper, Hello Nasty, found them goofing around with in-jokes and references to obscure American TV shows, yet garnered the most positive reviews of the band’s career and topped album charts worldwide. And now their latest album is arguably their best yet.
“I think we’re in a privileged position,” Diamond says, “stupid hat” nowhere in the vicinity of his head. “Somehow, we get left alone to make whatever record we want. Largely, I guess, because we had a lot of success for Licensed to Ill, that gave us freedom. We don’t have people knocking on our door, saying: ‘Where the hell is our record?’”
A fortnight later, and the Beasties take to the stage of the intimate ICA Theatre in London. There are no caged girls and no phallic symbols, and they’re drinking tea to help keep their throats in condition rather than spraying beer over the front rows. They’re playing a show for broadcast on Radio 1 to an audience of competition winners: giving more to fans has become as much a defining feature of the band over the past 15 years as their music and their humour. Their DJ, MixMaster Mike, pulls the musical rugs from under each song, replacing Beastie instrumentals with other hip-hop hits of the same tempo; something that’s not been rehearsed, judging from the expressions on all four faces. Thrown by some of the selections, Diamond fluffs his lines a couple of times, but the response isn’t the anger one would expect from a band playing new material for broadcast to one of their key markets. Instead, they crack up laughing.
“We were doing a photo session earlier today, and I was getting real tired and bored,” Yauch had said in New York. “I was thinking: ‘Why are we doing this again?’ And I realised, well, for the past two years we’ve had a lot of fun making this record. And I haven’t ever felt, during those two years making it, that I was unhappy. I’ve just totally enjoyed it.”
To the 5 Boroughs is out now on Capitol.
Fifteen years before Eminem, the Beastie Boys made rap hip. Now, finds Angus Batey, they’ll fight for the right to be arty
“If you put a cold egg salad in a balloon and threw it at somebody, you could really hurt them.” Adam “AdRock” Horovitz, one third of the rap legends the Beastie Boys, looks pleased with himself. Sitting in Oscilloscope Laboratories, the group’s studio space in Greenwich Village, New York, he has good cause: his band have returned from a six-year break with a record that ’s worth shouting about. But the real reason Horovitz is happy is more immediate. Right now, he’s the only Beastie not wearing a ridiculous wicker pith helmet, and he has managed to derail with some panache a discussion about songwriting.
Most bands, even those that don’t enjoy interviews, at least play the game. Some may genuinely be unsure how their muse operates, so prefer not to discuss it; others simply find queries about their life intrusive. The Beasties fall into neither camp. When they get “on message” they are erudite spokesmen, walking encyclopaedias of popular culture, champions of causes such as the struggle for a free Tibet.
Yet interviewing the Beastie Boys can be like trying to join in an improvised routine with the Marx Brothers, or undergoing a surreal kind of psychoanalysis. Right now, for instance, control of the conversation has been ceded to the three wicker hats, worn at the insistence of Michael “Mike D” Diamond by himself, Adam “MCA” Yauch and your correspondent. Diamond has designated these “the stupid hats ”, and while they are worn, no serious topic can be discussed.
The key to understanding the Beastie Boys, why they are still together after more than 20 years, why they remain one of the most influential bands in the world, is here. To them, it’s not going to work unless they’re having fun. And when they’re together, they just can’t seem to keep straight faces.
The oldest member, 38-year-old Yauch, had mentioned that they had written a song in their early punk days about throwing eggs at nightclub doormen, hence this freeform discussion on launching egg-based projectiles. “To translate, you don’t really have egg salad in England, you have egg mayonnaise,” says Diamond, at 37 Horovitz’s senior by nine months. “And what would be nice would be to use hard -boiled egg that was still warm. First it would hurt, then they’d feel this warm, nasty egg mayonnaise all up on them.”
“I think we have a name for your article right there,” offers Yauch, the soul of helpfulness. “Egg Mayonnaise Balloon!”
“All our records, in a weird way, are a kind of internal dialogue,” Diamond admits a few moments later, his “stupid hat” removed.
“We’re saying shit that we’d probably talk about among ourselves, and a lot of times I think it’s a miracle that the audience for what we do goes beyond the three of us and our really immediate friends. I think that 70 or 80 per cent of the more silly, goofy or downright stupid rhymes that are on this record are part of those thoughts, but so are the 20 or 30 per cent that are more serious.”
In the six years since the Beasties last released a new album the landscape in which they operate has altered radically. Metaphorically, in terms of hip-hop music, which is now the biggest selling genre on the planet; and literally, when one casts a glance downtown from Oscilloscope to where the World Trade Centre stood.
A year after the Beasties released their last album, Hello Nasty, Marshall Mathers began his inexorable rise. Many of the allegations of cultural piracy that Eminem had to contend with, as a white man in the predominantly black world of rap, were ones that the Beasties had had to deal with more than a decade earlier. Eminem is a Beastie fan — he reportedly dropped in backstage at an MTV filming to meet them recently — and the feeling seems mutual.
“It’s pretty amazing to me that somebody who definitely is a rapper is the biggest pop star in the world,” Diamond says. “Ten years ago I don’t know that I would have foreseen a rapper existing on that level of celebrity. He reached people and made the impact that he did to a certain extent because of the colour of his skin, but to me it’s almost more of a wonder that it took that long for someone like him to come along.”
What’s not such a surprise is that To the 5 Boroughs, the new Beastie Boys album, finds them addressing their altered realities. Making a decisive move back to sample-based hip-hop after previous records found them dabbling with rock and live instrumentation, they’re keen to speak about the changed atmosphere in rap’s birthplace.
“We started this record about two years ago,” Diamond explains, “so every morning we were walking to the studio past soldiers holding machineguns in a post-9/11 New York City. So, of course, that’s gonna work its way in. For all New Yorkers after September 11, dialogue about the city became a much more prevalent topic. It was just more natural as your thoughts and conversations turned toward New York and what it means to us now, what it meant to us growing up as New Yorkers, and the future.”
Horovitz keeps his counsel through much of the interview, but wears his heart almost literally on his sleeve. About 18 months ago a friend decorated the inside of his right forearm with a three-inch black-and-white tattoo, depicting the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers. It’s all a far cry from 1986, when Licensed to Ill became the first rap album to top the US charts, selling seven million copies and causing a scandal as much for the group’s over-the-top stage show as for the fact that these brat-rappers were not black. A smart collection of snot-nosed anthems and puerile in-jokes, Licensed to Ill gave the band global infamy. They lived out the caricatures that they had created on records such as Fight for Your Right (to Party), touring with a 30ft (9m) hydraulically operated penis and caged go-go girls on stage, and living up to the image off it. Horovitz’s father, the playwright Israel, told the Los Angeles Times that he was “delighted beyond description — it’s like a kid taking over the family store”. But so whole-hearted was the Beasties’ embrace of their own shtick that audiences and onlookers often couldn’t see the joke. Do they ever regret anything they said or did?
“I’m sure there are some things I’ll hear that’ll make me cringe a little bit,” Yauch admits.
“You mean, like the song Girls, for instance?” Horovitz deadpans. Licensed’s more infamous moments, Girls has the nowadays avowedly anti-sexist trio dreaming of “girls who do the dishes, girls to clean up my room”. “But at the same time,” Diamond argues, “I’d say that what we went through and what we did was absolutely necessary. Point A was necessary to get to Point B.”
After almost 18 months touring the world and a legal battle with their label, Def Jam, they relocated to Los Angeles and recorded Paul’s Boutique on EMI’s Capitol imprint. An ambitious musical collage that sampled everything from the Beatles to Sly Stone, it sold 800,000 copies — excellent by most standards, but a flop after Licensed to Ill.
The relative commercial failure provoked a rethink. Three years later they re-emerged with Check Your Head, which went back to their garage band roots and won over an alternative music audience enamoured of their rebelliousness but turned off by the sexism of Licensed to Ill. Ill Communication two years later followed the same live-instruments-plus-samples template, and they also launched a record label, magazine and clothing line. In the ensuing years, the Beasties would host several huge Tibetan Freedom concerts in the US and Japan — a cause dear to Yauch, who had become a Buddhist. Their reinvention — from yobbish nerds to the coolest, most right-on brand in rock’n’roll — was complete.
In 1998, their fifth album proper, Hello Nasty, found them goofing around with in-jokes and references to obscure American TV shows, yet garnered the most positive reviews of the band’s career and topped album charts worldwide. And now their latest album is arguably their best yet.
“I think we’re in a privileged position,” Diamond says, “stupid hat” nowhere in the vicinity of his head. “Somehow, we get left alone to make whatever record we want. Largely, I guess, because we had a lot of success for Licensed to Ill, that gave us freedom. We don’t have people knocking on our door, saying: ‘Where the hell is our record?’”
A fortnight later, and the Beasties take to the stage of the intimate ICA Theatre in London. There are no caged girls and no phallic symbols, and they’re drinking tea to help keep their throats in condition rather than spraying beer over the front rows. They’re playing a show for broadcast on Radio 1 to an audience of competition winners: giving more to fans has become as much a defining feature of the band over the past 15 years as their music and their humour. Their DJ, MixMaster Mike, pulls the musical rugs from under each song, replacing Beastie instrumentals with other hip-hop hits of the same tempo; something that’s not been rehearsed, judging from the expressions on all four faces. Thrown by some of the selections, Diamond fluffs his lines a couple of times, but the response isn’t the anger one would expect from a band playing new material for broadcast to one of their key markets. Instead, they crack up laughing.
“We were doing a photo session earlier today, and I was getting real tired and bored,” Yauch had said in New York. “I was thinking: ‘Why are we doing this again?’ And I realised, well, for the past two years we’ve had a lot of fun making this record. And I haven’t ever felt, during those two years making it, that I was unhappy. I’ve just totally enjoyed it.”
To the 5 Boroughs is out now on Capitol.