1 2 Oh My God
06-21-2004, 05:45 PM
From last Sunday's Newsday. See if you can spot the mistake in the article.
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B-Boys of hip-hop grow up
In their ripe old 30s, the once-wild Beastie Boys settle down into rap respectability
Beasties are a blast from the past
Jun 15, 2004
BY PHIL SUTCLIFFE
Phil Sutcliffe is a London-based freelance writer. This first appeared in the Los Angeles Times, which is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
June 20, 2004
'Hey, Buckingham Palace!" Michael "Mike D." Diamond says in a high, pinched New York accent as the Beastie Boys' minibus swings past the royal homestead. "Hence all the flags. And this is the Mall."
Actually, Brits say "mal," not "maul," but yes. And America's premier white rappers are playing a late-afternoon showcase gig for a select couple of hundred fans and assorted media right beside this historic ceremonial way.
The venue is the tony, though not quite snobbish, Institute for Contemporary Arts, mere yards from Queen Elizabeth's London residence.
"Well, there's a nice juxtaposition," the amiable Diamond muses as the trio disembarks, unnoticed, at the stage door. "When we first came here in 1987, Parliament debated whether to ban us from entering the country."
Now in their late 30s, the Beastie Boys - Diamond, Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz and Adam "MCA" Yauch - are respected senior citizens of hip-hop. Their new album, "To the 5 Boroughs," is their first in six years, and it arrived last week garlanded with high hopes. Commercially, it's expected to be one of the biggest hits of the summer. Artistically, it's a de facto test of whether the once-wild rappers can grow old gracefully.
Back in the '80s, when the mere mention of the name Beastie Boys gave grown-ups conniptions, the group reigned unchallenged, Brats of the Decade. They rapped rude words. They drank beer onstage with a woman (often topless) dancing in a cage. Their most popular song invited fans to "Fight for Your Right (to Party)." And, their show featured a 25-foot-tall hydraulic penis.
That was just the regular stuff. Days before that original United Kingdom tour, a tabloid printed a story claiming that while at an all-star event in Switzerland, the Beasties told a group of disabled children seeking autographs, "Go away, you -- cripples!" The story exploded in the British press. The band denied they had said it, but the mud had been slung, and those indignant members of Parliament fulminated.
Success run amok
For the young Beastie Boys it was one of many signs that their success had run out of control.
Middle-class sons of an interior designer (Diamond, now 37), an architect (Yauch, 38) and a playwright (Horovitz, 36), they got together in the early '80s and grew into rebellious, satirical rappers. Their debut album, 1986's "Licensed to Ill," so captured the spirit of noisy youth in the Reagan era that it eventually sold 9 million copies in the United States. But, they acknowledge now, the well-brought-up boys had tried too hard to be bad, and they've taken a long, slow road to find themselves as thoughtful, sophisticated souls.
At first, looking back at those early days, they squirm painfully in "embarrassment" and even "humiliation" at temporarily becoming the boozy, macho boneheads they'd intended to mock.
"On the 'Licensed to Ill' tour we really homed in on being jackasses," says Yauch. "We were taking [a shot at] frat guys, and then suddenly they were our whole audience, and they were going, 'Yaaaaaaaaah!'"
"When it first happened it was really exciting," Diamond says. "Like being Led Zeppelin. Until we were saddled with being these characters from our own jokes."
"It's the become-what-you- hate theory," says Horovitz. They had to stop, recover their self-respect. With some distaste, he dredges up an apparently trivial moment from the "Licensed to Ill" tour aftermath - "me and Yauch getting tickets from the cops for wearing beer helmets." He says that started "the transition" for him.
The latest manifestation of that odd transition from living out an essentially fictional brattiness is a rap called "An Open Letter to NYC" from the new album.
Warm, yet largely unsentimental, it tackles their hometown's deep, dense, collective emotions in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. It champions the Statue of Liberty principle but embraces all the jostling touchiness of the city, too:
Writers, prizefighters and Wall Street traders
We come together on the subway cars.
Diversity unified, whoever you are.
On the L we're doing swell
On the No. 10 bus we fight and fuss.
In fact, the Beastie Boys' studio reunion was triggered by the New Yorkers Against Violence benefit they organized in October 2001.
"It was a time when you would sit down and talk and really evaluate what's important," Diamond says. "What a lot of the world missed was just how caring New York became post-9/11. So we had to be sensitive in what we wrote, pick our shots. But you don't want to sugarcoat it either. Bad stuff happened.
"There was racial hatred, mosques that needed police protection - we shouldn't shirk on that. Then, over the months the tone switched from everybody being uncharacteristically helpful. Normal, mundane life came back. But it is this hopeful place, this incarnation of total diversity, always changing. In that sense, it's a source of endless inspiration."
Leaving New York
However, back in the late '80s, trapped by that uncomfortable brat identity they'd foisted on themselves and spurred by a bitter dispute over money with their label, Def Jam, they felt they had to leave New York to rediscover themselves.
It did the trick. They hit it off with the Dust Brothers, a then-unknown production team, and made a landmark album, "Paul's Boutique." The transformation from rowdy party sounds into an unprecedented hybrid - one critic dubbed the 1989 work "retro-funk-psychedelia" - fell far short of the "Licensed" sales, yet over time it brought them a new reputation as crucial hip- hop innovators.
They settled down, launched a label, Grand Royal, distributed through Capitol and published their own magazine. On their records, the jokes, the "silliness," as they call it, never stopped coming. But there were also startling moments when they took less traveled roads.
With "Bodhisattva Vow," from 1992's "Check Your Head" album, Yauch declared his self-styled "hippie freak" adoption of Tibetan Buddhism. Suddenly, if the frats were still out there, the brats were telling them: "I put it down now so I'll be sure./...I pledge here before everyone who's listening./To try to make my every action for the good of all beings."
These days, Yauch says that although he has no regrets about making a public statement then, he doesn't want to talk about "spirituality and religion" now because the subject seems such a source of current conflict.
Of course, his two old friends supported his declaration as a Beastie Boys track or it wouldn't have made the album. Even though they didn't "convert," it meant a lot to them, too.
The Beasties had come a long way.
Now, Yauch is gray-haired, and the Beastie Boys are rap veterans. At the same point in their careers, the Rolling Stones started talking about how their idols were Muddy Waters and Little Richard, and getting older never slowed them down. The trio ponders rap history for parallels before deciding, "No, in terms of people still making records, from our generation there's LL Cool J, Ice-T, us, but no one earlier - the precedent doesn't exist."
Pushing in another direction
Certainly, the urge to cling to their youth is tangible in group banter - they're hungry to get a comic riff rolling or show an outsider a fancy verbal step or two.
But on "To the 5 Boroughs" it's their experience, wide interests and hard-won confidence that enable them to push hip-hop in another direction: campaigning about liberal politics. In "It Takes Time," they note, "We've got a president we didn't elect/We need a little shift on over towards the left."
Their intentions are blatant.
"This being an election year gave us the incentive to get the album finished," Diamond says. "Maybe we can influence a couple of people. Whether the political songs could cause a backlash, well, I guess we'll find out."
------------------------------------------------------------------
B-Boys of hip-hop grow up
In their ripe old 30s, the once-wild Beastie Boys settle down into rap respectability
Beasties are a blast from the past
Jun 15, 2004
BY PHIL SUTCLIFFE
Phil Sutcliffe is a London-based freelance writer. This first appeared in the Los Angeles Times, which is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
June 20, 2004
'Hey, Buckingham Palace!" Michael "Mike D." Diamond says in a high, pinched New York accent as the Beastie Boys' minibus swings past the royal homestead. "Hence all the flags. And this is the Mall."
Actually, Brits say "mal," not "maul," but yes. And America's premier white rappers are playing a late-afternoon showcase gig for a select couple of hundred fans and assorted media right beside this historic ceremonial way.
The venue is the tony, though not quite snobbish, Institute for Contemporary Arts, mere yards from Queen Elizabeth's London residence.
"Well, there's a nice juxtaposition," the amiable Diamond muses as the trio disembarks, unnoticed, at the stage door. "When we first came here in 1987, Parliament debated whether to ban us from entering the country."
Now in their late 30s, the Beastie Boys - Diamond, Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz and Adam "MCA" Yauch - are respected senior citizens of hip-hop. Their new album, "To the 5 Boroughs," is their first in six years, and it arrived last week garlanded with high hopes. Commercially, it's expected to be one of the biggest hits of the summer. Artistically, it's a de facto test of whether the once-wild rappers can grow old gracefully.
Back in the '80s, when the mere mention of the name Beastie Boys gave grown-ups conniptions, the group reigned unchallenged, Brats of the Decade. They rapped rude words. They drank beer onstage with a woman (often topless) dancing in a cage. Their most popular song invited fans to "Fight for Your Right (to Party)." And, their show featured a 25-foot-tall hydraulic penis.
That was just the regular stuff. Days before that original United Kingdom tour, a tabloid printed a story claiming that while at an all-star event in Switzerland, the Beasties told a group of disabled children seeking autographs, "Go away, you -- cripples!" The story exploded in the British press. The band denied they had said it, but the mud had been slung, and those indignant members of Parliament fulminated.
Success run amok
For the young Beastie Boys it was one of many signs that their success had run out of control.
Middle-class sons of an interior designer (Diamond, now 37), an architect (Yauch, 38) and a playwright (Horovitz, 36), they got together in the early '80s and grew into rebellious, satirical rappers. Their debut album, 1986's "Licensed to Ill," so captured the spirit of noisy youth in the Reagan era that it eventually sold 9 million copies in the United States. But, they acknowledge now, the well-brought-up boys had tried too hard to be bad, and they've taken a long, slow road to find themselves as thoughtful, sophisticated souls.
At first, looking back at those early days, they squirm painfully in "embarrassment" and even "humiliation" at temporarily becoming the boozy, macho boneheads they'd intended to mock.
"On the 'Licensed to Ill' tour we really homed in on being jackasses," says Yauch. "We were taking [a shot at] frat guys, and then suddenly they were our whole audience, and they were going, 'Yaaaaaaaaah!'"
"When it first happened it was really exciting," Diamond says. "Like being Led Zeppelin. Until we were saddled with being these characters from our own jokes."
"It's the become-what-you- hate theory," says Horovitz. They had to stop, recover their self-respect. With some distaste, he dredges up an apparently trivial moment from the "Licensed to Ill" tour aftermath - "me and Yauch getting tickets from the cops for wearing beer helmets." He says that started "the transition" for him.
The latest manifestation of that odd transition from living out an essentially fictional brattiness is a rap called "An Open Letter to NYC" from the new album.
Warm, yet largely unsentimental, it tackles their hometown's deep, dense, collective emotions in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. It champions the Statue of Liberty principle but embraces all the jostling touchiness of the city, too:
Writers, prizefighters and Wall Street traders
We come together on the subway cars.
Diversity unified, whoever you are.
On the L we're doing swell
On the No. 10 bus we fight and fuss.
In fact, the Beastie Boys' studio reunion was triggered by the New Yorkers Against Violence benefit they organized in October 2001.
"It was a time when you would sit down and talk and really evaluate what's important," Diamond says. "What a lot of the world missed was just how caring New York became post-9/11. So we had to be sensitive in what we wrote, pick our shots. But you don't want to sugarcoat it either. Bad stuff happened.
"There was racial hatred, mosques that needed police protection - we shouldn't shirk on that. Then, over the months the tone switched from everybody being uncharacteristically helpful. Normal, mundane life came back. But it is this hopeful place, this incarnation of total diversity, always changing. In that sense, it's a source of endless inspiration."
Leaving New York
However, back in the late '80s, trapped by that uncomfortable brat identity they'd foisted on themselves and spurred by a bitter dispute over money with their label, Def Jam, they felt they had to leave New York to rediscover themselves.
It did the trick. They hit it off with the Dust Brothers, a then-unknown production team, and made a landmark album, "Paul's Boutique." The transformation from rowdy party sounds into an unprecedented hybrid - one critic dubbed the 1989 work "retro-funk-psychedelia" - fell far short of the "Licensed" sales, yet over time it brought them a new reputation as crucial hip- hop innovators.
They settled down, launched a label, Grand Royal, distributed through Capitol and published their own magazine. On their records, the jokes, the "silliness," as they call it, never stopped coming. But there were also startling moments when they took less traveled roads.
With "Bodhisattva Vow," from 1992's "Check Your Head" album, Yauch declared his self-styled "hippie freak" adoption of Tibetan Buddhism. Suddenly, if the frats were still out there, the brats were telling them: "I put it down now so I'll be sure./...I pledge here before everyone who's listening./To try to make my every action for the good of all beings."
These days, Yauch says that although he has no regrets about making a public statement then, he doesn't want to talk about "spirituality and religion" now because the subject seems such a source of current conflict.
Of course, his two old friends supported his declaration as a Beastie Boys track or it wouldn't have made the album. Even though they didn't "convert," it meant a lot to them, too.
The Beasties had come a long way.
Now, Yauch is gray-haired, and the Beastie Boys are rap veterans. At the same point in their careers, the Rolling Stones started talking about how their idols were Muddy Waters and Little Richard, and getting older never slowed them down. The trio ponders rap history for parallels before deciding, "No, in terms of people still making records, from our generation there's LL Cool J, Ice-T, us, but no one earlier - the precedent doesn't exist."
Pushing in another direction
Certainly, the urge to cling to their youth is tangible in group banter - they're hungry to get a comic riff rolling or show an outsider a fancy verbal step or two.
But on "To the 5 Boroughs" it's their experience, wide interests and hard-won confidence that enable them to push hip-hop in another direction: campaigning about liberal politics. In "It Takes Time," they note, "We've got a president we didn't elect/We need a little shift on over towards the left."
Their intentions are blatant.
"This being an election year gave us the incentive to get the album finished," Diamond says. "Maybe we can influence a couple of people. Whether the political songs could cause a backlash, well, I guess we'll find out."