3rd Nov - New Interview in Chicago Music [Archive]

paulb

11-03-2004, 07:36 PM

For Those Lazy People:

The Beasties’ hard edge
Rappers turn their vocal powers to the political arena and their vibrant past

By Greg Kot

When the Beastie Boys first began performing in their hometown as teenagers, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were less than a decade old. Adam "MCA" Yauch, "Mike D" Diamond and Adam "Adrock" Horovitz came of age in the early '80s with two still-young art forms--punk and hip-hop--as their soundtrack.

The trio's sixth and latest album, "To the 5 Boroughs" (Capitol), is a love letter to that era, by turns sarcastic and celebratory. It's also the most pointedly political album of the trio's career, with a handful of songs that lash out at President George W. Bush and what the Beasties perceive as his misguided foreign policy in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes.

"Bush has really [screwed] things up, to the point where people like us are saying, `I don't care what MTV says or what the sales charts say, I have to say something about it,'." Horovitz says in an interview from the road (the Beastie Boys headline Thursday at the United Center). "We basically don't care if we look stupid, or if I look like Jackson Browne doing the No Nukes concert. When I was a kid, I'd look at all that political rock and think, `That's just stupid, Jackson Browne's just hopping on a bandwagon.' But looking back on it, how is speaking out against nuclear power plants and weapons a bandwagon?"

The Beasties, typecast early in their career as rap's idiot savants, have taken on serious subjects in recent years, first by sponsoring a series of benefit concerts for Tibetan exiles and then releasing the anti-war song "In a World Gone Mad" last year on the Internet.

That track set the tone for the new album. "We have conversations about this stuff continually because we're right in the middle of it in New York," Horovitz says. "We can't walk to our studio without hearing it, seeing it in the newspaper headlines."

While the gesture is clearly heart-felt, the Beasties' political commentaries aren't a strong suit.

"Honestly, the only time we've ever questioned ourselves for going too far is on this album, because we didn't want to be overly political," he says. "We didn't finish a number of songs like that because we just sounded whiny, and we were like, `Argh, no one wants to hear this from us.'."

"To the 5 Boroughs" is more convincing when it evokes the sound and sensibility of the city the Beasties all grew up in. From its cover art--a line drawing of the city skyline with the World Trade Center towers prominently featured--to its joyous, comical and sometimes nostalgic celebrations of city life, "To the 5 Boroughs" works best as celebration of the two-turntables-and-a-microphone culture that so inspired the Beasties in the first place.

"The best thing about growing up in New York was just being exposed to so much stuff so fast," Horovitz says. "Something is always going on. To see the Damned play one night and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5 the next, that was amazing to be exposed to that as a kid."

Though hardcore punk and hip-hop came up alongside each other, they weren't necessarily embraced by the same audience. But the young Beastie Boys heard it differently. "We were a hardcore band at first, but we were also into soul and rap records," he says. "At one point, we just thought, `Why not rap? If we love it so much, why not try it?' Hardcore and rap were the music any kid growing up in New York at that time was listening to. We never aspired to be as good as Melle Mel. That was never the point, to try to be the best rapper. We just loved rap and wanted to be part of it."

For a bunch of self-professed amateurs, the Beasties overachieved, instantly. They established a new high water mark for hip-hop with their 1986 debut, "Licensed to Ill," the first 5 million-selling album in rap history. The disc smacked of one-hit-wonder novelty, but the Beastie Boys demonstrated their staying power with a series of brilliant albums: the mind-bending patchwork of samples and crazy rhymes on "Paul's Boutique" (1989), and the funky rap-rock hybrids "Check Your Head" (1992) and "Ill Communication" (1994).

Now, after a six-year hiatus, the group is back touring arenas, the graying elder statesmen of hip-hop. "Elder statesmen"? The Beastie Boys? "Hey, it sounds crazy to me, too," says Horovitz, 36. "Am I gonna feel stupid doing this in five years? You are definitely asking the wrong person. I wish I thought like that. There are plenty of times in my life where I wish I had asked that question before doing something. So it's probably too late now."

Greg Kot is the Chicago Tribune rock critic.

Originally published Oct. 29, 2004.