Salon.com > Beastie Boys

Listen to the Beastie Boys in a previously unaired interview from 1985

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:40:00 +0000

David Gerlach's “Blank on Blank” series, produced by PBS Digital Studios, has revived a never-before-heard interview of Beastie Boys, Mike D (Michael Diamond), MCA (Adam Yauch) and Ad-Rock (Adam Horovitz) from 1985, when the group was finding the hip-hop voice that later earned them three Grammy Awards and multiple platinum albums.

In the following animated clip, the group talks to ABC News Radio's Rocci Fisch, telling him about their tour with Madonna, how they're not just "rappers for the suburbs" and the origin of their name "from the good old days."

Beastie Boys to write memoir

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:50:00 +0000

The surviving members of the Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), are writing a high-concept memoir, reports the New York Times.

The band has been toying with the idea for years -- even before third member Adam Yauch (MCA) died at 47 from cancer in 2012. “After Yauch died, I didn’t push them,” said agent Luke Janklow. “But I think that Adam and Mike ended up realizing that it was the right time for them.”

From the Times:

The Beastie Boys are “interested in challenging the form and making the book a multidimensional experience,” [publisher Julie] Grau said in an interview. “There is a kaleidoscopic frame of reference, and it asks a reader to keep up.”

The book, to be edited by the hip-hop journalist Sacha Jenkins, will be loosely structured as an oral history. It will also have contributions by other writers, as well as a strong visual component. Ms. Grau and Luke Janklow, the group’s agent, both compared it to Grand Royal, the Beastie Boys’ acclaimed but short-lived magazine in the 1990s, which explored some of its wide-ranging pop-culture interests with curiosity and snark.

Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau, which published Jay-Z's "Decoded," has taken on the project and is targeting a fall 2015 release.

“Sometimes, you just gotta’ shut down”

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:23:00 +0000

Back in the day, Beastie Boy Adam Yauch brought Tibetan music and Buddhist philosophy to music fans everywhere. Originally published in the January 1995 Shambhala Sun magazine, this interview finds Yauch after the release of "Ill Communication," candidly talking about about hip-hop, hardcore, helping people and his relationship to Buddhism's Bodhisattva Vow.

Amy Green: What was your first experience with Buddhism, the first thing that really caught you? Was it books you read?

Adam Yauch: I was reading a lot about Native American and other religions and checking out different things. Then I was in Kathmandu about two years ago, and I met some people who were Tibetan Studies majors living there. I was just hanging out with them; went to a couple of monasteries and Tibetan people's houses and started getting into Tibetan culture a little bit. And I went and saw the Dalai Lama speak when he was in America for the Arizona teachings. I have studied a lot of different things; Buddhism is fairly new to me.

Jerry Granelli: Buddhism made sense to you?

From brat to activist

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:00:00 +0000

For a band that broke out with the indelible slacker declaration “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party),” the Beastie Boys weren't exactly the most likely group to turn into human rights activists. Yet it was the trio -- that included Adam Yauch, the Buddhist who lost his battle with cancer Friday at 47 -- that led the battle for Tibet in the late '90s at a time when changing the world through music events wasn’t so fashionable. Their transformation from bratty, delinquent teenagers into altruistic, socially engaged cultural figures may have paralleled the coming-of-age and awareness of a generation of Americans.

Starting as a teenage punk band in the late '70s, the Beastie Boys latched onto the hip-hop culture that was rising all around them, hooked up with young producer Rick Rubin and became a mainstay of his new Def Jam label. Armed with their 12-inch hits that preceded it, the debut “Licensed to Ill" was a time bomb on hip-hop that few albums were, creating instant anthems, top-rated videos and opening slots on tours from Public Image Ltd. to Madonna to Run DMC.

Goodbye to a Beastie Boy

Fri, 04 May 2012 18:30:00 +0000

He was MCA. The handsome, swaggery Beastie Boy. The low growl the others' ratatats bounced off. A guy whose early tours including dancing girls in cages and an inflatable, enormous penis. He was Adam Yauch. Vegan and a practicing Buddhist. Recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee. A 47-year-old husband and father. Another goddamn cancer statistic. He died Friday morning.

For those of us who answer to the name Gen-X, Yauch's demise represents a very different kind of grief than the one experienced when Kurt Cobain died. Cobain's suicide, at age 27, represented the darkness of rock 'n' roll, the wild, terrible danger of it. Yauch's, 18 years later, is something else. It's random and cruel. It's the banal awfulness of disease.

When the Beasties first appeared in the mid-'80s, they seemed like a brash and bratty trio of white boys ripping off rap. They were. Have you heard "Cooky Puss"? Their appeal – considerable even then – was largely in their naughtiness. But there was a knowingness to them, a clever, infectious style that couldn't be dismissed as mere frat boy posturing -- and a background in the fast, furious language of punk that gave them a whole different way of creating music. Their first album, "Licensed to Ill," was a breakthrough not just for its defiant party vibe but for its knowing wit, its infectious, irresistible and distinctive charm. Was rap ever truly charming before the Beastie Boys?

Where youth and relevance go to die

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:30:00 +0000

When you really think about it, it's inherently peculiar to bestow the words "Hall of Fame" upon individuals who've spent a serious portion of their lives clad in nothing but gym socks. Yet that's what the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is all about. It raises up our scruffy guitar heroes; it makes rebellion venerable. It says, the way that you used to carve up your chest, that is some museum-quality stuff, sir. And so, when this year's lineup was announced Wednesday morning, the inevitable cries of outrage and pride went up from the fans, tinged by the mixed blessing of knowing that one's bad-ass youthful idols are now considered elder statesmen. Oh, sweet, strange life – one day, you're a bratty prank caller, harassing the local Carvel ice cream store. The next, you're middle-aged, and the word "inductee" is somehow attached to your name.