Beastie Boys

The Beastie Boys are one of the loveliest stories of evolution in rock and hip-hop.

Three friends who started out as noisy clowns and ended up as some of the most creative, respected and decent musicians of their generation.

They went from punk to rap, from the joke to the masterpiece, from teenage machismo to apologising for what they had said when they were young. And they did all of it in full view of everyone.

From punks to rappers

Mike D, MCA and Ad-Rock —Michael Diamond, Adam Yauch and Adam Horovitz— were three Jewish teenagers from New York who in 1981 put together a hardcore punk band.

But they caught the hip-hop bug, that new sound being born on the city's streets, and they made a leap that was very odd for the time: from playing punk they moved to rapping.

With the help of producer Rick Rubin and the Def Jam label they released, in 1986, their debut: "Licensed to Ill", a rap record crossed with metal guitars, loutish and addictive, with party anthems like "Fight for Your Right" and "No Sleep Till Brooklyn".

It was a phenomenon: the first hip-hop record to reach number one in the United States, where it stayed for five weeks. A historic moment for the whole genre.

But it also pigeonholed them as what they appeared to be: three privileged white kids shouting and drinking beer.

The failure that became a masterpiece

And here is where it gets interesting.

Instead of repeating the winning formula, the Beastie Boys did something extremely brave: they blew it up.

Their second record, "Paul's Boutique", from 1989, produced with the Dust Brothers, was completely different: a delirious collage made of more than a hundred sampled songs, woven together in layers, with lyrics full of references, humour and wit.

It was a madness of creativity. And it did not work. It barely reached number fourteen, people did not understand it, they were expecting another party. They were written off.

But over the years what happens to works ahead of their time happened: "Paul's Boutique" came to be recognised as one of the most influential records in the history of hip-hop, a peak of the art of sampling. Only in 1999, ten years later, did it go double platinum.

The record that sank them ended up being their great monument.

Growing up in full view

And that is the heart of their story, what makes them special.

The Beastie Boys grew up, in public, record after record. They kept reinventing themselves —"Check Your Head", "Ill Communication", with that mix of funk, punk, jazz and rap, and the classic "Sabotage" with its seventies-cops video directed by Spike Jonze—, and at the same time they matured as people.

Adam Yauch, MCA, became a Buddhist, founded the Milarepa Fund together with the activist Erin Potts, and organised the Tibetan Freedom Concerts: the first, in June 1996 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, drew some hundred thousand people, and the series went on through New York, Washington, Amsterdam, Sydney, Tokyo and Taipei.

And the group did something almost no artist does: they apologised for the sexism of their early lyrics.

It was not a press release. It was better than that. In 1994, in "Sure Shot", Yauch put the apology inside a song: he wanted to say something that was long overdue, and it was that the disrespect towards women had to end. Five years later, Ad-Rock wrote a letter of his own to a New York magazine apologising for the sexism and homophobia of their early years.

And in the book they published in 2018 they gave a whole chapter to Kate Schellenbach, the drummer from the punk era whom they themselves had left out.

It is a rare and beautiful thing to watch a band grow older by becoming wiser and more generous, instead of more bitter.

The end

Adam Yauch, the deepest voice and the spiritual heart of the group, was diagnosed in 2009 with a rare cancer of the salivary gland. He died on 4 May 2012, at the age of forty-seven.

Three weeks earlier, the band had entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was already too ill to go.

And with him the band ended. Mike D explained it afterwards, testifying under oath in court: we cannot make new music, because they had promised Yauch not to record without him. Ad-Rock put it more simply: the band did not break up; that was our last record because Adam got cancer and died.

It was a decision of love and loyalty. Their lifelong friendship was worth more than the brand.

What to remember

The Beastie Boys are proof that people can change, grow and become better, and that creativity has no genre borders.

If you put on "Sabotage", "Intergalactic", "So What'cha Want" or "Fight for Your Right", you will hear an unstoppable party, a collage of punk, funk, rap and humour made by three friends having more fun than anyone.

And behind it you will find a strange, hopeful story: that of three clowns who became real artists, who broke the rules of hip-hop, who grew older with dignity and even apologised for their mistakes.

Few bands left behind music this much fun and, at the same time, an example this good of how you grow up.

They started out shouting for their right to party, and they ended up teaching something much harder: how to mature without ceasing to be yourself.

Sources

Beastie Boys, American group formed in New York in 1981 as a hardcore punk band, made up of Michael "Mike D" Diamond, Adam "MCA" Yauch and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, all three of Jewish background; in its first phase it featured Kate Schellenbach on drums. After turning to hip-hop, their debut "Licensed to Ill" (1986, produced by Rick Rubin for Def Jam), with "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)" and "No Sleep Till Brooklyn", was the first rap album to reach number one on the Billboard 200, where it stayed for five weeks. Their second record, "Paul's Boutique" (1989), produced with the Dust Brothers and built on 105 sampled songs, reached only number 14 and was a relative commercial failure —gold record in September 1989—, until it was reassessed as a masterpiece of the genre: it went double platinum in January 1999. The anecdote that Miles Davis was enthusiastic about the record circulates widely, but there is no documented statement from him: it comes from Dan LeRoy's book about the album. With "Check Your Head" (1992) and "Ill Communication" (1994) they went back to live instrumentation; the video for "Sabotage" was directed by Spike Jonze. Adam Yauch, a Buddhist, founded the Milarepa Fund together with the activist Erin Potts and organised the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, the first edition of which was held on 15 and 16 June 1996 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco before some 100,000 people, with later editions in New York, Washington D.C., Amsterdam, Sydney, Tokyo and Taipei. The group's apologies for the misogyny of their early lyrics were not a single statement: Yauch included them in the song "Sure Shot" (1994) —"I want to say a little something that's long overdue / The disrespect to women has got to be through"— and Ad-Rock separately wrote a letter to the magazine Time Out New York in 1999 apologising for the sexism and homophobia of the past; in the "Beastie Boys Book" (2018) they included a chapter written by Kate Schellenbach. Yauch was diagnosed in 2009 with a cancer of the salivary (parotid) gland, with spread to a lymph node, and died on 4 May 2012, at the age of 47. The band had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 14 April 2012, a ceremony Yauch was unable to attend. Mike D testified under oath in a New York court, on 2 June 2014, that they could not make new music, because of a promise made to Yauch. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of their work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Data gathered from Wikipedia, Slate, Rolling Stone, NME, NBC News and other press coverage.