The Beastie Boys

Rap trio

“We’re probably a parent’s worst nightmare,” Mike Diamond, member of the rap trio the Beastie Boys, disclosed in People. Diamond and his songster cohorts Adam Yauch and Adam Horovitz are the controversial core of a group whose first LP, Licensed to III, sold more copies than any debut album in Columbia Records history. Called the Bowery Boys and Three Stooges of rock-rap, the Beastie Boys are clowns of a raunchier variety of stage imagery and antics than their comic forebears. During their concerts of the mid- to late 1980s, for example, grand finales climaxed with the hydraulic rise of a 20-foot pink penis from a black box rostrum while “King Ad-Rock” Horovitz, “Mike D” Diamond, and “MCA” Yauch urged audiences to “Fight for Your Right (to Party).” The group has been credited with making rap accessible to a broader audience, mouthing obscenities in the syntactically proper phrasing of the Jewish, bourgeois New Yorkers they are. With their debut and subsequent albums, the Beastie Boys intend to offend.

The offspring of professionals, Adam Yauch is the son

For the Record…

Group formed in 1983 in New York City; members include Adam Yauch (bass; rap name, MCA; born c. 1965 in New York, NY; son of a school administrator and an architect); Mike Diamond (drums; rap name, Mike D; born c. 1966 in New York, NY; son of an interior decorator and an art dealer); Adam Horovitz (guitar; rap name, King Ad-Rock; born c. 1967 in New York, NY; son of a playwright; appeared in films, including Lost Angels, 1989, and Roadside Prophets, 1992).

Yauch and Diamond joined the Young and the Useless, 1979, and formed hardcore punk band the Beastie Boys; recorded the EP Polly Wog Stew; Horovitz joined group; released punk-rap cult hit, “Cookie Puss,” 1983, and single “She’s on It,” 1985, featured in the film Krush Groove; opening act for Madonna’s Virgin Tour, 1985, and Run-D.M.C.’s Raisin’ Hell Tour, 1986; released debut album, Licensed to III, 1986; appeared in Run-D.M.C.’s film Tougher Than Leather; made horror film Scared Stupid; coheadliners on Run-D.M.C.’s Together Forever Tour, 1987.

Addresses: Agent —Howard Rose, The Howard Rose Agency, Ltd., 2029 Century Park E., Ste. 450, Los Angeles, CA 90067. Record company— Capitol, 810 Seventh Ave., 4th floor, New York, NY 10019.

of a school administrator and an architect, and Mike Diamond is the son of an interior decorator and an art dealer. Adam Horovitz’s father is playwright Israel Horovitz, who wrote The Indian Wants the Bronx. After his mother died in 1986, Horovitz dedicated Licensed to III to her.

The members of the Beastie Boys were not high school or college classmates. Yauch dropped out of public school to attend Elizabeth Seeger. He divulged to David Handelman in Rolling Stone that Seeger was “a little hippie school with sixty kids in it where I smoked pot all day.” Although he pursued a higher education, Yauch remained at Bard College only two years. Diamond attended Brooklyn Height’s posh St. Ann’s followed by one semester at Vassar College. Gathering credits working in a recording studio in New York City as a part of a school program, Horovitz spent a total of two hours enrolled at Manhattan Community College. The group discovered each other during their early teen years club-hopping in a warehouse district that included the Rock Lounge, Tier 3, and the Mudd Club.

Rooted in Hardcore Tradition

Originally punk rockers in early adolescence, Diamond and Yauch performed together in the hardcore band the Young and the Useless in 1979. The duo played guitar and bass, respectively, after they created their own punk band. They dubbed themselves the Beastie Boys, Diamond revealed to Handelman, since hardcore music groups propagated “stupid names, and it was the stupidest name we could come up with.” When they enlisted Horovitz to join the group in 1983, the band remained punk but experimented with rap that same year. Their crank call to the toll-free number of Carvel Ice Cream, during which the Boys harangued female employees, was the impetus behind the rap song that achieved cult status, “Cookie Puss.”

With their venture into the rap genre officially underway, the Beasties enlisted Rick Rubin, whom they knew from an earlier hardcore band, to serve as DJ for onstage performances. Rubin had founded Def Jam Records as a college student at New York University; he eventually became the group’s producer, taking “Rock Hard,” a sample of the Boys’ work, to Russell Simmons of Rush Productions. Recognizing the potential of the group to “be able to cross a lot of boundaries that a lot of other rap groups couldn’t,” as Rubin explained to Anthony DeCurtis in Rolling Stone, Simmons signed the trio.

Undaunted by Boos

In 1985 the Beasties contributed the single “She’s on It” to the film Krush Groove. Less successful that same year as the opening act for pop icon Madonna, the group was booed off stage during their six-week stint of her Virgin Tour. Undaunted, the Beasties shouted obscenities back at the crowds. “We were going for the boos,” Yauch explained in People. “We didn’t want any bland reaction. If they aren’t going to walk out happy, they’ll walk out mad, but they won’t walk out wondering who played.” The following year, the Beasties opened the Raising Hell Tour for Run-D.M.C., prior to the success of their debut album Licensed to III.

“You probably knew kids like the Beastie Boys in high school: wiseasses who wore beat-up clothes, smoked dope, cut classes and partied till dawn in grungy rock clubs—too antsy to be studious but too upper-middleclass and smart to be real delinquents,” wrote Handelman, summing up his impression of the group upon the release of Licensed to III in 1986. Although Jim Miller in Time called the album “loud, disgusting, without redeeming social merit” and “a perverse kind of slapstick comedy,” he credited the group for the authenticity of its most famous single. “Still, when the Beastie Boys gleefully shout, ‘You gotta fight for your right to PAAARTY,’ you can almost taste the beer and smell the barf.”

Creators of the fastest-selling debut album in the annals of Columbia’s history, the Beasties did not endear themselves to the older generation with their crotch-grabbing and use of expletives at the Grammy Awards. “If you don’t see the joke in three white, relatively privileged art brats’ affecting the manners and morals of street hoods,” penned Anthony DeCurtis in Rolling Stone, “you missed the point—not to mention the fun.”

Earned Critical Respect

After the Beastie Boys severed their relationship with Rick Rubin and Def Jam Records over a heated royalty dispute, they released their second album, Paul’s Boutique, on Capitol Records. The LP, featuring a sampling of a radio advertisement from the Brooklyn store after which it is named, only went gold, but made the Beasties musically credible. Critics who surmised that Licensed to III was a one-shot product of Rick Rubin’s artistry, began to take serious notice of the white rappers. “Although the album doesn’t boast an anthem on the order of ‘Fight for Your Right,’ Paul’s Boutique certainly marks a musical advance for the trio,” wrote Fred Goodman in Rolling Stone. “At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let us assert right off the bat that Paul’s Boutique is as important a record in 1989 as Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde was in 1966,” wrote David Hiltbrand in People. “Everyone who thought the Beasties were just rude, crude, moronically loutish delinquents, the Three Stooges of rap, think again.”

With their legal battles with Def Jam behind them, the Beastie Boys began work on a new album in 1990, this time in their own studio, which Bob Mack described in Spin as “a kid’s bedroom, with freaky color photos of the band … and two Tijuana black velvet portraits of [singer] Michael Jackson.” Their efforts there yielded the well-received 1992 release Check Your Head, an admitted departure for the trio, who, as they had in their punk rock days, returned to playing their own instruments. “We kinda got back into it from the stuff we were sampling on our other records,” Yauch told Gary Graff of the Detroit Free Press. “A lot of the records we were listening to [in order] to find loops and samples had really amazing playing on it. We had a lot of funk records that had these really great instrumentals. You listen to that playing, and … it got us into playing again.”

Though Alan Light commented in Rolling Stone that “it remains to be seen … whether people are ready for rappers playing their own instruments for the first time,” it took only a week for Check Your Head to break into the Top Ten. Some reviewers found the album—an eclectic blend of styles ranging from funk to punk—“murky and messy,” in the words of a People contributor. Spin’s Steven Blush, however, declared that “what makes Check Your Head so vital and timely is the groove quotient. No longer silly, yet steadfastly sardonic, the Beasties take their rap-rock hybrid audience on an aural joyride.”

Despite the skepticism of many critics after the hugely successful Licensed to III was followed by the poor sales of Paul’s Boutique, the Beastie Boys, as they demonstrated with the release of Check Your Head, continue to earn notice in the music industry for their rambunctious forays into a variety of genres. “If there’s a secret to the Beastie Boys’ survival,” Light remarked, “it is [their] willingness to wear their influences on their raggedy sleeves. They have never claimed to be anything they’re not or to play anything but music they like listening to.”