Beastie Boys

The Beastie Boys were the first white group to offer a successful send-up of rap. After emerging from New York's hardcore punk underground of the early '80s, the group crossed over into the mainstream in 1986 with its first full-length album, Licensed to Ill, the first rap album to hit #1. Featuring "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)" (#7) and "Brass Monkey" (#48 pop, #83 R&B, 1987), the album sold 720,000 copies in six weeks, becoming one of Columbia’s fastest-selling debuts ever. By the late '80s, the Beastie Boys’ sound had begun to mature, expanding into spaced-out funk and psychedelia, yet retaining its adolescent charm and hit-making sensibility.

At 14, Adam Horovitz, son of playwright Israel Horovitz, joined the hardcore band the Young and the Useless. His friends Adam Yauch and Mike Diamond, children of wealthy New York families, had formed the four-piece hardcore band the Beastie Boys along with Kate Schellenbach, later of the group Luscious Jackson, and John Berry. By 1982 the Beasties had released a 7-inch EP, Polly Wog Stew, on the independent label Rat Cage. Horovitz joined shortly thereafter.

The Beasties’ first attempt at rap came with the 1983 12-inch spoof, “Cookie Puss,” based on a crank call they made to the Carvel ice cream company. It wasn’t until the trio teamed up with friend Rick Rubin - who would start the Def Jam label in his college dorm room the next year - that the Beasties began taking rap seriously. The marriage was perfect, producer Rubin working into the group’s bratty raps samples with appropriately white, upper-middle-class references: Led Zeppelin, heavy-metal guitar, and the theme to TV’s Mr. Ed.

With thumbs-up from Rubin’s then-partner, Russell Simmons, head of Rush Productions and manager of Run-D.M.C., the Beasties were signed to Def Jam in 1985. That same year they appeared in one of rap’s first movies, Krush Groove, with the single “She’s on It.” They also opened for Madonna’s Virgin Tour, during which they shouted obscenities to the audiences and got booed in return. In 1986 the trio toured with Run-D.M.C.’s violence-plagued Raisin’ Hell Tour.

Nineteen-eighty-seven was a watershed year for the Beasties. The success of “Fight for Your Right” led to the trio headlining their own tour, which was plagued by lawsuits, arrests, blame for violence and vandalism, and accusations of sexism and obscenity. In 1988 they appeared in Run-D.M.C.’s movie, Tougher Than Leather. The Beastie Boys broke with Rubin and Def Jam over financial and personal differences, and moved to L.A., where they met producers the Dust Brothers (John King and Mike Simpson). Together they created the long-awaited second album, Paul’s Boutique (#14, 1989), whose release on Capitol came three years after the Beasties’ debut - partially due to a bitter legal dispute with Rubin. The band made an artistic leap on the record, turning their obnoxious, white, bourgeois take on rap into a funky, album-long sound collage. The record produced the Top 40 song “Hey Ladies” (#36), but sold far less than Licensed to Ill.

It would be another three years until their third LP, Check Your Head (#10, 1992), an eclectic album on which the Beastie Boys picked up their instruments again, was released on their own Capitol-distributed Grand Royal label. The record marked the first appearance of longtime sidemen DJ Hurricane and keyboardist Money Mark (a.k.a. Mark Ramos Nishita). It broke the Top 10 in a week, even though it jumps stylistically from funk to rap to hardcore. In 1994 the Beasties released a compilation of their early hardcore singles and EPs as Some Old Bullshit (#46), followed by a new album, Ill Communication (#1 pop, #2 R&B, 1994), which continued in the eclectic (and successful) vein of Check Your Head and debuted at the top of the albums chart. That summer, the Beastie Boys joined Smashing Pumpkins, the Breeders, George Clinton, and other big names for Lollapalooza ’94 (as Luscious Jackson played on the second stage).

It would be four more years before the Beastie Boys released another full album of new material. Meanwhile, they demonstrated a lingering fondness for hardcore punk on the Aglio E Olio EP (1995), and collected old and new jazzy, soul-influenced instrumental tracks on The In Sound From Way Out! (#45, 1996).

Yauch had been responsible for some of the Beasties’ wildest behavior (with girls, drugs, and egg-throwing), but in the ’90s embraced Buddhism and organized the annual star-studded Tibetan Freedom Concert, which demanded independence for Tibet. Diamond assumed hands-on management of Grand Royal, which branched off into a short-lived magazine of the same name, and co-owned a clothing company called X-Large. In the late ’80s Horovitz dabbled in acting, married actor Ione Skye, and created the side project BS2000, releasing Simply Mortified in 2001.

After the hit Spike Jonze–directed video for “Sabotage,” the director and the Beasties began discussing doing a feature film. When those ideas fell through, the band began work on a new album. Hello Nasty (1998) debuted at #1 with 22 tracks of hip-hop, rock, soul, bossa nova, opera, salsa, and cutting-edge turntablism by Mixmaster Mike (replacing DJ Hurricane). The band toured that same year. The first single, “Intergalactic,” was accompanied by a video directed by Nathaniel Hornblower, a “Swiss independent filmmaker” (actually Yauch in lederhosen and a fake beard). Another tour scheduled for 2000 - to include coheadliner Rage Against the Machine - was canceled after Diamond was seriously injured in a bicycle accident. The Beastie’s returned with their June 2004 release of To The Five Burroughs, their first self-produced album recorded in honor of their native city after the attacks on September 11th. The Mix-Up, their newest all-instrumental project, debuted on June 26, 2007.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)