here’s certainly a case to be made that Michael Diamond, Adam Yauch, and Adam Horowitz have been more cultural pillagers than tourists, but it’s one I’m afraid I’m not interested in pursuing right now. Granted, it’s easy to dismiss the Beastie Boys’ ten-plus year Bowie-like excursion through sloppy hardcore punk to irony-suffused lounge pop as essentially dilettantish, but, really, what iconic dabblers weren’t? Just as the Beatles-era fascination with Eastern mysticism is traceable to William Butler Yeats and his antecedents, and Darby Crash and Rimbaud end up looking more and more alike these days aside from that whole burn-out-or-fade-away thing, we end up finding out that (to borrow something Bowie himself once said) pop music and poetry is by its very nature an enterprise that depends on appropriation and pretense: ideas are accumulated that power the artistic engine, sincerity aside. Of course, sincerity isn’t the first thing we think about when we think about the Beasties—good-natured, doofy-guys-hanging-out together vibe of their last two albums aside—and as a result I’m even less interested in discussing it than usual. Instead, let’s take a look at all the debris Mike D, Ad Rock (curious, indeed, that my Word 2000 spellchecker recognizes his name; it always thinks I’m trying to type “KFC” when I type “Kafka”), and MCA accumulated on their musical journey, and how it’s affected the pop world at large.


The band has been laying low as of late, in a period that we may henceforth refer to as a dark time for their fans. They’ve fallen off the hipster radar, I’d say, despite their status as mid-nineties gods (some, though, might have pulled out their last album after hearing that the DFA were involved in its engineering). You could say they’re in some form of retirement, following the relatively unexpected collapse of Grand Royal sometime after their release of At The Drive-In’s Relationship of Command, and a few brief interviews I remember reading wherein Adam Yauch talked about giving up rapping altogether and Mike D predictably praised the Neptunes and reminisced about buying Public Image Limited records as a misguided youth (Adam Horowitz, married to Bikini Kill/Le Tigre legend Kathleen Hanna—now there’s a union few could have foreseen—has more or less stayed out of the limelight aside from another twilight release from Grand Royal as BS2000). The Sounds of Science retrospective-and-rarities collection, the Skills to Pay the Bills DVD, both issued since 1998’s Hello Nasty, seem to give off an air of quiet finality. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of the band reappearing with another single or two on par with Skills’ solid but underwhelming “Alive,” most likely produced by the Neptunes or whoever else is au courant. A guest-star studded farewell album could very well exist, and it has come to my attention that a new release is in the works, thanks to the band’s understated, classy, conscious-of-our-status-as-a-nostalgia-act (witness the slow dissolve of old publicity photos on the homepage) website. All of which seems increasingly comical given the graying trio’s origins as NYU wiseacres, an amateurish hardcore band who counted the son of a well-known Jewish playwright in its ranks, whose somewhat arch name initially stood for Boys Entering Anarchistic States Toward Internal Excellence...


The Beastie Boys, with Luscious Jackson’s Kate Schellenbach on drums, first appeared on vinyl with the Polly Wog Stew EP. Playing their first gig at Yauch’s 17th birthday party (as I read not long after starting my first “band” at roughly the same age in the liner notes to the retrospective—and unjustly maligned used-bin favorite—Some Old Bullshit), they went on to perform with the likes of Reagan Youth and Bad Brains, the group achieving something of a reputation. Nevertheless, the seven-inch attracted little attention; its Minor Threat pastiches (such as “Egg Raid on Mojo”), recorded in the same studio as the Bad Brains’ ROIR tape, have perhaps improved with age, given the record-collector-inspired preference for often bizarre imitations to the real thing that’s infected punk, new wave, and no-wave fandom as of late (look no further than the Beasties’ and Dust Brothers’ own preference for Pickwick compilation albums featuring oddball Beatles covers). It wasn’t until the band claimed to suddenly be purchasing more Sugarhill and Enjoy 12” hip-hop singles than Dischord catalog entries, however, that their first true canonical entry arrived: the “Cooky Puss” single.


For those who haven’t heard it, there’s not much I can say aside from the fact that it is, yes, something of a hip-hop artifact. It harkens back to the era where rap records themselves contained little in the way of lyrical skill—that was saved for the battle tapes the Beasties were reminiscing about (and indirectly hipping young fans to) in their new role as old-school revivalists on Ill Communication—but only intended to make the listener smile in some sort of recognition and dance. Take The Cold Crush Brothers’ “Punk Rock Rap,” which you’d swear was a piss-take of the three white rappers had it not come out before their early explorations in the genre: the terribly-acted intro sketch, the snotty imitative vocals (one sure sounds a lot like a kids’-show version of Jello Biafra), and the playful, hardly masculine sensibility all combine as something of a homage to the tough-looking guys no doubt proliferating around NYC street corners in the early eighties. Thus “Cooky Puss”—a sublimely stupid, innocent prank call to Carvel Ice Cream that today sounds about as timely as a Bowery Boys window-soaping—fulfilled much the same function. At the same time, of course, it was far more parodic; the too-amateurish-to-believe delirium of turntable “scratches” (listen for the band’s hardcore anthem backspun, as well as Steve Martin) offer only about a fifth of the deliberate aural shoddiness of it all. “Beastie Revolution,” the B-side, is a reggae goof-off that was improbably used without permission in a British Airways ad, garnering the band a large sum of money via lawsuit. Soon, the band had burned out on lukewarm punk rock and was playing New York’s Danceteria as an early incarnation of the goofball white-rapper outfit backed with a DJ, having yet to develop the winning frat-boy parody schtick that would prove to be both their greatest curse and blessing.


Whether it was lawsuit money, that earned playing shows, some other means of independent wealth, or Rick Rubin’s (brutally opinionated American Hardcore author Steven Blush lampoons Rubin as a fellow student with “plenty of Daddy’s money to throw around”) that resulted in their 1984 signing and recording of the “She’s On It” single for 1985’s Krush Groove, none can say. Rubin and Russell Simmons had by this time formed Def Jam Records, and it wasn’t long until the Beasties were opening for fellow Danceteria mainstay Madonna Ciccone. One can only hypothesize that it was on this tour that the band honed their preternatural instinct for audience-baiting and general obnoxiousness (the latter both onstage and off, though rumor has it that Yauch was, yes, romantically linked with Madonna at one point), resulting in the cultural production of the self-aggrandizing personae that, throughout 1986 and 1987, were spraying caged go-go dancers with beer, clowned around with a giant inflatable penis, sparked innumerable legal controversies and British tabloid headlines, smoked a ton of angel dust, etc.


It’s a mystery just how, but the Beasties tapped into a cultural zeitgeist for rudeness that was perhaps untopped until late-Clinton America. There’s something about this era in our culture—seemingly trapped in some perpetual war of impulses between Freudian anality and phallic obsession—that already seems a bit distant in more recent years, where grim microbe death and grimmer, “Dirrty”-style sex is the cultural cocktail of the day. (Born Against’s Sam McPheeters eulogized it recently: “America has become a giant Spencer’s Gifts. Who could have imagined, at the start of the 90’s, that Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole would end the decade as a boner pill salesman?”) The Licensed to Ill (original, much-apologized-for title: Don’t Be a Faggot) brand of outrage was much simpler, its insolence a mere foot-in-the-door pretext for its turd-in-the-punchbowl single-mindedness. To say that this was music for rebellion is not exactly correct, but it certainly captured some puerile impulse in all its glory. It may well be timeless, really, guaranteed airtime blasting out of dorm room windows well into the next three or four decades. It quickly achieved status as the pervasive soundtrack to multiple teen escapades—both in actuality and onscreen just witness the VW-medallion-adorned class clowns in Cusack movies and TV series like Canada’s Degrassi Junior High—based on its infectious formula: the strut of 808 beats, simplistic, immediately familiar rock riffing (Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were quick to be dusted off from stoner milk-crates and brought into the fray on Licensed’s opening salvo, thus ensuring its place in a certain canon), and ludicrous, nasal lyricism on the order of “Man, living at home is such a drag! / Your mom threw away your best porno mag!” The now-famous hit, which did a great deal to ensure the popularity of “party” as a verb, pales in comparison to some other items on display here, such as the Run DMC-penned “Brass Monkey.” (Jam Master Jay manned the turntables during the sessions, and Slayer’s Kerry King has been long rumored to have provided riffs and solo alike on “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn.”)


Imagining the critical response to the record today seems either ridiculously simple or ridiculously difficult, in this post-Eminem era of cultural-studies-mad Village Voice critics who talk about fragmentation of the self and intertextuality and Bill-O’Reilly-esque chest-thumpers alike. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most of it came from the latter side of the spectrum; the album doesn’t seem nearly art-friendly enough, its brand of hip-hop lacking the immutable coolness of Run DMC or the smug nihilism of Dead-Boys-era punk. Just as Black Flag’s Damaged was too unhinged and fucked-up to attract anything but outrage and the-end-is-nigh censure, the Beasties’ punk-infused, almost Andy-Kaufman-esque parodies of frat culture—which signaled an early kinship to Spike Jonze’s deadpan prankster stance—were too dorky, too asinine, to commandeer anything but the most sheepish form of critical respect. The band’s most ardent fans, meanwhile, were probably the ones who were most likely to be missing the point. (This would happen about six years later with Beavis and Butthead.) Of course, the much-reviled album had by this time become the first rap record to hit #1.


Some readers may fondly reminisce about Licensed to Ill as their first cassette tape purchase. This recollection usually is directly followed with one about learning, with the help of an older brother, that the tail number on the cover art’s demolished airplane spelled out “Eat Me” when held up to a mirror. But I was not one of these people. I was an only child, for one thing. My parents tried desperately to steer me away from rock music at the age of six or seven, and it was only while clandestinely watching the forbidden MTV with my dad that I saw the “Fight For Your Right” video. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, though I remember him laughing uproariously. I essentially lacked what could have been called a normal sense of humor at the time, so I think I identified (perhaps even pitied) the nerdy antiheroes of the video who, you may recall, wanted nothing more than to have soda and pie. Obviously, the references to Spanish fly were lost on me, but I might have had some idea what was going on when one nerd emerged from the bathroom, clothing disheveled, lipstick on his face, draped in toilet paper. But then the pie-in-the-face freeze-frame occurred—I probably laughed at that, though, again, I was discouraged from watching Three Stooges shorts and Looney Tunes alike as a youngster—and it was all over as soon as it had begun. I think MTV followed this up with the announcement of a contest wherein viewers could meet the Beastie Boys, or maybe a man-on-the-street interlude wherein bystanders were asked if they’d let their daughter date MCA, bad-boy extraordinaire, or maybe the Beastie Boys themselves appeared on location at Ft. Lauderdale, site of the budding spring break phenomenon, to say something like, “I like chicken, and I like steak! / We’re the Beastie Boys and we’re... on... Spring... Break! Eighty-Seven!!! ” Or maybe they played “Walk This Way” again. I used to love to draw Steven Tyler and the band in colored pencil on the back of leftover sheafs of dot-matrix-glitch-addled computer paper my dad brought home from the office.


Whatever my opinion was, any public persona the trio may have had was virtually indistinguishable from who they may have been in real life. Interestingly, the same was becoming true within the world at large. Worse the wear for on-the-road partying and a bitter, protracted lawsuit with Rubin and Simmons, the band vanished in 1988 and ended up (after Yauch used his modest tour earnings to produce an unheard hardcore supergroup demo) relocating to California and presumably taking a lot of drugs. The long slouch towards maturation had begun, in one way or another.


It was when the band met with the Dust Brothers, an upstart production duo who would prove responsible for pop-rap smashes with Tone-Loc and Young M.C. Though the landscape of hip-hop had changed considerably in the interim between their last appearance on vinyl and their upcoming one, there were still a sufficient number of good-natured rapping goofballs on the airwaves, such that a slightly altered Beastie persona could prove commercially viable. In the meantime, Public Enemy’s emergence did not go unacknowledged by the band; they opened for them at one point (as immortalized on Fear of a Black Planet’s “Incident at 66.6 FM”) and were sampled on the forthcoming “Eggman,” which also began the slightly problematic process the trio took of reclaiming their punk roots. Legend—though it is, like all legends, unreliable—has it that the Dust Brothers played the Beasties tracks for a kaleidoscopic instrumental hip-hop album they had painstakingly assembled from countless samples, and that the rest was history.


Paul’s Boutique has been written about at great length, both on this site and elsewhere, particularly in the post-Odelay age. However, what’s rarely discussed, aside from its epic mixture of obscure soul, rock, funk, and whatever else happened to be lying around that sounded dope, is how the album somehow managed to predate the national obsession with seventies revival culture—which, of course, though we may be in its waning days, and only us postpunk-obsessed rock critics, has outlasted the decade in question—by a good four or five years. On the one hand, Paul’s, gatefold panoramic art, kaleidoscopic Capitol label and all, is a retro-inspired salute to the essentially sixties conceit of an album as a conceptual whole (did I at one time hear rumors about the band playing a few sporadic shows in support of the record, wearing Sgt. Pepper suits? The [literally] impressionistic “Shadrach” video is an additional nod towards psychedelic bliss), but on the other it’s a very modern—or, y’know, postmodern—idiomatic mash-up. It would, however, be the only grasp at a coherent whole (as on the downright breathtaking “B-Boy Bouillabaisse”) on behalf of the band: the late triptych Beasties albums would tend towards a fragmented aesthetic, with live instrumentals, terse punk interludes, and the like.


Between these two poles of recording strategy would seem to lie the theoretical blueprint for much of the 1990s’ most memorable music, from Endtroducing... to Post to Wowee Zowee. It’s no coincidence that DJ Shadow opened for the Beasties, Björk was treated to a Donovan-sampling remix by them, and that Pavement were often mentioned in the same sentence as the band in the Lollapalooza/Tibetan Freedom Concert eras, along with a loose coalition that crew to include Stereolab, Sonic Youth, and even the Boredoms. For listeners like myself, the Beasties would begin to act, like Nirvana, as ambassadors in a sense, introducing us to new artists. On the less critically well-received front, we probably have them to thank for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.


But in 1989, the Beastie Boys were about to enter a deep hibernation. Paul’s Boutique was more or less ignored upon release, and the waning years of MC Hammer/Vanilla Ice pop-rap takeover would soon be ushered in, continuing to alter the status of hip-hop in relation to mainstream musical culture; De La Soul, meanwhile, managed to succeed at accomplishing the same goal as Paul’s, though a sample lawsuit from the Turtles would have dire consequences for hip-hop production.


The second time I saw the Beastie Boys on MTV was 1992. I believe I was more or less allowed to watch it by this time, and I enjoyed the likes of Metallica, Nirvana and, when it premiered, Sonic Youth’s “100%” video, despite a near-complete lack of understanding of just what exactly they were about. (Of course, I also loved Madonna and Deee-Lite and the B-52’s and the local oldies station, which was more often than not my listening choice when playing Nintendo. Really, the only music video I insisted on skipping whenever it came around was one by the Indigo Girls.) Suddenly the band was on House of Style with Cindy Crawford, explaining the origins of their grunge- and skate-derived “anti-style.” I recall the program making a big deal of this, as the band was shown perusing the racks at a Goodwill, picking out threadbare T-shirts with obscure mottos on them and baggy Dickies. Vintage sneakers had something to do with it, too. This was all more than a bit confusing to me, but in the same sense it was almost somewhat revelatory. I was beginning to understand the implications of subculture, in an extremely simple sense. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew what I wouldn’t want to be. The clothes had something to do with it. High schools across the country would probably say the same thing. Soon I became fascinated with the video for “So Whatcha Want,” all chintzy psychedelic tinting, stock footage, and shots of the band alternately looking bored, grimacing into the camera, and jumping up and down, wearing knit hats and flannel. In 1993, Beck’s “Loser” would have a similar effect.


Check Your Head was a unique affair. The grainy black-and-white cover, offset with a color booklet collage evoking There’s a Riot Goin’ On and a shot of the band in the studio, revealed its contents as something of a mishmash. There were downtempo soul instrumentals featuring “Money” Mark Nishita, usually laced with plenty of wah-wah guitar. There were of course the standard sample-based raps, but this time they arrived with an abrasive, lo-fi edge, with emphasis on LP surface noise and improbable, campy soundbites: “Professor, what’s another word for pirate treasure? Well, I think it’s booty!” A mellow, stoned obscurantism was also the order of the day; while Paul’s contained a pop-art aspect to its soundscapes, the point of them often (as on “The Sounds of Science”) being that one should recognize the source material, things were a lot harder to pick out this time around. Lyrics were shouted through fuzzed-out distortion, as they would be on the next record. Live instrumentation—over which a great deal of fuss was made at the time—coexisted with sampled music, and was often difficult to distinguish from it. ECM new-age was sampled on “Pass the Mic” (with another skateboard-inspired video; the subculture was undergoing one of its periodic renaissances, as the presence of magazines like Spike Jonze’s Dirt, the male counterpart to Sassy, explained. Mainstream youth culture had become quite a different arena than it was in the previous decade). The album-closing “Namasté” offered a portent in the form of Adam Yauch’s first flirtation with Buddhism. The album, meanwhile, was a much-imitated hit—both on the pop charts and on college radio—in the now-changed landscape of alternative, and alternative-aspiring, music.


Unfortunately, it was also the last Beastie Boys release that it seems any music critics can agree upon having any merit. Ill Communication, released two years later, is not only a mixed bag musically but in terms of quality. In many ways a retread of its predecessor, with a slightly more refined hip-hop aesthetic—the crate-digging ethos, with beats purloined from Moog novelty albums, began to prevail, while Q-Tip makes a memorable cameo, surely pleasing the audience’s collegiate hip-hop fanbase—the album succeeds as a whole, but contains little in terms of truly memorable music (some awful throwaway lyrics, muddled when they aren’t blindingly stupid, don’t help) aside from the minor classic “Sabotage,” a piece of rap-rock fusion that earned no shortage of notoriety for its silly, now overplayed but once groundbreaking Spike Jonze cop-show parody video.


1994 saw the Beasties co-headline Lollapalooza with The Smashing Pumpkins along with a diverse line-up, but the previous year more importantly saw the launch of Grand Royal magazine, which probably manages to trump anything issued on its co-named label for cultural relevance. Essentially a glorified zine, it allowed the band to create a cosmology of its own heroes and interests—Lee “Scratch” Perry, Bruce Lee, Sick Of It All, Mike Watt, The Pharcyde, and the ’71-’72 Lakers, to name a few (just about all of whom are mentioned in the online-vintage first issue, which currently resides, Sun AU clips and all, among broken banner ads on the now defunct Grand Royal site). It’s a safe bet that we have the magazine to thank for the resurgence and reissue of Perry’s work, at the very least. Eking out a sensibility of its own, the band and other contributors were known to supply everything from tour diaries and record shopping tips (I know the first time I heard about Can was somewhere in its pages, likewise for Thurston Moore’s list of top free jazz recordings and the 1996 issue largely dedicated to the Moog) to Fugazi and Bikini Kill concert reviews. Believe it or not, we even have the Jonze co-edited mag to thank for the now hideously overplayed phenomenon of mullet humor. In short, it remained for its six-issue run a hipster’s bible for guys in ringer tees and baggy cords. By the time I was a junior in high school, I was more or less worshipping it, along with DJ Shadow and the newly heroic Wu-Tang Clan. Odelay, which I remember running out to buy on tape after seeing the “Where It’s At” video on 120 Minutes, was another crucial ur-text of sorts at the time, but that’s another (if not entirely unrelated) story.


After the release of a brief hardcore EP and a late-in-the-Lounge-Nation-craze compilation of the band’s instrumentals, anticipation was high for the 1998 Hello Nasty, which more or less delivered on the equation. Maybe Dave Matthews fans were a bit perturbed at the presence of lounge jazz numbers featuring guest vocals by Miho Hatori (of Cibo Matto, another Grand Royal discovery), as well as the bizarre Paul-Mauriat-influenced big-band psychedelia of “Song For the Man,” a putdown of sexism. However, Mixmaster Mike was present on a large number of bizarre, analog-funk-infused songs—we’ll overlook a drum-and-bass flirtation and tenderly sung ballads by the two Adams for the time being, and focus on tracks like the catchy, eccentric “Negotiation Limerick File” and “Intergalactic”—that, for me at least, seemed to mark a revival of the group’s creativity. (They did, after all, have the nerve to sample “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”) Returning to their old-school cadences was perhaps a wise move, though again a weird, unfocused blend of politically admirable sentiments and parodic goof-off lines made the lyrical content more or less irrelevant. In short, this was the sort of album one looked to for diversion, not nourishment.


Regardless of the relevance of their recent output, the Beasties deserve merit. Perhaps, though, they’ve achieved more lasting influence as cultural ambassadors rather than pillagers. One could argue that the likes of Limp Bizkit were the ones who took the Licensed to Ill cues and ran blindly with them in the wrong direction, but I think there’s a certain breed of music listener, much like myself, for whom the band acted as a gateway to a great deal of new music, starting with, well, hip-hop itself. I can’t say I listen to any of their records, aside from Paul’s, with any regularity these days; Licensed gets pulled off my shelf more often for its epically moronic gatefold photograph than anything else. Still, it may not be hip anymore to be a fan of theirs, but I can’t help but feel that the band did a great deal to break down musical boundaries in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and for that, they’ll always hold a place in my list of personal influences.