Beastie Boys
The Beastie Boys, an American hip-hop trio from New York City, once set off a worldwide run of car thefts without ever touching a car. Around the time their debut album came out, Mike D began appearing on stage and in publicity photographs with a large Volkswagen emblem hanging from a chain-link necklace. Fans trying to copy him started taking the emblems off vehicles around the world. The band behind that craze was made up of Michael Diamond, known as Mike D, Adam Yauch, known as MCA, and Adam Horovitz, known as Ad-Rock.
Their story raises questions that this documentary will chase. How did a group that began as a hardcore punk outfit end up ruling the hip-hop charts? Why did an album that stalled on release later get hailed as a landmark? And what did three friends do with their fame once one of them started organizing huge benefit concerts for a cause far from home?
The Young Aborigines formed in 1979, a couple of years before anyone called them the Beastie Boys. Michael Diamond had already played in the Walden Jazz Band and a group called BAN. Then, in the summer of 1981, bassist Jeremy Shatan left New York City. Diamond, guitarist John Berry and drummer Kate Schellenbach kept playing, and Adam Yauch took over the bass.
In a 2007 interview with Charlie Rose, Yauch said that Berry suggested the name. The band later claimed that Beastie stood for Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Inner Excellence. In that same interview, Yauch and Diamond admitted the acronym was an afterthought, invented once the name was already chosen.
Berry's loft in the city hosted the first Beastie Boys show. From there the band opened for Bad Brains, the Dead Kennedys, the Misfits and Reagan Youth. They played CBGB, A7, Trude Heller's and Max's Kansas City, and they were on the bill at Max's on its closing night. In November 1982 they recorded a 7-inch EP called Polly Wog Stew at 171A studios. It is an early recorded example of New York hardcore.
On the 13th of November 1982, the band played the birthday of a filmmaker named Philip Pucci at the Preston Drama Dance Department Theatre at Bard College. Pucci was shooting a short concert film called Beastie. He handed a half dozen 16 mm Bell & Howell Filmo cameras and some 16 mm Bolex cameras to audience members, so they could film from their own point of view. A master sync sound camera filmed from the balcony of the abandoned theater. The opening act was the Young and the Useless, with Adam Horovitz as lead singer. The film gave the Beastie Boys their first appearance in a published motion picture. Years later the band licensed a one-minute clip for the Capitol Records home video Skills to Pay the Bills, which the RIAA certified Gold.
Berry left in 1982 and went on to form Thwig, Big Fat Love and Bourbon Deluxe. Horovitz, who had grown close to the band as a friend, replaced him.
In 1983 the group recorded its first hip-hop track, Cooky Puss. It was built on a prank call the band had made to a Carvel Ice Cream franchise. The song headlined the first EP by the new lineup, which was also called Cooky Puss, and it was the first work to show their use of samples and underground rap. It quickly became a hit in the underground dance clubs of New York. Soon a New York University student would be spinning records at their shows.
Rick Rubin was a New York University student when the Beastie Boys hired him as their DJ. Rubin recalled that he met Mike first and took him for arrogant. Then he said, "Through spending time with the Beasties I grew to see that they had this great sense of humor." Rubin was soon producing records. He formed Def Jam Recordings with Russell Simmons and asked the band to record for the new label.
In 1984, as the group moved toward rap, Schellenbach was fired and Diamond moved to drums. In their 2018 memoir, Ad-Rock said he regretted the firing. He tied it to her not fitting what he called the "new tough-rapper-guy identity".
The 12-inch single Rock Hard, from 1984, was the second Def Jam record to credit Rubin as producer. The first was It's Yours by T La Rock and Jazzy Jay. In 1985 the Beastie Boys supported Madonna on the Virgin Tour, her first concert series. On the 22nd of July 1986 they opened for Public Image Ltd., the band of John Lydon after the Sex Pistols. Later that year they joined the Raising Hell tour with Run-DMC, Whodini, LL Cool J and the Timex Social Club. That exposure helped Hold It Now, Hit It reach Billboard's R&B and dance charts.
Licensed to Ill came out on the 15th of November 1986, and Rolling Stone reviewed it favorably. It became the first rap album to reach number 1 on the Billboard 200, where it stayed for five weeks. It also climbed to number 2 on the Top R&B album chart. It was the fastest-selling debut in Def Jam's history, with more than nine million copies sold. The fourth single, (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!), reached number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its video, directed by Ric Menello and Adam Dubin, became an MTV staple. Despite more than 26 million records sold in the US, it remains the only single the group ever took into the top twenty there. In the UK, No Sleep till Brooklyn peaked at number 14.
The world tour that followed in 1987 was troubled by lawsuits and arrests, with the band accused of provoking crowds. On the 30th of May 1987, a show at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool erupted into a riot about 10 minutes after the group walked on stage. Merseyside Police arrested Horovitz and charged him with assault causing grievous bodily harm. Another controversial concert that year, in Columbus, Georgia, led the city to pass a lewdness ordinance.
Def Jam stopped paying the Beastie Boys for work they had already done, and they left the label for Capitol Records. Before that, in 1988, the band appeared in Tougher Than Leather, a film Rubin directed as a star vehicle for Run-D.M.C. and Def Jam.
Paul's Boutique arrived on the 25th of July 1989. Produced by the Dust Brothers, it stitched together an eclectic web of samples and has been called an early work of experimental hip-hop. It reached only number 14 on the US album chart and could not match the sales of its predecessor. Acclaim came later. Rolling Stone placed it at number 156 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and the Apple Music 100 Best Albums list ranks it at number 48.
For Check Your Head, the band recorded at its own G-Son studio in Atwater Village, California. The Dutch group Urban Dance Squad inspired them to play instruments themselves. Mike D took the drums, Yauch the bass and Horovitz the guitar, with Mark Ramos Nishita, known as Keyboard Money Mark, on keyboards. Mario Caldato, Jr., who had helped produce Paul's Boutique, engineered the record and became a longtime collaborator. Released in 1992, it was certified double Platinum and peaked at number 10 on the Billboard 200. So What'cha Want reached number 93 on the Hot 100. The album mixed funk and jazz on tracks like Lighten Up with a hardcore return on Time for Livin', a cover of a 1974 Sly and the Family Stone song. Its heavier rock sound has been called a precursor to nu metal.
Ill Communication, released in 1994, debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200. The video for Sabotage, directed by Spike Jonze, got heavy rotation on MTV. That year the band headlined Lollapalooza alongside the Smashing Pumpkins. In 1995, tickets for an arena tour went on sale, and Madison Square Garden and Chicago's Rosemont Horizon sold out within 30 minutes. The group also played South America and Southeast Asia for the first time. Along the way they made Aglio e Olio, eight songs that last just 11 minutes and look back to their punk roots.
The band also built its own label, Grand Royal, which it owned until 2001. The roster included Luscious Jackson, Sean Lennon and the Australian artist Ben Lee. Its first independent release was Luscious Jackson's In Search of Manny in 1993. Grand Royal also published a magazine that ran for six issues between 1993 and 1997. The first issue carried a cover story on Bruce Lee, artwork by George Clinton, and interviews with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest.
A piece on the mullet in the 1995 issue produced one of the band's oddest legacies. The Oxford English Dictionary cites it as the first published use of the word, alongside the lyrics of the band's 1994 song Mullet Head. The dictionary says the term was "apparently coined, and certainly popularized" by the group.
Hello Nasty sold 681,000 copies in the US in its first week after release on the 14th of July 1998. The band had begun the album at G-Son in 1995, then kept working in New York City after Yauch moved to Manhattan in 1996. The record added DJ Mix Master Mike and leaned on bombastic beats, rap samples and experimental sounds. It went straight to number 1 in the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden. It reached number 2 in Canada and Japan.
At the 1999 Grammy Awards the group won Best Alternative Music Album for Hello Nasty and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group for Intergalactic. No band had ever won in both the rap and alternative categories. The MTV Video Music Awards honored them with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award in 1998, and Intergalactic took Best Hip Hop Video in 1999.
On the 1998 arena tour, the band worked with Ian C. Rogers to offer live downloads of its performances to fans. Capitol Records briefly removed them from its website. The Beastie Boys were among the first bands to offer MP3 downloads on their own site, and the response won them an article in The Wall Street Journal.
The two-CD anthology The Sounds of Science followed in 1999 and reached number 19 on the Billboard 200. Its one new song, Alive, hit number 11 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart. In 2000 the band planned to co-headline the Rhyme and Reason Tour with Rage Against the Machine and Busta Rhymes. Mike D hurt himself in a bicycle accident, with a fifth-degree acromioclavicular joint dislocation, and needed surgery and long rehabilitation. The tour was canceled. By the time he recovered, Rage Against the Machine had disbanded, although the band reunited seven years later.
Mike D spent that Christmas recording Country Mike's Greatest Hits, an album he gave to friends and family. In 2001 Horovitz's side project BS 2000 released Simply Mortified. In 2002 Yauch started building a new studio in downtown Manhattan called Oscilloscope Laboratories, and the band began its next album there. To the 5 Boroughs came out worldwide on the 15th of June 2004. It was the first album the group produced itself and went to number 1 on the Billboard albums chart. Ch-Check It Out reached number 1 in Canada and on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart, after first appearing on the TV show The O.C. on the 28th of April 2004.
The album also drew an accusation that it installed spyware on computers. The band denied it. European copies carried Macrovision CDS-200 copy protection, which the band said was standard for EMI and Capitol releases there and installs no permanent software. For their next record, The Mix-Up, they chose to go entirely instrumental. A mailing-list email on the 1st of May 2007 said so plainly, in the band's usual joking tone. The Mix-Up came out on the 26th of June 2007 and won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Album at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards in 2008.
While hiking in Nepal, Adam Yauch spoke with Tibetan refugees, and the conversations changed what he did with his fame. In 1994 he and the activist Erin Potts organized the Tibetan Freedom Concert to draw attention to China's human rights violations in Tibet. The same year, the band played three benefit shows in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C. The money went to the Milarepa Fund, which works to raise awareness of Tibetan human rights and of the Dalai Lama's exile. The band also dedicated the royalties from Shambala and Bodhisattva Vow, two songs on Ill Communication, to the fund.
On the 1995 arena tour, one dollar from each ticket went through Milarepa to local charities in each tour city. In 1996 Yauch organized a two-day festival at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It drew over 100,000 people and was the largest rock benefit show since Live Aid in 1985. The concerts became annual and then international. Acts included Live, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe of R.E.M., Rage Against the Machine, the Smashing Pumpkins and U2. The 19th and 20th editions were held in Tokyo and Taipei, and the Taipei show was the band's first appearance in Taiwan.
The band also used its television moments for politics. At the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, Yauch spoke at length about Muslims being stereotyped as terrorists. He did so a month after the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. At the 1999 ceremony, Horovitz spoke about the sexual assaults and rapes reported at Woodstock 99. He argued that bands and festivals needed to take concert security far more seriously.
In October 2001, after the September 11 attacks, the group organized and headlined the New Yorkers Against Violence Concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom. In 2003 it released a protest song against the Iraq war, In a World Gone Mad, as a free download. It appeared on the Milarepa site, the MTV site, MoveOn.org and Win Without War. For their 2007 summer tour, they partnered with Reverb, a non-profit environmental organization.
Six seconds of flute from a recording called Choir by the musician James Newton ended up in a federal court. In 1992 the band sampled the opening six seconds of Newton's sound recording and repeated them as a background element through various versions of Pass the Mic. They held a license from ECM Records for the recording itself. They did not get a license from Newton for the underlying composition.
Newton sued, claiming the band had infringed his copyright in the composition. The district court granted summary judgment to the Beastie Boys. It ruled that the three-note segment lacked the originality needed to be copyrightable, and an appeals court affirmed. The decision became known as Newton v. Diamond. The judge wrote that the band's use of a brief segment of the composition, "consisting of three notes separated by a half-step over a background C note", was not enough to support a claim of infringement.
The band was just as ready to defend its own music. After a British Airways commercial sampled the song Beastie Revolution, the band threatened to sue over the use. The airline promptly paid $40,000 in royalties.
A much bigger case came in June 2014, when the Beastie Boys won a lawsuit against Monster Energy. The company had used parts of Sabotage, So What'cha Want, Make Some Noise and Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun in a commercial without permission. The court awarded $1.7 million in damages plus $668,000 in legal fees. The case matched a rule that Yauch's will itself set down, forbidding the use of Beastie Boys music in advertisements.
In February 2009, Yauch told the press that the band's next album had taken them in a "bizarre" new direction, a mix of playing and sampling obscure records as they played. Its first working title was Tadlock's Glasses. Yauch explained that years earlier the band had a bus driver named Tadlock who drove Elvis's backup singers, and Elvis gave him a pair of glasses of which he was proud.
On the 25th of May 2009, the band announced on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon that the album would be called Hot Sauce Committee. It included a collaboration with Santigold on Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win. In June the group played Bonnaroo and performed Too Many Rappers with Nas. It was the last live performance by the Beastie Boys as a trio.
On the 20th of July, Yauch announced that he had a cancerous tumor in his parotid gland and a lymph node. The band canceled tour dates, including headline spots at the Osheaga Festival in Montreal and at All Points West in Jersey City, and postponed the album. In October 2010 an email to fans announced that Part 1 was delayed indefinitely but Part 2 would arrive on time. A week later another email explained that Part 2 would now contain the same 16 tracks originally planned for Part 1. Yauch admitted it was strange and confusing but said that after a year and a half of sequencing, it was the only arrangement that worked. Hot Sauce Committee Part Two reached stores on the 3rd of May 2011 in the US. Days earlier, the band streamed the album online by beatbox from inside Madison Square Garden.
In December 2011 the group was announced as a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee. On the 14th of April 2012, Chuck D and LL Cool J inducted them. Yauch was admitted to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital that same day and could not attend. Black Thought, Travie from Gym Class Heroes and Kid Rock performed a medley instead. Diamond and Horovitz read aloud a letter Yauch had written.
Yauch died of cancer on the 4th of May 2012, at the age of 47. Mike D told Rolling Stone that the band would likely disband, and in June 2014 he confirmed that he and Ad-Rock would not make music as the Beastie Boys. John Berry, the founding guitarist who suggested the name, died on the 19th of May 2016, aged 52, from frontotemporal dementia.
The survivors told their story in a memoir, Beastie Boys Book, in October 2018. Spike Jonze adapted it into the documentary Beastie Boys Story, which premiered on Apple TV+ in April 2020. A compilation album, Beastie Boys Music, followed in October 2020.
The band's influence runs through hip-hop and rock. Eminem has said that the Beastie Boys, along with LL Cool J, were the reason he got into rap. Artists including Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit, Sublime and Blur have also cited them. UFC president Dana White keeps a bass guitar signed by all three members in his office. In 2020, Spin ranked the group as the 12th-most influential artist of the previous 35 years.
In 2022 the New York City Council voted to rename the intersection of Ludlow and Rivington streets in Manhattan's Lower East Side as Beastie Boys Square. The vote passed on the 14th of July 2022, after a grassroots campaign begun in 2013 by the historian LeRoy McCarthy. A first proposal in 2014 had been voted down. The square was formally renamed on the 9th of September 2023, the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, at the spot photographed for the cover of Paul's Boutique.
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Common questions
Who were the members of the Beastie Boys?
The Beastie Boys were Michael Diamond (Mike D), Adam Yauch (MCA) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), an American hip-hop trio formed in New York City in 1981. Early members also included guitarist John Berry and drummer Kate Schellenbach.
What was the first Beastie Boys album and how did it perform?
The first Beastie Boys album was Licensed to Ill, released on the 15th of November 1986. It became the first rap album to reach number 1 on the Billboard 200, stayed there five weeks and sold more than nine million copies.
Why did Beastie Boys start the Tibetan Freedom Concert?
Adam Yauch started the Tibetan Freedom Concert with activist Erin Potts in 1994 to raise awareness of China's human rights violations in Tibet. He became aware of the issue after speaking with Tibetan refugees while hiking in Nepal.
What was the Beastie Boys Newton v. Diamond sampling case?
Newton v. Diamond was a sampling case in which musician James Newton sued over a six-second flute sample from Choir used in Pass the Mic. The courts ruled that the three-note segment was not enough to support a copyright infringement claim.
When and how did the Beastie Boys break up?
The Beastie Boys disbanded after Adam Yauch died of cancer on the 4th of May 2012, at age 47. In June 2014, Mike D confirmed that he and Ad-Rock would not make music under the Beastie Boys name.
Where is Beastie Boys Square?
Beastie Boys Square is the intersection of Ludlow and Rivington streets in Manhattan's Lower East Side, the location of the Paul's Boutique album cover. The New York City Council approved the name on the 14th of July 2022, and it was renamed on the 9th of September 2023.
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- 186Chuck D on Public Enemy's Two New LPs: "fraternal twins."Greg Prato — Rollingstone — April 6, 2012
- 187The Pop Life; Two Rap Groups Plan Extensive Summer TourNytimes — May 20, 1987
- 188Magazine25 Years Ago: Beastie Boys Release 'Check Your Head'Chad Childers — April 21, 2017
- 189MagazineBeastie Boys, Rollins Band Shake Up NYCMichael Azerrad — January 21, 1993
- 190MagazineBEASTIE BOYS' RAP UNCHECKEDJoe Brown — May 22, 1992
- 191BookThe Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie BoysAlan Light — Three Rivers Press — 2006