Bad Boys to men

By Phil Sutcliffe

June 13, 2004 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

London — “Hey, Buckingham Palace!” Mike Diamond says in high, pinched New York tones as the Beastie Boys’ minibus swings past the ugly royal pile. “Hence all the flags. And this is the Mall.”

Actually, Brits say “Mal,” not “Maul,” but yes. And America’s premier white rappers are playing a late-afternoon showcase gig for a select couple of hundred fans and assorted media right beside this historic ceremonial way.

The venue is the toney though not quite snobbish Institute for Contemporary Arts, mere yards from her majesty’s London residence.

“Well, there’s a nice juxtaposition,” the sociable Diamond muses as the trio disembarks, unnoticed, at the stage door. “When we first came here in 1987, Parliament debated whether to ban us from entering the country.”

Now in their late 30s, the Beastie Boys are respected senior citizens of hip-hop. Their new album, “To the 5 Boroughs,” is their first in six years, and it arrives this week garlanded with high hopes. Commercially, it’s expected to be one of the biggest hits of the summer. Artistically, it’s a de facto test of whether the once wild young rappers can grow older gracefully.

Back in the ‘80s, when mere mention of the name “Beastie Boys” gave officialdom conniptions, the group reigned unchallenged, Brats of the Decade. They rapped rude words. They drank beer onstage with an (often topless) woman dancing in a cage. Their most popular song invited fans to “Fight for Your Right (to Party).” And their show featured a 25-foot-tall hydraulic penis.

That was just the uncontested stuff. Days before that original U.K. tour, a tabloid launched a story that, at an all-star event in Switzerland, they had told a group of disabled children seeking autographs, “Go away, you ... cripples!” The story exploded in the British press. The band denied absolutely that it had done any such thing, but the mud had been slung, and those indignant members of Parliament fulminated.

For the young Beastie Boys it was one of many signs that their success had run out of control.

Middle-class sons of an interior designer (Diamond, now 37), an architect (Adam Yauch, 38) and a playwright (Adam Horovitz, 36), they got together in the early ‘80s and grew into rebellious, satirical rappers. Their debut album, “Licensed to Ill,” so captured the spirit of noisy youth in the Reagan era that it sped away toward an eventual 9 million U.S. sales. But, they acknowledge now, the well-brought-up boys tried too hard to be bad, and they’ve taken a long, slow road to find themselves as thoughtful, sophisticated souls.

A break for self-respect

Before the whirl of sound check, TV interview and live show, they shin up a ladder to sit on the flat roof of the arts institute and sun themselves while they talk, in seclusion, above the traffic’s hubbub and the babble of fans arriving on the street below.

At first, looking at those early days and those rather primitive versions of the people they are now, they squirm painfully at remembered “embarrassment” and even “humiliation” at temporarily becoming the boozy, macho boneheads they’d intended to mock.

“On the ‘Licensed to Ill’ tour we really homed in on being jackasses,” murmurs Yauch (alias MCA), who seems a kindly soul, except when it comes to self-criticism. “We were taking [a shot at] frat guys and then suddenly they were our whole audience and they were going, ‘Yaaaaaaaaah!’ ”

“When it first happened it was really exciting,” allows Diamond (Mike D). “Like being Led Zeppelin. Until we were saddled with being these characters from our own jokes.”

“It’s the become-what-you-hate theory,” says Horovitz (Ad-Rock). They had to stop. Recover their self-respect. With some distaste, he dredges up an apparently trivial moment from the “Licensed to Ill” tour aftermath -- “me and Yauch getting tickets from the cops for wearing beer helmets” -- and says that started “the transition” for him.

The latest manifestation of that odd transition from living out an essentially fictional brattishness is a rap called “An Open Letter to NYC” on the new album.

Warm yet largely unsentimental, it tackles their hometown’s deep, dense, collective emotions in the Sept. 11 aftermath. It champions the Statue of Liberty principle but embraces all the jostling touchiness of the city, too:

Writers, prize fighters and Wall Street traders

We come together on the subway cars.

Diversity unified, whoever you are.

On the L we’re doing swell

On the number 10 bus we fight and fuss.

In fact, the Beastie Boys’ studio reunion was triggered by the New Yorkers Against Violence benefit they organized in October 2001.

“It was a time when you would sit down and talk and really evaluate what’s important,” Diamond says. “What a lot of the world missed was just how caring New York became post-9/11. So we had to be sensitive in what we wrote, pick our shots. But you don’t want to sugarcoat it either. Bad stuff happened.

“There was racial hatred, mosques that needed police protection -- we shouldn’t shirk on that. Then, over the months, the tone switched from everybody being uncharacteristically helpful. Normal, mundane life came back. But it is this hopeful place, this incarnation of total diversity, always changing. In that sense, it’s a source of endless inspiration.”

However, back in the late ‘80s, trapped by that uncomfortable brat identity they’d foisted on themselves and spurred by a bitter dispute over money with their label, Def Jam, they felt they had to leave New York to rediscover themselves.

It did the trick. They hit it off with the Dust Brothers, a then-unknown production team, and made a landmark album, “Paul’s Boutique.” The transformation from rowdy party sounds into an unprecedented hybrid -- one critic dubbed the 1989 work “retro-funk-psychedelia” -- fell far short of the “Licensed” sales, yet over time brought them a new reputation as crucial hip-hop innovators.

They settled down, launched a label, Grand Royal, distributed through Capitol, and published their own magazine. On their records, the jokes, the “silliness” as they call it, never stopped coming. But there were also startling moments when they took less traveled roads.

With “Bodhisattva Vow,” from 1992’s “Check Your Head” album, Yauch declared his self-styled “hippie freak” adoption of Tibetan Buddhism. Suddenly, if the frats were still out there, the brats were telling them: “I put it down now so I’ll be sure / ... I pledge here before everyone who’s listening / To try to make my every action for the good of all beings.”

These days, Yauch says that although he has no regrets about making a public statement then, he doesn’t want to talk about “spirituality and religion” now because the subject seems such a source of current conflict.

Of course, his two old friends supported his declaration as a Beastie Boys track or it wouldn’t have made the album. Even though they didn’t “convert,” it meant a lot to them too.

“When your life is mostly going out to parties and clubs, getting messed up, whatever, and then you hear ideas like that. Well ...,” says Horovitz, a quiet fellow with an edge of anger to him who’s prone to leaving serious sentences unfinished.

“It’s a natural progression you make, hearing about philosophies you’ve never been exposed to before,” Diamond adds. “The novelty of your lifestyle wears off. And then what?”

Later, Horovitz picked up that heavy question himself with a song -- literally, he sang it, and rather sweetly -- somberly titled “Instant Death” (from the 1998 album “Hello Nasty”). Very short, it reflects on the deaths of his mother and of a close friend, nakedly expressing his own fear: “And where is my Mom / I need to show her that / She taught me / And please let me / Die an instant death.”

“Yeah, I dunno,” he says, none too willing to revisit those tough times. “It’s just about what we’re afraid of. Sometimes it’s OK to be more open and say these things out loud....”

The Beastie Boys had come a long way.

A political direction

Hereabouts, they drifted home to New York for no one reason apart from needing a walk (although Diamond is still “bicoastal,” his wife, Tamra Davis, being a movie director).

As Yauch puts it, “You go to L.A. to do something and you wind up like, ‘Is it really five years we’ve been out here?’ ” Going on eight, actually.

And now he’s gray-haired and Beastie Boys are rap veterans. At the same point in their careers, the Rolling Stones started talking about how their idols were Muddy Waters and Little Richard, and getting older never slowed them down. The trio ponders rap history for parallels before deciding, “No, in terms of people still making records, from our generation there’s LL Cool J, Ice-T, us, but no one earlier -- the precedent doesn’t exist.”

Certainly the urge to cling to their youth, the gang thing, is tangible in group banter -- they’re hungry to get a comic riff rolling, show an outsider a fancy verbal step or two.

But on “To the 5 Boroughs,” it’s their experience, wide interests and hard-won confidence that enable them to push hip-hop in yet another new direction: campaigning about liberal politics. In “It Takes Time,” they note, “We’ve got a president we didn’t elect / We need a little shift on over toward the left.”

Their intentions are blatant. “This being an election year gave us the incentive to get the album finished,” Diamond says. “Maybe we can influence a couple of people. Whether the political songs could cause a backlash, well, I guess we’ll find out....”

(Capitol Records CEO/President Andy Slater reckons it’s inappropriate for him to comment on the band’s politics but asserts he has no commercial concerns: “To me this record stands next to ‘Paul’s Boutique’ as their best piece of art. I have very little trepidation about it being successful.”)

Few bands have expressed so vividly how lucky they are to do what they do. Way back, in “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” in 1986, they wrote, “My job ain’t a job, it’s a damn good time” and in 1994’s “Root Down”: “It feels good to play a little music / Tears running down my face ‘cause I love to do it.”

They still feel that way, they concur, still full of the joys of hip-hop battle-tape put-downs and, conversely, of celebration of the life they’ve shared from their teens on (the records, the TV shows, and, their specialty as cheese freaks, “politickin’ at Murray’s Cheese Shop”).

Their short set at the arts institute is full of the old roughhouse belly-laugh rhyming.

“Making this album we’d walk into the studio, start talking, whatever’s on our minds, then loop up a two-bar, four-bar, eight-bar section of music and we sit down together with our notebooks writing,” Diamond says.

“We do that for hours,” Yauch says. “Then we notice Mike is on the floor crying with a laughing fit.”

“So you grab a hand-held mike and try a rough vocal real quick, and the others react to that, come up with something better, work on it, craft it,” Diamond says. “When we’re making a record we’re in this ideal, isolated world, the three of us. Sometimes when I get home I just start giggling and Tamra looks at me like, ‘OK, what is it now? This is what you do with your day?’ ”

And sometimes all this scribbling and giggling transports them to rapper heaven.

“It happened with ‘Ch-Check It Out,’ the first single off the new album. Looped up a couple of beats, threw some rhymes on it fast -- and it took shape,” recalls Yauch, savoring a trace of remembered wonderment.

“That’s why we keep on making records,” Diamond says. “You harness that energy into three minutes that sound good. You’re always going for that. Those moments together are ... beyond time.”

“They’re special,” Yauch says with a grin, sensing an enthusiastic lurch toward the pretentious.

You hug?

“No, but we nuzzle.”

Phil Sutcliffe is a London-based writer.