Skip to main content

The Beastie Boys & Rick Rubin Reunite and Revisit Their Formative Time Together in 1980s NYC

The Beastie Boys’ record-shattering Licensed to Ill is thirty-four years old. This fact might mean nothing to you, or it might mean that you are thirty-four years older than the moment the album came out in November of 1986, and suburban parents around the country, maybe even your parents, freaked out in unison. The album was a stroke of genius from producer Rick Rubin, delivering hip-hop safe for white kids while also giving them permission to be as obnoxious as possible.

Ostensibly a rap record, the first ever to hit number one, Licensed to Ill also rode in on the crest of the mid-80s Satanic Panic. Rubin's decision to set its exaggeratedly juvenile rhymes to samples of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin made a defiant statement—and bringing in Slayer’s Kerry King to play guitar on “No Sleep till Brooklyn” really rubbed it in. He was simultaneously producing Slayer’s Reign in Blood, and both albums managed to terrify, and appeal to, many of the same people.

Lyrically, Licensed to Ill kept things light and goofy but also amplified some corrosive misogyny and homophobia, for which the band has made amends and apologies over the years. Adam Horowitz called their personas on the album “idiot caricatures of ourselves.” Of its first, discarded, title, he says, “it was meant to be a joke about jock frat dudes.” They moved on and moved to L.A., showing very different sides of themselves on follow-up Paul’s Boutique. You’re probably familiar with Rick Rubin’s post-Licensed to Ill career and all-around status as a hip-hop, metal, rock, pop, country, etc. producer.

They hadn’t been in touch in around twenty years when Rubin and surviving Beastie Boys Adam Horowitz and Michael Diamond sat down—over Zoom—recently for the Rubin-hosted Broken Record Podcast. There’s a lot of catching up to do. They start at the very beginning, when the trio was still in high school and Rubin lived in the NYU dorms and occasionally went to classes. From the perspective of their current selves, they realize how strange it was that they hardly knew anything about each other at the time. There are also a few lingering misunderstandings to clear up.

Joining them is Spike Jonze, director of the classic video for “Sabotage” and of the upcoming Beastie Boys Story (trailer above). The film is a “love letter to hip hop’s golden age,” writes Kevin Eg Perry at NME, an “intimate, personal story of their band and 40 years of friendship.” Every Beastie Boys retrospective, and there have been a few lately, is tinged with sadness for the conspicuous absence of Adam Yauch (MCA).

He appears here in spirit and on video, projected on a giant screen behind Horowitz and Diamond onstage in the live storytelling event filmed by Jonze. “They’re frank about the shittiness of some of their past behavior,” Perry notes, like firing founding member Kate Schellenbach because she didn't fit their new tough-guy act. It’s a grown-up perspective that will surprise no one who has followed the course of their creative and personal evolutions.

Related Content:

Watch 36 Beastie Boys Videos Now Remastered in HD

Hear Every Sample on the Beastie Boys’ Acclaimed Album, Paul’s Boutique–and Discover Where They Came From

The Beastie Boys Release a New Freewheeling Memoir, and a Star-Studded 13-Hour Audiobook Featuring Snoop Dogg, Elvis Costello, Bette Midler, John Stewart & Dozens More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The Beastie Boys & Rick Rubin Reunite and Revisit Their Formative Time Together in 1980s NYC is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2BehIwy
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more