A new documentary by Spike Jonze reveals how the New York trio accidentally became what they hated, Stephen Armstrong discovers.
Zoom is not the ideal method for interviewing the Beastie Boys. The band's infamous tag-team rap style usually spills over into conversations with the press, leaving journalists bewildered. On Zoom, conversely, it's kind of awkward. There are gaps, overlaps and fumbled silences, followed by sudden walls of sound as everybody speaks at once. Although it suddenly occurs to me, halfway through, perhaps this is deliberate. There has never been a point in the band's career when they have not mastered technology while sounding ramshackle and messy. When Michael "Mike D" Diamond starts showing me Santa Claus gnomes, I wonder if I'm just being pranked.
Ostensibly we're on the video chat to discuss Beastie Boys Story, the band's homemade documentary, directed by long-time collaborator Spike Jonze. Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz describes it as "the story of the band Beastie Boys. I'm sorry, I meant the heartfelt story of the Beastie Boys. I'm sorry, I mean the emotional train wreck of our story." The conversations keep drifting to the big kickers in the piece: their shame at key parts of their career, the deep void that the band-ending death of Adam "MCA" Yauch in 2012 left in their lives and — above all — their apology to women.
"We started out as a hardcore punk band, with Kate Schellenbach as our drummer," Ad-Rock says. "We ended up a cartoon rap version of a 1980s metal band and we kicked Kate out. How wrong was that? When the Beastie Boys began, the majority of our friends were girls. It's embarrassing to think we let them down."
There's a key moment in the documentary when the duo unpick the lyrics to Girls, a stupid, disposable piece of clowning from their 1986 debut album, Licensed to Ill — including the lines "Girls, to do the dishes. Girls, to clean up my room. Girls, to do the laundry. Girls, and in the bathroom" — then they jump to an MCA lyric from 1994's Sure Shot: "I want to say a little something that's long overdue. The disrespect to women has got to be through."