Beastie Boys Book

Product Information

The contents of the final chapters--and what's absent from them--will stick with me for a long time. I’m one of those kids whose musical identity isn’t just about music and whose identity isn’t about much else. I loved it so much I went out and bought the actual book just to see the snaps Spike Jonze was banging on about.

Being they're only 6-8 years older and Boston and NY are pretty close I remember so many of the clubs and small bands that didn't make it which they reference. If you've seen the band in an interview, you know they have a way of drifting through questions by way of providing nonsensical answers. Because, for example, while I genuinely disliked the bit at the end where André Leon Talley was trashing the Boys' fashion choices over the decades (it felt mean-spirited), it comes shortly after one of the funniest sections in the book where Ad-Rock recounts this experience he had tripping on some strongly laced pot cookies 15 minutes before they had to go on stage. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin.A final love letter to a fellow band member, best friend, brother - one that will allow even passing Beastie Boys fans to rediscover what it was about these punks/rappers that makes them just as relevant 30 years later. I love the homage they pay to everybody from Led Zeppelin to the Clash to Jackson Brown and especially to Run DMC. For example, Adam's favorite album is Hello Nasty, Mike's least favorite song is "What Comes Around," and the beginning of "The Maestro" was taken from a message they got on an answering machine thanks to Yauch having the defunct Paul's Boutique number routed to an unused phone in a basement or something. These leaps sometimes feel a bit disjointed, but they are totally in character, given the eclectic nature of the music they produced.

Really evocative descriptions help transport you to that place and time, it's certainly the best part of the book. Shoutout to the audiobook, which is read (no joke) by Steve Buscemi, Jon Stewart, Kim Gordon, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, Elvis Costello, and many more. In a recent interview they admitted to be uncomfortable dealing with the past, preferring the present and future. For more than twenty years, this band has had a wide-ranging and lasting influence on popular culture.

Instead, the tone is almost conversational, and as I acclimated myself to their respective writing styles, I began to feel as if I was having one-on-one conversations with Adam and Mike, and it reached a point where I stopped looking at who was writing the new chapter, because I started to understand how the two men wrote. I can't say enough, about what intelligent, animated storytellers both Michael Diamond and Adam Horvitz are. That for a time they became the ridiculous caricatures they were mocking on that album, and how much they soon regretted it. But, like the photo suggests, this is also a creative and funny look at a very particular era, that late-80s, early-90s period of effervescence in music that got Slayer and Run-DMC into photos together, when everything was reckless and rebellious, pre-Internet, pre-well, everything a younger reader might know. Because Beastie Boys Book, with it's gloriously bland title (kind of ironic given their discography), does not function as a normal biography, auto or otherwise.

Whilst damning the album with disinterest, the author of the review reflects on some soup they are making for a social gathering that evening. What you won't find is gossip or name-dropping, but instead you'll read a sincere tale of success and what that means, of friendship and how that endures, of music and what that inspires and of a gritty city that provided a soundtrack for us all. It really is musical anthropology and I learned quite a bit about the process and the business and was amazed these three just went for it and let the chips fall where they may on numerous occasions.And so this book proves to be a beautifully creative, powerful articulation of the legacy they leave.