beastie boys BBBB eeee aaaa ssss tttt iiii eeee BBBBmmmoooo yyyybbbsssssss SSSMMMeee aaaiii sssEEnnnsssmm yyyJJCCCaaii ooonnEEEyyllleelll--iiimmZZooo ttt tttQQQQ uuuuLL eeeeLL eeeeCCnnnnoo ooLLLL aaaall MMMttttJJiiii ffffCCCaaaa hhhh DDD TTTuuuRRRpppuuuaaannnccc––– SSS hhhmmmmmaaa kkkmmmmmuuuooooorrr nnnnn sssss RRRRR uuuuu sssss sssss eeeee lllll lllll SSSSS iiiii beastie boys dennis abrams Beastie Boys Copyright © 2007 by Infobase Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any infor- mation storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York, NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abrams, Dennis, 1960– Beastie Boys / Dennis Abrams. p. cm. — (Hip-hop stars) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. Discography: p. ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9480-8 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 0-7910-9480-4 (hardcover) 1. Beastie Boys—Juvenile literature. 2. Rap musicians—United States—Biography— Juvenile literature. I. Title. II. Series. ML3930.B38A63 2007 782.42164092'2—dc22 2007000970 [B] Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Text design by Erik Lindstrom Cover design by Ben Peterson Printed in the United States of America Bang NMSG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of pub- lication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Hip-Hop: A Brief History 6 by Chuck D 1 That’s Not Who We Are 11 2 Growing Up Beastie 18 3 From Hardcore to Hip-Hop 27 4 Fame and Its Aftermath 42 5 The Making of a Masterpiece 53 6 Check Your Head/Ill Communication 65 7 Maturity 75 8 Elder Statesmen 84 Discography 92 Chronology 93 Glossary 96 Bibliography 97 Further Reading 99 Index 101 introduCtion by Chuck d Hip-Hop: a brief History Like the air we breathe, hip-hop seems to be everywhere. The lifestyle that many thought would be a passing fad has, three decades later, grown to become a permanent part of world culture. Hip-hop artists have become some of today’s heroes, replacing the comic book worship of decades past and joining athletes and movie stars as the people kids dream of being. Names like 50 Cent, P. Diddy, Russell Simmons, Jay-Z, Foxy Brown, Snoop Dogg, and Flavor Flav now ring as familiar as Elvis, Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, and Charlie Chaplin. While the general public knows many of the names, vid- eos, and songs branded by the big companies that make them popular, it’s also important to know the holy trinity, the found- ing fathers of hip-hop: Kool DJ Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and  Introduction  Afrika Bambaataa. All are deejays who played and presented the records that rappers and dancers delighted themselves upon. Bambaataa single-handedly stopped the gang wars in the 1970s with the themes of peace, unity, love, and having fun. Hip-hop is simply a term for a form of artistic creativ- ity that was spawned in New York City—more precisely, the Bronx—in the early to mid-1970s. Amidst the urban decay in the areas where black and Hispanic people dwelled, economic, educational, and environmental resources were depleted. Jobs and businesses were all but moved away. Living conditions were of a lower standard than the rest of the city and country. Last but not least, art and sports programs in the schools were the first to be cut for the sake of lowering budgets; thus, music classes, teaching the subject’s history and techniques, were all but lost. From these ashes, like a phoenix, rose an art form. Through the love of technology and records found in family collections or even those tossed out on the street, the deejay emerged. Different from the ones heard on the radio, these folk were innovating a style that was popular on the island of Jamaica. Two turntables kept the music continuous, with the occasional voice on top of the records. This was the very humble begin- ning of rap music. Rap music is actually two distinct words: rap and music. “Rap” is the vocal application that is used on top of the music. On a vocal spectrum, it is between talking and singing and is one of the few alternatives for vocalizing to emerge in the past 50 years. It’s important to know that inventors and artists are side by side in the importance of music’s development. Let’s remember that inventor Thomas A. Edison created the first recording, with “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1878, most likely in New Jersey, the same state where the first rap recording— Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”— was made more than 100 years later, in 1979.  beastIe boys It’s hard to separate the importance of history, science, language arts, and education when discussing music. Because of the social silencing of black people in the United States from slavery in the 1600s to civil rights in the 1960s, much sentiment, dialogue, and soul is wrapped within the cultural expression of music. In eighteenth-century New Orleans, slaves gathered on Sundays in Congo Square to socialize and play music. Within this captivity many dialects, customs, and styles combined with instrumentation, vocals, and rhythm to form a musical signal or code of preservation. These are the foundations of jazz and the blues. Likewise, it’s impossible to separate hip-hop and rap music from the creativity of the past. Look within the expres- sion and words of black music and you’ll get a reflection of history itself. The four creative elements of hip-hop—emcee- ing (the art of vocalization); deejaying (the musician-like manipulation of records); break dancing (the body expression of the music); and graffiti (the drawn graphic expression of the culture)—have been intertwined in the community before and since slavery. However, just because these expressions were introduced by the black–Hispanic underclass, doesn’t mean that others cannot create or appreciate hip-hop. Hip-hop is a cultural lan- guage used best to unite the human family all around the world. To peep the global explosion, one need not search far. Starting just north of the U.S. border, Canadian hip-hop has featured indigenous rappers who are infusing different language and dialect flows into their work, from Alaskan Eskimo to French flowing cats from Montreal and the rest of Quebec’s provincial region. Few know that France for many years has been the second largest hip-hop nation, measured not just by high sales numbers, but also by a very political philosophy. Hip-hop has been alive and present since the mid-1980s in Japan and other Asian countries. Australia has been a hotbed in welcoming world rap acts, and it has also created its own vibrant hip- hop scene, with the reminder of its government’s takeover of Introduction  indigenous people reflected in every rapper’s flow and rhyme. As a rhythm of the people, the continents of Africa and South America (especially Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa, Brazil, Surinam, and Argentina) have long mixed traditional homage into the new beats and rhyme of this millennium. Hip-hop has been used to help Brazilian kids learn English when school systems failed to bridge the difficult language gap of Portuguese and patois to American English. It has enter- tained and enlightened youth, and has engaged political discus- sion in society, continuing the tradition of the African griots (storytellers) and folk singers. For the past 25 years, hip-hop has been bought, sold, fol- lowed, loved, hated, praised, and blamed. History has shown that other cultural music forms in the United States have been just as misunderstood and held under public scrutiny. The his- tory of the people who originated the art form can be found in the music itself. The timeline of recorded rap music spans more than a quarter century, and that is history in itself. Presidents, kings, queens, fame, famine, infamy, from the great wall of China to the Berlin wall, food, drugs, cars, hate, and love have been rhymed and scratched. This gives plenty reason for social study. And I don’t know what can be more fun than learning the history of something so relevant to young minds and souls, as music.