Beastie Boys Book
- Mar 13, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★★★
I’m sure not everyone my age feels the way I do about Beastie Boys (though they should), but when Licensed to Ill dropped in November 1986, I was in the eighth grade and that cassette was not only on permanent rotation on my boombox (a sweet-as-hell dual-deck Emerson), it was on permanent rotation on the school bus. It was the jam, it was our jam, the kids, and our parents HATED IT. For the first time, my mom, who was only 31, seemed like an old fogie. We were at my grandmother’s house (her mother’s), hanging out in the living room watching MTV on a television that sat on a stand directly in front of the fireplace. (Those damn fireplaces, always getting in the way.) The video for “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” came on, and when MCA smashed the TV set with a sledgehammer she said flatly, “Oh, that’s really great.” It seemed that people over a certain age just didn’t get the joke.
By the time Paul’s Boutique came out three years later, I’d upgraded from buying tapes to CDs (though mixtapes were still a thing for a long, long time). I obsessed over the panels-wide nearly-impossible-to-follow lines of minuscule type that made up the run-on-sentence of a lyric sheet and was equally fascinated by the 360-degree panoramic photo that extended from the cover to panel to panel to panel. There was no tracklisting, and as soon as I had access to a computer with Word Perfect and a dot matrix printer, I created my own. When Check Your Head hit in 1992, I was nearing the end of my freshman year of college. I was across the hall from my dorm room hanging, or, more likely, playing or watching others play John Madden Football on Sega Genesis, with some guys from my floor when “Pass the Mic” came on MTV. Somehow when that opening scratch and booming bass drum kicked in I immediately knew it was the Beasties. I dashed across the hall and when the video was over I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I was shellshocked. This album also went into heavy rotation but this time there was an additional obsessive twist: trying to track down all the singles with their crazy-ass B-sides (whaddup “Netty’s Girl” and “Boomin’ Granny”).
Three stone-cold classics in a row. Naturally, I was stoked that Ill Communication came out just two years later. It too went into instant heavy rotation. Despite the immediacy of “Sabotage” and, of course, that video, something was missing for me. I retired the album at the end of the summer (only a measly three months after it was released) and never really went back to it. For reasons unknown to me, I didn’t pay much attention to their subsequent albums. I was, however, pumped for Hot Sauce Committee Part Two and thought it to be the best possible way they could have gone out (even if they never meant for it to be). Though I’d mostly tuned out for 17 years (but only three albums!), my love and affection for those first three never waned. They are as important to me now as they were then.
And, much to my absolute delight (perhaps my understatement of the century), that’s pretty much the trajectory of Beastie Boys Book, a 590-page nearly everything-and-the-kitchen-sink mixtape-hangout-jam-session-cut-and-paste-collage of a book. Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz don’t even get to stories around the making of Ill Communication until nearly three-fourths of the way through, so you know they're spending mad time on the years that meant the most to me. If you're a fan who came to the Beasties later and are looking for real attention given to the eras and albums that meant the most to you, I’m sorry to say you’ll have to settle for side dishes (and sometimes scraps). It was also totally fitting that I was reading this while spending the weekend bumming around my college town, taking it with me to every bar and restaurant I went to, either laughing hysterically or trying to hold back tears, and being asked by everyone what it was I was reading that was clearly so good. As Horovitz, aka Ad-Rock, would say, this shits is the shit.
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