The Beauty Of The Beasties

By Josh Tyrangiel

Adam Yauch--one-third of the Beastie Boys--will turn 40 in August. In rap years, 40 is 400. That leads to an obvious question that Yauch, in his ancient wisdom, anticipates: "Is it awkward being onstage with a walker? The answer is yes. Yes, it is," he says with a nod of his silver head. "The walker gets caught up in the wires. It can be very dangerous."

On the eve of releasing their sixth album, To the 5 Boroughs (out June 15), the Beastie Boys--Yauch; Mike Diamond, 38; and Adam Horovitz, 37--insist they are neither too old nor too wise for rap. They make an excellent case for themselves. Yauch fantasizes about building a medieval catapult on his roof to shower fruit on his neighbors. Diamond asks charmingly tactless questions about the salaries of TIME employees. Horovitz, the only childless Beastie, proudly calls himself Uncle Fart Joke. Even their music, which they take kind of seriously, is something of a gag. Diamond: "People ask us about this album like there's some kind of point. We've got no mission statement. We've got no plan." Yauch: "Basically, we just went into the studio and made a lot of stuff." Horovitz: "We're really not that bright."

Since the release of their previous album, Hello, Nasty, in 1998, the Beastie Boys have accumulated an aura of seriousness that is almost wholly undeserved. It's true that they issued a long-overdue apology for the homophobia of their historically dumb first record, 1986's Licensed to Ill, and continued to champion the cause of Tibetan freedom. But in much the same way that Condoleezza Rice's oft repeated desire to be commissioner of the NFL hardly makes her a jock, the Beasties' hopes for a free Tibet don't make them statesmen. The Tibet thing was just, you know, something they kind of wished would happen. But the absence of new Beastie music has had the effect of magnifying the wise and obscuring the wiseass. "That's strategy," says Horovitz. "We figure if we space our music out over years and years, we won't seem so dumb."

Diamond defends the group's six-year layoff by explaining that "band business" occupied much of that time. The rest was spent tending to the band's alter egos. Horovitz released weird electronic music under the name BS 2000. Diamond recorded satirical country tunes--Don't Let the Air out My Tires, On Your Way Up Again (The Fowl Song)--under the name Country Mike. Yauch, who directs many of the Beasties' videos as imaginary Swiss auteur Nathanial Hornblower, oversaw the Beastie Boys DVD Video Anthology for the Criterion Collection.

Having walked all possible avenues of procrastination, the Beastie Boys started a new album just before Sept. 11. When the planes hit, the three lower-Manhattan residents justifiably took some more time off. When they began recording in earnest, "we kind of anticipated making a pretty serious record," says Diamond. "Maybe a fifty-fifty balance of serious to ridiculously silly. But as I say, there's no plan."

Once they were together, the sessions deteriorated into gossiping, ordering coffee, taking turns in a massage chair and recording the odd song. Typically, each Beastie Boy makes musical tracks, featuring a beat and a looped sample, on a home computer and takes the results in to play for the group. About half the tracks remain untouched, and the rest are divided by tempo. Tracks with roughly the same beats per minute are often merged. The Beasties then write lyrics, with occasional punch-up help from a thesaurus. All that took two years.

The finished product turns out to be about 25% serious and 75% silly. There's a post-9/11 track called An Open Letter to NYC that's as close as the Beasties ever get to Springsteen-style solemnity. Three other songs are about overthrowing President Bush and the radical right. The problem with those is not politics but priorities. There's nothing wrong with having a point of view, but there's a lot wrong with the prosody of a line like "George W.'s got nothing on we/We got to take the power from he." In rap, rhyme still has to come before reason.

The good news is that on the 11 tracks devoted to exuberant stupidity, the Beastie Boys remain masters of the game. Over minimalist break beats and a few nice string samples, they shout out lines that merge grade school, grad school and old school. On Oh Word? Horovitz raps, "You gotta get up awful early to fool Mr. Furley/And that's word to Aunt Shirley/And you could stick your head in the toilet, give yourself a swirley." Yauch swiftly follows: "Like Ernest Shackleton said to Ord-Lees,/ 'I'll have dog pemmican with my tea.'" When the rhymes flow, the ideas buried within go down more smoothly, and on All Life Styles, their vision of hipster utopianism sounds both typically juvenile and wonderfully sweet: "Whether in the high rise where you live like Rhoda or in the shack and you live like Yoda/Once again it's on, like a brand new morn/Beatsie Beatsie Boys here to keep you all warm." When they're being idiots, the aging Beastie Boys are still quite brilliant.