"IT'S A MOUSE! A FUCKlNG MOUSE!" screams MIke D. He smashes the varmint flat against the carpet with a copy of the Beastie Boys' new LP 'Licensed To Ill'. He pounds the pipsqueak into puree with a baseball-booted foot. Both record and rodent shatter. Blood oozes. "Get the gun! GET THE FUCKING GUN!" screams bog-eyed Ad-Rock. MCA whips out an eight-inch, steel and plastic CANNON and points it at the ex-mouse.

"Oh my God, that's a REAL GUN!" squeals Michele Kirsch, my Jane in the New York jungle.

"Phut," roars the air pistol. "Phut Phut Phut Phut Phut."

"It moved," screams Mike D. "IT FUCKING MOVED!"

"Get the baseball bat," screams MCA. "GET THE FUCKING BAT!"

And you wonder why they lost in Vietnam?

FUNKY MONKEYS

They hang from their furry tails and dribble mashed banana through their Hardy Har Har masks... this is how the Beastie Boys wish to be perceived japers, witty slobs, naughty Beasties!

"We were doin' this interview and someone shot a bullet through the fucking wall. I'm standing in the kitchen, right, and the fucking toaster explodes and this plaster rains down and there's this fucking bang and we're cowering on the floor and this journalist is going - 'Aw c'mon! You guys staged this!'"

This leads us inevitably to the question of the steam that pours from the cracks in the New York sidewalk. Like everybody else in this city they have no idea where the steam comes from, but Mike D has a theory that it's alligator farts. This sounds feasible, as Mike D says - this city is a jungle. Ding ding, seconds out.

In more sober mood they will change before your very eyes into bold white knights crusading to spread a (black) ghetto culture. What they always are is wee sexist shits - but more of that later.

Not long back the Beastie Boys were a jerk-off NY thrash outfit who dragged scratching into their punk kindergarten and hit it (moderately) big with the 'Cookie Puss' EP. It was grindingly slurred and deceptively sloppy heavy metal funk and it lit enough fires under enough purist noses to get noticed. And then... instead of crawling back under the nearest rock, the Beasties had the gall to set themselves up as weedy white RAP artists. They'd smelt the possibilities, they had the slobbering genius of Rick Rubin.

Rubin it was who rammed together the bopping, rhythmic swagger of Run DMC with Aerosmith's bludgeoned trousersnake rock to create last year's single, 'Walk This Way'. It suddenly seemed blindingly obvious that hollerin', virginal rap would look lovely sat astride the 1umbering, riff-breaking rock monster.

Beastie Boys are custom-built mongrelisers. 'Licensed To Ill' is a solid slab of sweat, sauciness and slapstick. It informs the listener that the Beasties have the sort of rhymes that are 'in your face'. It's not as good a rap record as Run DMC's 'Raising Hell' but it's ten times as spunky - a honky mongrel that barks and shits from both ends. The only fly in the cake mix being the lyrical leprosy that afflicts both rock and rap - thick-skulled, groin-clenching SEXIST SHIT.

"I said I'll ride with you if you can get me to the border/The sheriff's after me because of what I did to his daughter/I did it like this/I did it like that/I did it with the whiffleball bat..." ('Paul Revere') But to bop with the Beastie Boys as sexist schmendrichs you've got to flirt first with the rock'n'roll schmucks. Take a deep breath.

"I have seen," says MCA defensively, "Run DMC in their dressing room, like, throwing bottles of ketchup against the wall and breaking chairs and shit no-one ever writes about it. A lot of other bands probably do shit a lot worse than us but we only get the press because we're a bunch of little white kids." "Take Sigue Sigue Sputnik," suggests Ad-Rock, "they're wild!" "Take OMD," says Mike D. "I'm sure those guys have a ball on the road." I make the mistake of claiming that some of the tracks on 'Licensed To Ill', including the mega-rockist life-on-the-road 'No Sleep Till Brooklyn', are somewhat reminiscent of AC/DC.

"AC/DC?" yells MCA. "I can tell you this, none of them drink. They go straight to sleep after the concert. They don't see any of their fans and they don't fuck anybody. They don't do a fucking thing!" But they wouldn't have too many problems with the lyric - "Skirt chasing/Free basing/Killing every village/We drink and rob and rhyme and pillage..." Given the Beasties' Rock Viking self-image, why did they avoid using the word 'rape'?

"We say rape in another song..." claims Mike D. So feminist sensibilities were not a consideration?

"We don't give a shit about that. We don't give a shit about anyone. If we didn't put rape in there it was purely by accident." Then, as I move into the kill position, Mike D goes red in the face, sticks his legs in the air, points to a little mouse in the corner and starts to scream. Which is where we came in, the Beastie Boys on the ropes and saved by the squeak.

Round two in just a moment.

GURLIE WURLIES

If you've heard 'Licensed To Ill' you'll have spotted that the Beasties are neither new men nor quiche eaters. In their raps "gurlies" are screwed, swapped and slagged with grim abandon. As with WASP ('805 shock-rock goons - Ed) and Bernard Manning and all the other microwinkled big boys, the Beasties are keen to impress on us just how funny it all is. Women in your lyrics are reduced to the position of objects, no so?

"Right!" says Ad-Rock.

So Beastie Gurls exist merely to be fucked by the likes of our three heroes?

"Er... no..." says MCA, and do we detect just a glimpse of a pink liberal slip sticking out from under his hairy foreskin?

"Damn right!" says Ad-Rock punching the air. "So? They do lots of other things - like in 'Girls'." From which I now quote - "Girls to do the dishes/Girls to clean up my room/Girls to do the laundry/Girls - and in the bathroom..." "You see? You see?" says Ad-Rock excitedly. "They can do lots of stuff in our lyrics. That's written about when I split up with a girl who ruled my life. So I wrote those ill lyrics..."

"I can testify," says MCA, "that she had him completely under her thumb. It was fucking disgusting."

"She had me wrapped by the balls! I'm saying I would like a girl to do my laundry and stuff, wouldn't you? Don't even say no because you know you'd like a def girl like that..."

"What he's saying is he likes all girls in general and he's naming all the kinds of girls there are..."

So there are four different kinds of women; those who are good at washing up; those that are good at washing clothes; those that are handy with a Hoover and...

"And in the bathroom! AII we can say now is that the girl in the bathroom is definitely the quintessential girl, OK7" MCA now has his dander up, he sniffs a stitching.

"I think the NME is shit. It's too much on Paul Weller's dick for my taste."

"I mean," explains Mike D, "if the Beastie Boys lived in England we might vote Labour, but over here it's got to the point where nobody gives a fuck. I don't know."

The Beastie Boys would like to see more "naked girls" in NME Mike D reckons it should be more like National Geographic - a hard glossy chocka with scantily clad US foreign policy victims that is said to be the major masturbatory aid for adolescent Americans. Michele informs me that young American women are told to wear brassieres so that "they'll look like the girls in National Geographic". Thank you, Michele.

'Licensed To Ill' contains no fewer than 48 references to lockers and locker-rooms. Now a locker in the post-pubescent USA is somewhere you stick your homework and apple for the teacher rather than your sweaty gym-shorts but there is a popular theory that blokes who brag non-stop about the women they've screwed are probably closet gays, or virgins. So which are the Beasties? "It's different... I don't know if you've walked about this neighbourhood. Do you know what this neighbourhood is like? I grew up in this area..." It's the gay area.

"This is the gay area and I've lived here all my life and I hate faggots," spits Ad-Rock.

You hate homosexuals?

"I really do... I shouldn't have said that. I've got a lot of gay friends but... you don't know what it's like growing up in this neighbourhood..."

"Yo! Adam!" MCA has correctly diagnosed a dodgy quote situation. "We do not need to go into that. What Adam's talking about - I'll give you this, he definitely hates gay people - but the reason for that is in this neighbourhood, when you're five years old, when you're walking down the street a lot of 'disgusting' faggots who hang around here aren't like just gay people - normal gay people - all the sickos who are gay hang about on Christopher Street and they see the kids and they walk up to them and they say, 'Hey, kid, I'll give you five bucks if you suck my dick,' y'know?"

"We used to get fucked up with it," says Ad-Rock. "You used to get really crazy..." If somebody brought out an album that talked about little Jewish boys the way you talk about women, wouldn't that piss you off?

"We wanna talk about Jews? I dunno," says MCA as if it's the first time he's ever been asked the question. "I suppose it would, being Jewish, but when we're talking about women or whatever, we're creating a fantasy. A fantasy so far-fetched and overboard that 90 per cent of people that understand it understand that there is such a thing as humour such a thing as parody..." Which is the exact same brand of bullshit trotted out by WASP and the defenders of our very own Macc Lads (Purveyors of rock'n'roll rugger songs - 80s Ed). Parody of reactionary attitudes itself is the context in which it is delivered renders it indistinguishable from the 'real thing' Parody needs a punch line. For sure, the Beasties can rip the piss like nobody's business out of both the Schoolly Ds and the AC/DCs of this planet but their insistence - off record that life for them is nothing but one long "skirt chasinglfme basing" parteeeeeeeee blunts the edge of any parody to the point of impotence. Who gets the 'joke'? What is the joke?

"Taking all those people, different sorts of people, and you're putting them all in the one concert hall and they're gonna see what we do onstage - laughing and spraying beer on each other. They have a good choice, they can either have a good time, really go with it, or they can say 'Man, they're really fucked up' and leave..." says Mike D.

"Most people who seem intelligent to me," claims MCA (who plays, when pushed, the straight-man to Mike D's stoned goofball and Ad-Rock's surly git), "they get the joke and they think it's funny... but when I meet people who are really stooopid, they either agree with the lyric or they fail to see the humour. Look, I can honestly say that nobody, nobody, has ever come up to me and said - 'Hey! Girls to do the dishes - that's an excellent idea!'" "They haven't?" says Ad-Rock, looking genuinely surprised. "I've heard that lots..."

PO-FACED PURITANS

Not so much like shooting fish in a barrel as picking fleas off a cat with cancer. The Beasties are as sexist (if less authentically stooopid) as most of the chest-beating macho morons in rock and rap. You don't dig the joke and you're a humourless puritan blah blah blah bollocks. It's a shame in a way that the Beasties have mouths full of male genitalia because in form they are just a teensy weensy bit RADICAL.

"Black kids are always hipper to what's going on than white kids," says Mike D. "Rap music; what's so good about it is that it's always changing. You'll have new rap records on the radio all the time whilst on rock stations they're still playing 'Stairway To Heaven'. Black stations like Kiss and BLS have these rap hours on Friday and Saturday and it's all new stuff. The rock stations have, like, The New Music Hour and they play Madonna and the Stones album and, y'know it's like 'new music' that you're going to hear every day for months..."

Some have pointed to the success of 'Walk This Way' and alleged racism. They claim that many radio shows will only play rap if it's sugared for a white audience.

"That's maybe true... Well, that record broke down a lot of barriers for us. Right now we are being played on K-ROQ, which is like pure rock, we're on pop radio and we're also on the two black stations. If it takes Aerosmith to get us to that point then so be it."

"Run DMC are coming from growing up in a black neighbourhood and being into black music and they're adding rock..." says MCA. "We grew up with white music and we're putting rap into it.

It's like we're coming from the opposite direction to them. When we first started, a lot of people, not people in the music - a lot of rappers and DJs have always taken us seriously - but to a lot of people it was just inconceivable for white kids to rap. It was like we'd suddenly decided to become American Indians for a while and live on the reservation. Now we've built up some respect. We definitely broke some ground but we went through some embarrassing gigs doing it."

"White people, after Long Beach, (There was a shooting at a rap gig - '80s Ed) are terrified to go to a rap show, they're terrified to go to an all-black show. White people are definitely scared to cross over to the other side of the tracks. Maybe we're making it all right now, maybe we're making it safe..."

Mike D is in earnest flood. This is the heart of the Beastie Boys dilemma. They're WHITE boys playing BLACK music. Like fat, WHITE Elvis Presley was 'King of rock'n'roll'; like fat, WHITE Benny Goodman was 'King of swing'. Like every musical form shaped and dominated by BLACK Musicians has had a WHITE cherub foisted on it as its figurehead. So the Beastie are CBS' Judas honkies? The Bill Haleys of hip-hop?

"No, no, I don't think so. I don't think it's like Benny Goodman or Elvis or whatever... Y'know we're in a really rough position," says Mike D. "We didn't know if we were ever going to be able to play to white people ever... I mean we had the feeling we'd maybe only be able to play to black people, I mean that's still our number one audience. The difference between us and those guys you mentioned is that we started off playing to a black audience..."

And the truth is that the Beastie Boys at present are too ornery to be moulded by CBS into the Modern Romance (Rubbish romo group - 80s Ed) of rap. The nature of the US recording industry and the comparative diversity of the markets it has to cater to means that US rap is safe from the rapid co-opting and diluting that destroyed UK punk as a cultural force. Yet rap's strength lies partly in the diversity of the markets of its roots. Whilst its more successful exponents are branching out and stealing from a thousand other sources, the guilty white liberals who champion rap in the UK are desperately trying to scoop it back into the 'correct' pigeon-hole - rap is HARD and URBAN and BLACK. Which means that the Beastie Boys are poor copies at best and imperfect copies at that - which is, of course, to miss the point totally. Like Dexys did with Stax, like the 2-Tone bands with ska and reggae, the Beastie Boys borrow from a genre that is itself 'impure'. The idea that a 'black' music is a noble savage, that it is somehow free of the culturally dynamic theft, misinterpretation and dilution of other musics - even the idea that there is any such thing as 'black' music - is archaic and racist, brother to the creed of 'natural riddim'.

What is exciting about rap is that it is that rare phenomenon in pop - a producer culture that is genuinely popular. To a large extent rap is consumed by the same communities that make it. It isn't, yet, just another consumer-disposable 'product'. Inevitably the process by which rap reaches a wider audience will draw its teeth - either that or it will go the same way as reggae, too obsessed with its own cliches and too 'black' to be marketed properly by a 'white' recording industry, but I think not.

PILLAGING PUNKS

Along with the slack-brained sexist baggage that the Beasties have both brought from rock and absorbed from rap, they bring a total disrespect for the correct-way-of-doing-things, a tendency to mongrelise. This tendency already exists within rap but the Beasties are able to interpret it in the light of their own experience - they add as much to rap as they steal from it.

Ad-Rock: "Punk and rap are identical, just from different cultures..."

MCA: "Accessibility, that's what it is. Any kid can learn to DJ or MC..."

Mike D: "On the 'Raising Hell' tour we got hundreds of kids busking their rhymes..."

MCA: "When we came offstage there'd be about 30 kids..."

Mike D: "Not hero-worshipping or any of that shit..."

MCA: "Saying - 'Listen to my song! Listen to my song!'"

Mike D: "What was cool about punk was that you'd see The Clash and the entire audience would be composed of people in other bands..."

Steal, pillage, borrow, thieve, MONGRELISE.