Beauty and the Beasties
(The Irish Times)
by: Kevin Courtney

EVER since rap music poked its head overground and exposed itself to the masses, white boys the world over have tried to imitate their black heroes, to varying degrees of effectiveness. But no one has ever done it as quite as well as The Beastie Boys and, as the group's fourth album arrives to wild critical acclaim and certain chart topping success, it looks increasingly like no white boy ever will.

The B Boys began life in Downtown New York in the early 1980s, a place and time which have shaped their musical world view and given them a unique urban authenticity not to mention a head start on every other genre hopping white band. At first they were a hardcore/thrash group, with Adam Yauch on bass, Mike Diamond on vocals, John Berry on guitar and Kate Schellenbach on drums, playing such prestigious dates as Yauch's 17th birthday party and a couple of clots in Max's Kansas City.

By 1983, the band had lost Schellenbach (but found her again years later when her band Luscious Jackson signed to the Beasties' own Grand Royale record label) and replaced Berry with Adam Horovitz, formerly a member of The Young And The Useless. The trio started to play outside their native New York, and slowly began to drop the instrumentation in favour of rapping.

Three years later they sold over four million copies of their debut album, Licensed To Ill, the first rap record ever to top the US mainstream charts. It made the Beasties a household name in both black and white neighbourhoods, and media stars out of Mike D, MCA and Ad Rock, the group members' more familiar stagenames.

To say that they influenced an entire generation of young white Americans is no overstatement. They brought rap music to an audience which had been weaned onthe likes of Journey and Aerosmith and offered it an irresistible altertive: street smarts, cool clothes and, most of all, a passport to party. Their arrival spelt the end of an era dominated by bad pageboy hairstyles, tight jeans and tame metal music. The Beastie Boys set white American kids free from their shackles and gave them a whole new set of musical and sartorial accessories to flaunt. Michael Jackson may have crossed over the black/white divide, but The Beastie Boys smashed the barrier to pieces. Forever.

Seven years after Fight For Your Right To party became the teen anthem of the year, The Beastie Boys are still knocking down barriers, and pushing their music to even greater levels than before; 1992's Check Your Head, the follow up to the acclaimed but confusing Paul's Boutique, saw the band mix live instrumentation with ever more ambitious samples and beats, and was somewhat of a return to form, clocking up a couple of million on the Billboard scale. But this was just a warm up for 1994's Ill Communication, the Boys' most accomplished work yet, and one which proves they are still the pale faced pioneers of rap.

These days, there's a lot of other stuff going on in the Beastie Boys camp. Mike D is involved with the rag trade, having a stake in the successful X Large range of clothes, Yauch goes snowboarding in Utah and Alaska, and Horovitz is married to actress Ione Skye

When they're not touring or upholding our right to party, all three spend most of their time at the LA offices of Grand Royal, rehearsing, jamming, recording, Sampling; overseeing the production of the B Boys fanzine, playing basketball, skateboarding and, you know, just chillin. Still the bad boys of rap, and still the best.