The Beastie Boys life and biography

The Beastie Boys are an American hip hop group from Manhattan/Brooklyn, New York City. The group consists of Mike D (Michael Diamond) (vocals, drums), MCA (Adam Yauch) (vocals, bass), and Ad-Rock (Adam Horovitz) (vocals, guitar) and Mix Master Mike (Michael Schwartz) (turntablist).

They started out as a young trio who wanted to fight for their right to party, but the Beastie Boys have grown into socially-conscious rappers in over more than 15 years of producing their own rap/punk blend. Even as their lyrics became more mature over time, they maintained their loud, aggressive, rebellious sound. The group's success allowed expansion into other business ventures, including owning their own record company, publishing a magazine, and creating a specially designed line of clothing.

Michael "Mike D" Diamond, Adam "King Ad-Rock" Horovitz, and Adam "MCA" Yauch met as teenagers hanging out in New York clubs. They all grew up in New York in families that were no strangers to creativity. Adam Horovitz was the son of playwright Israel Horovitz. His parents divorced when he was just three years old, and he was raised by his mother Doris, who was a painter and managed a thrift store. Adam Yauch grew up with a father who was a painter and an architect and a mother who was a social worker. Michael Diamond's father worked as an art dealer, but died when Michael was just 16 years old. His mother was an interior decorator.

The Beastie Boys started out playing in a hardcore band called the Young and the Useless. While still in high school they released their first punk album on Ratcage Records, called Polly Wog Stew, and the following year released a single called "Cooky Puss." Without the band's permission, British Airways used a portion of the single in a commercial. The group won the subsequent lawsuit and were paid $40,000. The money helped them focus on their music full-time, and a contract with Def Jam Records' head Rick Rubin led to greater exposure. The single "She's On It" was released on the soundtrack for Krush Groovein 1985.

In 1986, the Beastie Boys released their debut on Def Jam Records titled Licensed to Ill. The album included the hit singles "Fight for Your Right (to Party)" and "No Sleep Till Brooklyn," and earned multiplatinum sales. It later became the first rap album to reach number one on the Billboard album charts. As a result, the Beastie Boys had earned great success with a less-than-respectable image. But soon, the members began to fall prey to their own "party boy" media hype. "It wasn't until "Fight for Your Right (to Party)" came out that we started acting like drunken fools," Adam Yauch told Akiba Lerner and Mark LeVine in Tikkun. "At that point, our image shifted in a different direction, maybe turning off the kids that were strictly into hip-hop. It started off as a goof on that college mentality, but then we ended up personifying it." Their bad-boy image was fueled by reports that the group had made a music journalist cry during an interview, and that they had been banned from the executive offices of CBS Records for allegedly stealing a camera. The group didn't win much respect on the music front either. David Handelman wrote in Rolling Stone, "When the Boys weren't being called Monkees for not playing instruments, they were being called Blues Brothers for plundering a black music form and making more louie off it."

The Beastie Boys vigorously performed a lengthy tour in support of the album, and Licensed to Ill became the first rap album to surpass the four million copies sold mark in 1987. "We started getting sick of each other and of being on the road, even sick of the band and what it represented, like we were ashamed to be a part of it," Yauch told Light in Spin. "We decided to take some time apart from each other." Yauch spent his time away from the group on a side project called Brooklyn that performed in clubs around New York.

During this same time, the members of the Beastie Boys got into a dispute with Rick Rubin and Def Jam Records over royalty payments. The argument ended in a split with the record label. "Leaving Def Jam was kind of a blessing in disguise," Michael Diamond told Alan Light in Rolling Stone, "because we can make whatever record we want." To further change the pace of their lives and music, the trio moved from New York to Los Angeles and signed a new record contract with Capitol Records.

In 1989, the group released their next album, Paul's Boutique, named after the Brooklyn store that appears on the cover. The Beastie Boys also recorded the store's radio advertisement on the album. On Paul's Boutique, the group moved in a slightly more mature direction. David Hiltbrand wrote in People, "With their second album, the New York trio has created a prodigiously inventive, genre-bleeding, free-for-all style." This unfamiliar musical mix was not well received by fans and the group's popularity waned. The album barely sold 500,000 copies-a significant drop from the multiplatinum sales of Licensed to Ill.

The maturation of the Beastie Boys' music also revealed itself in its members' lives. The 'bad boy' party image they had maintained began to slow down to a more low-key pace. "Just as we were finishing Paul's Boutique, we got our own places, and I was going to clubs a lot less," Yauch told Joe Levy in Rolling Stone. "I got a bit more introverted and spent a lot more time on my own, reading. I would just go down to the esoteric bookstore and wander around." After the release of Paul's Boutique, the trio took some more time off and entered into some outside business ventures. They started their own record label and began publishing their own magazine, both under the name Grand Royal. They signed artists they wanted to support to their label, and broadcast news about the band, their lifestyle, and their world view in the magazine. They also went on to produce their own line of streetwear clothing to match their stage image called X-Large.

In 1992, the Beastie Boys decided to return to the studio to record Check Your Head. This time, in addition to their rap vocals, each member of the band played his own instrument instead of relying on technological wizardry and sampling to provide the music. Adam Horovitz played guitar, Adam Yauch picked up the bass, and Michael Diamond pounded the drums. The singles "Pass the Mic" and "Whatcha Want" helped boost the sales of Check Your Head beyond platinum.

The critics had a mixed response to the album. Hiltbrand wrote in People, "The sound is murky and messy, the music sloppy and uninvolving. The lyrics certainly contain none of the smartass cleverness that marked the trio's earlier work. Light had a different outlook in Rolling Stone, "They won the fight for their right to party, and then, while no one was looking, the Beastie Boys turned into one of today's most consistently creative bands."

Maintaining an easy-going recording pace, the Beastie Boys waited until 1994 to release their next effort, Ill Communication, which included "Get It Together" and "Sabotage." They reclaimed their popularity and high sales when the album debuted at number one on Billboard's album charts. David Browne wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "Call it novelty, slacker rap, or sheer white urban noise-whatever the tag, it's the most tantalizing ear candy in years, the incessantly inventive sound of brats dismantling pop and trying to reassemble it in their own ingeniously klutzy ways." During that summer, the Beastie Boys co-headlined the popular Lollapalooza tour with alternative rock band Smashing Pumpkins. The trio also released a compilation of the group's earliest recordings, including their lucky charm "Cooky Puss," titled Same Old Bullshit.

In the early 1990s, Adam Yauch began exploring Buddhism, and eventually exclusively studied Tibetan Buddhism. He co-founded the Milarepa Fund to raise the awareness of China's oppression of the Tibetan people. The Beastie Boys donated all the publishing proceeds from "Shambala" and "Bodhisattva Vow" on Ill Communicationto the Milarepa Fund. Following the tour for the album, Yauch organized several Tibetan Freedom concerts and a film documentary to increase awareness of Tibet's struggle.

The Beastie Boys took nearly four years off before they returned to the studio again. All three members moved back to New York, and each spent their time pursuing their own interests. Yauch worked on the Milarepa Fund, Diamond managed Grand Royal Records and the magazine, and Horovitz sought out talent to sign to the label and produced and recorded with other artists. "It's been four years between records, but it wasn't like we were sitting at home," Horovitz told Light in Spin. "We basically saw each other almost every day."

In 1998, the trio returned with the release of Hello Nasty and the single "Intergalactic." Within the first week of its release, the album soared to number one on Billboard's album chart and sold a whopping 681,500 copies. "Hello Nasty jumps from rap to easy listening to Latin to noise to soul to opera to rock without pausing for a breath," wrote Neil Strauss in the New York Times.

The members' individual personalities also made their distinct mark on the album as Ann Powers noted in the New York Times, "Attentive listeners will notice an unresolved split between the group's attempts at egoless expression and the consummately ego-driven boasts essential to its raps."

Michael Diamond explained how their personal divisions worked into their own cohesive style to Levy in Rolling Stone. "On this record, we went back to the three of us just getting together and sharing ideas, then piecing something together and spreading it out," he said. "So it's much more of a collective where we're all saying each other's lyrics, like on Paul's Boutique." After nearly two decades of making music together, the Beastie Boys continue to push the limits of rap and hip-hop music into new directions. They took their musical influences and blended them into their own style, eventually ignoring the praise and the criticism and pursuing their own creative path. "It would be nice to look at ourselves as innovators," Horovitz told Chris Mundy in Rolling Stone. "I think we are creative, but in terms of being masterminds, no. We're just making music that we like."

By 2010 they had sold 22 million albums in the United States and 40 million albums worldwide.

They are one of the longest lived hip hop acts worldwide and continue to enjoy commercial and critical success in 2011, nearly 25 years after the release of their debut album. The group has been selected as part of the 2012 induction class into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, after being eligible since 2007. In 2009, the group released digitally remastered deluxe editions of their albums Paul's Boutique, Check Your Head, Ill Communication and Hello Nasty. Their eighth studio album, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, was released on May 3, 2011, and received positive reviews.

Discography:
-Licensed to Ill (1986)
-Paul's Boutique (1989)
-Check Your Head (1992)
-Ill Communication (1994)
-The In Sound From Way Out! (1996)
-Hello Nasty (1998)
-To the 5 Boroughs (2004)
-The Mix-Up (2007)
-Hot Sauce Committee Part Two (2011)

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