Recommendations of the Editorial team
In the early days of rap, it was considered god that only black hip -hop liked, while the whites were only on rock. The reality looked different. At Run-DMC we rapped over rock beats while a punk band like the Beastie Boys HipHop heard.
I met the Beastie Boys for the first time in Rick Rubin’s student booth at New York University. What made me completely fired was the fact that they knew everything about hip-hop: they knew the Cold Crush Brothers, Treacerous Three, Africa Bambaataa-all the old school shit. And on top of that they could rap, they could sing and play instruments.
Run-DMC gave them the song “Slow and Low”, which became something like their musical blueprint. But then they wrote their own rhymes, and appeared as “Licensed to Ill”, it was the number of line tracks. They suddenly wrote songs like “No Sleep Till Brooklyn”, which we would have loved to write ourselves. They mixed rock and rap like us, but because they were punk rockers, their material got another drift.
For the first time we toured with the Beastie Boys on the “Raising Hell” tour in 1986. We played in the southern states, and there were only blacks in the audience. The first gig was somewhere in Georgia, and we only thought: “Hopefully people don’t go crazy when they see the beasties.” But the spectators loved them because they didn’t even try to be black rappers. They rapped over shit that they knew: skateboards, white castle hamburgers and television. The real recognizes the real one.
They have taught me and many others a lot about life, people and music
Boys Boys published ingenious plates for decades. When “Paul’s Boutique” appeared, it sold less than their debut, but now people have recognized that it was one of the best plates of the eighties.
Each of the Beastie Boys has a different personality. Mike D is the checker: he looks around and absorbs all information. MCA was always the adult. And ad-rock is the grip into full life-always friendly, funny and interested. But maybe my favorite quality of the Beasties is that they are all so clarified: they taught me and many others a lot about life, people and music.