"Tonight we're gonna tell you the story of three kids who met, became friends, and did all kinds of crazy stuff together over 30 years," says a greying, 50-something dude in a sweater and beige pants, taking to the stage in front of a capacity audience.
His co-host, another trim, plainly attired middle-aged guy, might be the ageing CEO of a tech startup.
But if the bratty voices of men decades younger weren't a giveaway, this isn't any old pair of nostalgic dads preparing to slog through their life highlight reel — it's Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond of New York hip hop pioneers the Beastie Boys, and they're holding court at Brooklyn's ornate Kings Theatre in April, 2019.
Together, Horovitz (aka Ad-Rock), Diamond (Mike D), and founding member Adam Yauch (MCA) — who passed away from cancer in 2012, effectively ending the band's recording and touring — could barely contain their sense of meta mischief, building a career on sampling pop culture ephemera and running it though their own goofball filter, even as they emerged as accomplished musicians, rappers, and, unexpectedly, part of a rising global consciousness.
Directed by the Beastie's longtime collaborator, filmmaker Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Her), this career-spanning "live" documentary — which captures a stage performance that was itself a live presentation of a documentary on the band — parades their sampling sensibilities, as Horovitz and Diamond narrate a deep dive into the group's storied history that's part slide show and part stand-up comedy routine.
It's two MCs and one DJ, with Jonze — who also directed the live show — impishly toying with his hosts from the theatre control booth, mixing audio-visual gags and non-sequiturs into Horovitz and Diamond's tales as they bound about the stage.
The documentary is an occasion to celebrate and reflect, charting the rise, fall, and reinvention of the group against a giddy backdrop of late-20th century pop history.
Like the band themselves, it's both infectious and funny.
Horovitz and Diamond roast each other in the way lifelong pals do, while Jonze serves up creaky rear-projection backdrops, sets a montage of hard-workin' hip-hop hustle to Dolly Parton's 9 to 5, and loops a clip of Horovitz's inauspicious acting debut — as he drives a red Maserati convertible into a designer swimming pool — until it becomes an absurd image of the excess that the band succumbed to at the height of their early fame.
If the Beastie Boys' narrative feels well-trod — cartoonish frat-rappers who sold millions, only to all-but vanish and reinvent themselves as vanguard hip-hop statesmen — then it gets fleshed out with a wealth of detail here, both anecdotal and surprisingly emotional.
Horowitz and Diamond take it back to their formative days as Manhattan high school punks, meeting at Bad Brains and Misfits shows and galvanized by Yauch, who at 16 was sporting the trench coat, buttons and combat boots of the downtown hardcore scene.
"We were like Monty Python as much as we were Black Flag," says Diamond.
But it was their burgeoning love of hip-hop, and a prank-call hit called Cooky Puss, that got them noticed in the New York club scene, bringing the fledgling rappers together with long-haired future super-producer Rick Rubin and Def Jam founder Russell Simmons, whose early hip-hop stars (and Beastie label-mates) Run-DMC were about to break into the mainstream.
With hindsight, Diamond suggests that Simmons "just needed three white rappers to get on MTV," but whatever the case, the Beastie were the real deal — respected white rappers years before the cultural flameout of Vanilla Ice, and the eventual mainstream legitimacy conferred upon Eminem.
Yet the Beastie Boys broke through as what Horovitz calls a "cartoon rap version of an 80s metal band".
Their 1986 debut Licensed to Ill, masterminded by Rubin and Simmons, became the first rap album to top the Billboard albums chart on its way to shifting 10 million copies, while its still-funny smash (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party) — "a party anthem that made fun of frat bros" according to Horovitz — would become both their golden ticket and career millstone.
At the height of the MTV 80s, their party-bro escapades — an irony apparently lost on America — fit right in with the lurid pop and spandex-clad hair metal that ruled the musical landscape.
The Beasties' subsequent world tour — for which they jokingly requested their promoter furnish them with go-go dancers in cages and a 25-foot hydraulic phallus, and were duly obliged — blew up in scope and notoriety, and the group leaned into it, effectively becoming the obnoxious jerks they'd set out to lampoon.
"Beastie Boys went from the funny tipsy guy with the lampshade on his head, to the ugly drunk guy people were trying to get out of their apartment," says Diamond.
"We didn't know what was a joke and what wasn't," says Horovitz, who goes on to recall the Groundhog Day-like nausea of waiting for the giant penis to emerge from its box at the end of the show night after night.
"The problem was, we built the f-----' box, and we're the dicks stuck inside," he admits.
The band's sense of regret is perhaps strongest when it comes to their attitude — however comically intended — toward women, especially as they lament kicking out their original drummer, Kate Schellenbach, just as they rocketed toward stardom.
"When Beastie Boys began the majority of our friends were girls ... and it's really embarrassing to think that we let them down," says Horovitz, whose long-term partner is no less than riot grrrl trailblazer and feminist activist Kathleen Hanna.
"It's not so much that we grew up, it's more like we wised up," he adds.
Humbled by the commercial flop of their innovative, and since highly regarded 1989 album Paul's Boutique, the Beastie Boys regrouped creatively, and the rest is pop-lockin' history.
Embraced by hip hop heads and the alternative nation alike, the band's second life yielded Lollapalooza headline slots, genre-spanning hit albums, and a spiritual awakening that led to Yauch's Free Tibet concerts — and his unlikely friendship with the Dalai Lama.
Yauch's presence looms large throughout, conveying a sense of creative communion that's so rich and warm that even the inevitable eulogising — as Horovitz dims the lights for the tale of their last show together — doesn't feel maudlin but celebratory and funny.
It's this shared spirit that gives Jonze's documentary presentation its own rambling, inventive charm, capturing a career in all of its chaos and glory.
As Horovitz notes at one point: "Things in life never come full circle… they're almost always misshapen, as if they're drawn by a toddler in crayon."
Beastie Boys Story premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday April 24.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiamh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA0LTI0L2JlYXN0aWUtYm95cy1zdG9yeS1yZXZpZXctc3Bpa2Utam9uemUtcmFwLXRyaW8tZG9jdW1lbnRhcnkvMTIxNzIyMTbSASZodHRwOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMjE3MjIxNg?oc=5
2020-04-24 00:12:31Z
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