As we’ve all been cooped up indoors in self-quarantine, a new trend has emerged on social media. This trend involves sharing 10 albums that have influenced your musical taste and then daily nominating someone else to do the same. When I was nominated, I knew some of the albums right off the top of my head–Rage Against the Machine’s debut album, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Usher’s Confessions, and Boston’s debut album, Boston. But there was one band that I knew not only was going to be on my list but could have easily taken it over entirely–
Beastie Boys.
I can still remember the day when my Uncle David played for me the License to Ill album on our way to Waterworld at Sacramento’s Cal Expo. It hit me like a lightning bolt and from then on, I was obsessed with the Beastie Boys. I would listen to To The 5 Boroughs at school, jam to Hello Nasty while doing my homework, and rap songs off of Paul’s Boutique loudly in my car. I performed their music with my two brothers at our middle school talent shows. Heck, I rapped “Pass the Mic” with my brothers at my wedding!
Growing up I loved their music, but as I’ve gotten older I have grown to love their personalities as well. Luckily I became a fan in the Internet Age and could look up old videos and watch old performances. It just always felt like there was a rich history to these three guys, and the newest documentary, Beastie Boys Story tells that story in beautiful, rich tones of humor, honesty, and vulnerability.
The format of Beastie Boys Story, like the Boys themselves, breaks convention. Rather than a compilation of talking heads spliced between images and videos telling the story of Beastie Boys, the film is a recording of Beastie Boys members Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz live presentation of “Beastie Boys Book“, a somewhat-biography of the band released in 2018. The film, directed by longtime band friend Spike Jonze, plays almost like a Ted Talk, with Diamond and Horovitz on stage at King Theatre in New York, telling the story of the band in front of a live audience flanked by a presentation of old photos and videos chronicling their saga.
The live documentary takes us through the band’s early punk rock roots when Beastie Boys included a female drummer, they were more punk than rap, and everything was a joke, right up to the passing of band member Adam Yauch, more popularly known as MCA. Diamond and Horovitz weave this tale of three friends living their dreams of making music, infused with archival footage, music video clips, and interviews.
For any fan of Beastie Boys, it truly is a treat to relive some of these moments but also to hear them tell the stories of frustration, creativity, sadness, annoyance, and loss that went into each and every album they created.
While the documentary can feel at times like two men just reading a teleprompter, those moments are few and far between as off-hand jokes and moments of humor find their way into the film. While these stories and moments are great, the truly special moments in this doc are when Diamond and Horovitz open themselves up, making themselves vulnerable through stories of losing loved ones, perceived failure, and personal growth.
While known mostly for their songs like “Brass Monkey”, “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right to Party”, and “Girls”, it can be easy to call the Beastie Boys hypocrites. A lot of their early songs, they thought, were jokes in the way that they talked about certain topics, women in particular. These “jokes” by a bunch of dumb kids were attributed to them as real ideas. As the Boys saw a career that lasted decades, over that time, these Boys became men and they ended up having children, families, they learned more about the world, life, and themselves. So how does one take the juxtaposition between some of the ideas posed in their early songs versus some of the ideas posed by later songs?
The young men that wrote songs with lyrics like:
“Girls! To do the dishes!
Girls! To clean up my room!
Girls! To do the laundry!
Girls! And in the bathroom!”
are the same ones who years later came out with a song with the line:
“I want to say a little something that’s long overdue/
The disrespect to women has got to be through/
To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends/
I want to offer my love and respect to the end.”
I mean, it sounds a little hypocritical, right?
But Diamond and Horovitz aren’t shy of this perceived “hypocrisy”; rather they embrace that change and turn it into a lesson to be learned by all as Diamond shares a moment where this exact question was posed to Horovitz and his answer was simply, “I’d rather be a hypocrite than the person I was 20 years ago.” Growth, evolution, and expansion have always been at the heart of Beastie Boys music, but moments like this highlight just how much those things are a part of the Boys themselves.
The film ends with a touching tribute from the Boys about their final years with Adam Yauch. Starting with the story, read straight from their book, about “The Last Gig”, Horovitz fights and struggles through tears and raw emotions to honor his lost friend. Together, Diamond and Horovitz paint a picture of a man who was the best friend that any of us could ask for–a friend that not only pushes himself to be the best version of himself but inspires those around him to join him in that same quest.
And that idea is the core of Beastie Boys Story. It’s a story of growth. It’s a story of a group of rowdy kids who went from having fun messing around with guitars and drums, to making music to get money and girls, to guys who realized that they only cared about making music, to becoming guys who had a mission to enact change through both their music and their actions.
It’s not just a story of their music changing and evolving, it’s a story about their own evolution as human beings. It’s that evolution that gives the film it’s emotional core and makes Beastie Boys Story a doc well worth watching. It’s a story that music lovers, in general, will find interesting, but this one is definitely made for the Beastie Boys fan in all of us.
RATING: B+
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