Borough boys An interview with Beastie prankster Adam Horovitz BY MATT ASHARE

Back in the ’80s, when three upper-middle-class New York Jewish college kids in a hardcore punk band hooked up with budding hip-hop producer Rick Rubin and made rap history with the mega-hit album Licensed to Ill (Def Jam; 1986), Beastie Boys were for sure an oddity. White people just didn’t make hip-hop — at least not good hip-hop. And Beastie Boys were the real deal, albeit an over-the-top and playful version of an Evander Holyfield, with all the punching power (thanks to the AC/DC power-chord backing tracks), a lot more charisma, and what appeared to be the staying power of your average heavyweight champ. In other words, Licensed to Ill had novelty written all over it, and the idea that two decades later we’d still be talking about Beastie Boys with any degree of seriousness was as far-fetched as Mike Tyson getting his title back. Indeed, Beastie Boys — King Ad-Rock (Adam Horovitz), Mike D (Michael Diamond), and MCA (Adam Yauch) — are no longer an oddity. They’re a full-fledged anomaly in a realm where 30 is over the hill and the average life span of a hip-hop career is a couple of albums. Rappers may stick around for longer than that, but Beastie Boys have few if any peers. It would be hard to find another hip-hop outfit that’s remained as relevant and lucrative for 20 years. And as they gear up for a tour that brings them to the Worcester Centrum this Tuesday, the Beasties can look back over a career that’s included three groundbreaking albums as well a new CD, To the 5 Boroughs (Capitol), that demonstrates just how good a hip-hop entity they are even when they’re simply doing what they love best — words ’n’ beats rap — and not trying to take hip-hop in a new direction.

The trio of CDs that established Beastie Boys as more than just another gang of word slingers — Licensed to Ill, with its heavy-metal-meets-hip-hop arrangements; 1989’s Paul’s Boutique (Capitol), with its Dust Brothers sample-based sonic experimentalism; and 1998’s Hello Nasty (Capitol), with its 180-degree turn away from sampling and back to the old-school values of two turntables and, well, three microphones — aren’t just artistic triumphs. They’re albums that did much to alter the direction of hip-hop. In the meantime, through their involvement with Tibet and the Dalai Lama, the trio brought an air of political consciousness to their often party-oriented atmosphere. And by bringing artists like DJ Mixmaster Mike and keyboardist Money Mark on board, both live and in the studio, while also returning to their own instruments from the hardcore-punk days, Beastie Boys have continued to build bridges between hip-hop and other styles of music. Not bad for something that started off as a "Cookiepuss" joke.

Getting any member of the group, but especially Horovitz, to take any of the above seriously is no easy feat. Even in this election year, the trio seem reluctant to let their playful guards down. But we did our best to draw the amused and amusing Horowitz out of his Beastie Boy shell. Here’s some of what he had to say.

Q: I’ve seen you a number of times over the years playing in various configurations. What’s it going to be this time?

A: We have everybody. That means, you’ve got me, Adam, and Mike. You’ve got Mixmaster Mike. You got Keyboard Money Mark. And you’ve Alfredo Ortez on percussion. He’s toured with us before. It seems to be working out well for him.

Q: Are you going to have your instruments on stage to do some playing of your own?

A: We might.

Q: You might?

A: No, we will. I’m just trying to make it more mysterious than it really is.

Q: Hip-hop artists don’t tend to have long careers. How do you explain yours?

A: I think it’s raw sex appeal. I think it’s stunning good looks, for one. Model-like presence. Stoic. Intelligent. Good team players.

Q: Sounds as if you were signing up for an Internet dating service. . . .

A: I like long walks . . . No, I don’t know . . . what am I supposed to say?

Q: Well, maybe it’s because you started as a rock band and you’re more of a rock band than a rap group.

A: Well, not even many rock bands stick around for twentysomething years.

Q: It’s hard to put up with the same people year after year in an artistic collaboration.

A: You’re telling me. It’s been 24 years. But I don’t know. I don’t know what to compare us to. I think we’re just what we are. We definitely just love rap music, so that’s part of it.

Q: One thing you’ve accomplished that not even many rock bands have done is that you’ve made a number of groundbreaking albums. Have you just lucked into that, or has it been a conscious effort?

A: Well, I thought Paul’s Boutique was going to be groundbreaking, but then De La Soul beat us to the punch with their album. The thing about rap, though, is that it’s different from rock, reggae, punk rock, or whatever. You’re supposed to sound like a particular era of time in rock or punk rock. But in rap, you wouldn’t be caught dead trying to sound like something from the ’80s. So we just decided to make shit that sounded like something from the ’80s, and somehow it worked.

Q: You did that by bringing back the notion of the DJ when it seemed that sampling was making the art of the DJ superfluous.

A: How can we get paid for that? A lot of rappers don’t even have DJs now. We’ve got the number one DJ in the world, and he’s got the belts and the titles to prove it. But it’s not like a lot of other artists are really doing it. Missy Elliott might be, and there’s some of that going on on some of Nas’s albums. Still, most rappers aren’t trying to sound old.

Q: Do you feel old doing what you’re doing?

A: No, we have new shit out that sounds different from we’ve done before. And I’m into it. I don’t know what happens when you decide, ‘Oh, I’m old.’ Maybe it’s when you’re not excited about your records anymore. I do think that if we had just kept making Licensed to Ill records, then maybe people would have gotten sick of us. Fortunately, that’s a maybe I don’t have to worry about.

Q: The new CD isn’t a radical departure from what you’ve done in the past.

A: It’s a radical departure from Hello Nasty. If you listen to that, it’s got so much crazy shit on it in terms of styles of music. That record is weird. And this record is just your basic rap record. It’s not experimental. It’s not that out there. It’s just not a weird record.

Q: Was that a conscious decision?

A: Well, it’s a lot different from the last record, but it’s not that different from the first one.

Q: So you’ve come full circle?

A: No. No. Because I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to go full circle. I want to go keep going straight. It’s just that we wanted to make some stripped-down things with big beats. If you start adding tons of samples and all of that stuff, then that doesn’t accomplish what we wanted.

Q: In the past, you guys have been politically active and somewhat outspoken. Why isn’t the new CD more political?

A: When we started to record it, all the songs were really slow, really heavy anti-Bush songs. And it started to sound so depressing. If I let George Bush take over every aspect of what I’m doing in my life, then he’s won. I can’t let him in my head that much. So, yeah, I’ve got to say stuff about politics, I’ve got to say stuff about the right wing and all of these things. But I can’t not go to the party because of them. At a certain point, it was ‘Let’s have fun for a while.’ So we tried to be fun and be political at the same time.

I gotta say it’s also very different with writing songs, like melodic songs or punk-rock songs, as opposed to rapping. Because you hear three guys talk about this stuff non-stop and it’s like enough already. Very few people can do that. I think Chuck D is one of them, and there are very few other rappers whom you’d want to listen to go off on political diatribes. It comes off sounding preachy, even though you’re not saying anything people don’t already know. I wouldn’t put a Rage Against the Machine record on to listen to around the house, but they’re so good that I would if they weren’t so one-dimensional. And even Public Enemy have songs that aren’t political.

At the same time, it’s a very important time to get angry and to talk out right now. I feel George Bush is a clown who needs to go away. And if people don’t get angry and speak out about it, then he’s not going to go away. But it’s weird because 95 percent of the kids who come to our shows already agree with us on that. It’s just a matter of getting them to vote. And it seems so crucial for those people to vote right now. It’s so scary, you go see Fahrenheit 9/11 and a lot of people are still like, "Oh well, fuck it, who cares?"

Q: Could it be that people feel that Bush can’t be as bad as he’s been portrayed?

A: Well, honestly, the youth vote is tough. I mean, I didn’t give a shit about that stuff when I was a kid. So we wanted to make sure we had this record done and out by summer so that we’d be on tour leading up to the election, and maybe we can make a small difference in terms of motivating younger people to vote against Bush.

Q: As a trio, you’ve always been closely associated with New York City, and so much has changed there since Hello Nasty. Did you feel a responsibility to address that on this album?

A: We definitely wanted to make a song about it. We didn’t want to make a whole album dedicated to it. But after we recorded the album, we realized it had a lot to do with the city, and that’s why we called it To the 5 Boroughs. Weird that Boston never made a record about Boston.

Q: Now there’s a deep thought. I bet Mixmaster Mike could do some interesting stuff with some of Boston’s greatest hits.

A: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s always been the three of us doing all the music and artwork and everything. But now that Mixmaster Mike is around, it’s a whole different thing because it feels like the record wouldn’t be right if Mike didn’t come in and do his thing. Me, Adam, and Mike still write all the songs and do all that, but a song’s not really done until Mike comes in with his bag of tricks.

Q: How has your relationship with the other two guys evolved over the past two decades?

A: It’s a lie. It’s all a lie. I don’t trust them. And if I were you, I wouldn’t trust them. They are problems. They are not assets to the team . . . No, seriously, we made a decision a long time ago that we wouldn’t do anything that the three of us weren’t completely happy with. And we decided to make sure that the three of us would stick together no matter what. And we lucked out. That’s the best way to put it.

Beastie Boys appear this Tuesday, October 12, at the Centrum in Worcester, Mass.; call (617) 931-2000.