On "Beastie Boys Story"

Wow.

So, over the weekend Melissa and I started Beastie Boys Story on Apple TV+. The feature-length film directed by Spike Jonze that chronicles the entirety of the band's career. We finished it up on Monday evening and (spoiler alert) it was f**king awesome.

For the ill-informed (see what I did there?), the Beastie Boys are Michael Diamond (aka, Mike D), Adam Horovitz (aka, Ad-Rock or King Ad-Rock), and Adam Yauch (aka, MCA). The latter of the three passed away in 2012 after a battle with cancer.

In late 2018 Mike D and Ad-Rock released "Beastie Boys Book", which chronicles the adventures of the band throughout their career in music. Beastie Boys Story is the film that was inspired by the book.

My history with the Beasties

License to Ill was the first album that I ever purchased with my own money. And, when I say "album" I mean cassette tape. It was the summer of 1987 and I thought that I was the hottest sh*t ever putting that into my tape deck. It took less than a week for me to learn every word of every rhyme. Moreover, I was taken with the hard rock samples. For example, the drum track from Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks" on "Rhymin' & Stealin'" was the coolest thing that I had ever heard. Add to that Jimmy Page's guitar riff from "The Ocean" on "She's Crafty" and I found out quickly that I was a burgeoning Led Zeppelin fan. It was through the Beastie Boys that I was introduced to other fantastic bands.

I spent that entire summer listening to License To Ill, and years after that.

But most importantly the Beasties were my entree into the world of hip hop. After License To Ill, I scrimped and saved enough money to purchase Run DMC's Raising Hell. After that it was LL Cool J's Bigger and Deffer. And the list goes on and on. While I may have been a young white kid in the suburbs, there was something about this music that spoke to me, and the Beastie Boys was the group that started that feeling. I would not be listening to artists from Jay Z to Jurassic 5 if the Beasties hadn't entered my life.

...but back to the film.

Credit: Justin Lloyd/Newspix/Rex Features

A love letter to MCA

As a young kid first listening to the Beastie Boys, MCA was always my "favorite" of the three (like, if you put a proverbial gun to my head - I loved all of them - so that favorite Beastie might have varied from week-to-week). There was something about Yauch's gravelly vocals that made him stand apart from the rest of the group.

It was clear throughout the movie that Mike D and Ad-Rock wanted the film to come through as a tribute to Adam Yauch. While the remaining Beasties told a LOT of stories, it was more often than not that the story began or ended with, "And this was Yauch's idea" or "Yauch came up with this". They made it clear that MCA was a creative force-to-be-wreckoned-with.

For example, on the classic, 808-heavy "Paul Revere" from License To Ill, Ad-Rock and Mike D revealed that it was MCA that came up with the idea to play the quintessential drum track backwards. The story goes that MCA got the idea from hearing that artists like Jimi Hendrix would play tracks backward to get a unique sound, and he wanted to try it with their song. But the resounding theme from Diamond and Horovitz was that Yauch was the driving force behind much of the creativity of the band. Not only did Yauch provide writing for music and lyrics, but he would shoot the videos. He would do the album art. And in that vein, they spent a good deal of time talking about Nathaniel Hörnblowér - Yauch's alleged uncle (and his alter-ego), and the antics and impact that he brought to the group.

Moreover, the love and friendship of the three really came through in the film. At one point, during an emotional story, choking back tears Ad-Rock turns to Mike D and says (off mic), "I can't do this, can you finish?"

It's emotional. I'm not ashamed to admit that I got choked-up more than once - particularly in the third act of the film.

Credit: cover art photo from Check Your Head

The format was EXCELLENT

Okay. If stand-up comedy, a TED talk, and a documentary movie somehow had a baby - Beastie Boys Story would be the result. I've never seen anything like this before.

It's simple. The film is Mike D and Ad-Rock on a stage in front of an audience, talking into microphones, with a screen behind them to play video clips. They are funny. And I mean really funny. Many of the stories have humor, but the delivery is key - and these two have a certain je ne sais quoi that results in belly laughs.

The videos that they play are a retrospective of the band's career. They start at the beginning and show clips of the boys (and girls) doing their punk/hardcore thing in New York City. They follow the band through the transformation to a rap group, and speak to the irony of the transition from making fun of "party bros" to becoming that which they were previously making fun of.

I think that the only criticism that I have could be interpreted one of two ways:

• They didn't cover everything that I would have like to have heard/seen, or;
• The film was way too short

They very adequately covered the run-up to the B-Boys' success with License To Ill. The story continued into the making of, and subsequent commercial failure of Paul's Boutique. From there, the story headed into the making of Check Your Head (and the stripped-down/raw nature of the creative and recording processes). All great, so far.

All along Mike D and Ad-Rock are continuing to highlight all of the great things about MCA. And that certainly continued. But we didn't get much detail about the creative process or stories surrounding Ill Communication or Hello Nasty. There was no mention at all of The In Sound From Way Out! (a collection of instrumental songs that they Beasties released on other albums), To The Five Boroughs (a post-9/11 love letter to New York City), The Mix-Up (another instrumental album), or Hot Sauce Committee, Part Two. We're talking about more than ten years of additional content that was glossed over! Inquiring minds - like Yours Truly - want to know.

But that criticism aside, in the end Beastie Boys Story is just, well, different. In a good way! They have a great story to tell, and this was the perfect format in which to tell it. Despite my feelings of an incomplete picture in the movie, it was still excellent. It is well-worth your time, and a 30 day free trial of Apple TV+.

...and if you can't watch Beastie Boys Story on Apple TV+, I'll leave you with a great concert from Glasgow, Scotland in 1999: