‘It’s funny how far a joke will get you,” Michael Diamond grins. This time 40 years ago, the New York rapper known as Mike D was working with schoolfriends Adam “MCA” Yauch and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz on Licensed to Ill, their 1986 debut album as the Beastie Boys.
The “joke” in question is that record’s cartoonish send-up of frat-bro culture, set to fusions of hard rock riffs and hip-hop beats. As for how far it got them: destinations included global stardom, a page in the history books with rap’s first US chart-topping album, and the crosshairs of British tabloids as they roused a generation to “fight for your right to party”.
The Beastie Boys would evolve into one of the most musically and socially progressive acts of their generation, with a run of boundary-pushing albums touching on politics and spirituality until they disbanded in 2012 after Yauch’s death from cancer. Diamond has since focused his creative energies on producing records for Soft Play and the Hives, while his sons, Skylar and Davis, took up performing as musicians themselves with the indie pop duo Very Nice Person.
Sitting in the lounge of his London hotel, happily munching cereal between questions, the wiry, thoughtful 60-year-old seems content in this quieter chapter of his career. But after jamming with his sons reignited his passion for writing, he is returning to the mic with his dizzyingly creative debut solo album Thank You.
The Beastie Boys formed in New York City in 1981; all three members hailed from artsy, middle-class backgrounds – Diamond’s father was an art dealer, and his mother an interior decorator. The group quickly decided “we had to have our own personas that were distinct and separate”, and took inspiration from teen comedies such as 1979’s Meatballs. The results were the beer-crushing, school-hating louts heard on Licensed to Ill. “When you’re 19,” Diamond says, “you’re just spewing out whatever, like: ‘This is going to be hilarious.’ You haven’t faced a major reaction yet.”
In the UK, they faced the strongest reaction of all. With an album strewn with sexist and homophobic jokes, shows featuring a giant inflatable penis and go-go dancers in cages, and tabloids circulating (instantly denied) rumours about them mocking sick children at Montreux pop festival, their 1987 UK tour stirred a Sex Pistols-style moral panic. MPs issued calls to ban them from performing. “Get Lost Beasties” ran one headline in the Mirror. Their Liverpool show was cut short after just 12 minutes and ended in a riot. “Britain was this lightbulb moment of: ‘Wait, what we say does actually impact people,’” Diamond says, calling the experience “terrifying, humbling, alienating and surreal”.
They nearly split that year largely due to the fallout. The joke wasn’t funny any more; they also left their record label Def Jam after a dispute over royalties, then Horovitz moved to Los Angeles. But the group were creatively reinvigorated by Horovitz’s new west coast friends, the Dust Brothers, who were masters of digital sampling.
“It was like our dream come true. We could have an old blues guitarist with a funk drumbeat and a jazz trumpet,” he says. “We could create these endless possibilities, this musical collage.” That collage was made into their second album, 1989’s Paul’s Boutique, a left turn that received a muted critical reception but has since been hailed as an experimental masterpiece.
Even more striking is how the trio who once delivered punchlines such as “You like men and we like beers” (Hold It Now, Hit It) became beacons of positive social messaging. As mainstream rap largely grew more toxic through the 1990s, the band went the other way and apologised for past lyrics, declaring “the disrespect to women has got to be through”, (Sure Shot); “homophobics ain’t all right” (Alive); and “love can conquer hate in every situation” (Bodhisattva Vow).
“In the same way we felt shame after some of the reaction to Licensed to Ill, we felt this nice, enriched feeling,” he says of the later albums. “I don’t want to get too ambitious here, as we are just a rap group, but maybe it changed how some people thought a little bit.” But across their albums, comedy and music remained partners. “They’re both things humanity desperately needs.”
Diamond’s new record is also experimental and socially conscious. There’s plenty of his old band’s fun-loving eclecticism, with nods to industrial music, psych and dream-pop, while the lyrics take in self-reflection – the need, he says, to “look under the hood, check inside”. But this time the backdrop of laughter was replaced by grief. “After Yauch died, I couldn’t make music for quite a while. I’d open a computer file, and I’d just feel sadness.”
His return to rapping emerged from free-wheeling home-studio jams with his sons, whose brand of vivid indie pop is stamped all over Thank You. “When we first started playing, everybody just picked up something we’d basically never played before,” Diamond says. He began to loosen up, scribbling ideas in notebooks as they came to him, and dipping back into them during sessions. “When I started actually being open to writing lyrics that were more genuinely working around how I was feeling, it started to feel good,” he says. “It was this liberating thing.”
Reflections on mortality loom large in Thank You; in It’s Time, he raps about “all these things that I want to get done”. For Diamond, Yauch’s death stirred up unresolved feelings. “In the New York we grew up in, there was a high mortality rate. We grew up in a club scene that was filled with drugs. Aids was brand new, and gay figures we knew from clubs started to drop dead. My dad died when I was 15. There was all this emotion I’d never dealt with,” he says. “Part of ageing is this thing of your own mortality. You can push it away and ignore it, or acknowledge it and feel what you’re feeling.”
An acquaintance of his sons, who was getting rich from cryptocurrency at 19, inspired Thank You’s most overtly political track, Crypto. “I was just taken aback to see that’s the reality of the world we’re in,” Diamond says of its reflections on greed and capitalism. “You just get sucked so quickly into this vacuum.” I ask how his own experiences around that age may have shaped his attitudes on greed, given the Beastie Boys’ financial disputes with their label. “It was a great lesson that everything comes with a price.”
Rather than money, Diamond feels “time is the most valuable commodity”, and returning to making and releasing his own music is time well spent. “I’m the most whole version of myself when I’m creatively completely engulfed and engaged.” There’s another note of contentment when he reflects on hip-hop generally, which the Beasties helped propel into the mainstream. He praises two artists who released their debut albums just as the Beastie Boys ended: Death Grips (“a real influence” on much current music) and Tyler, the Creator. “When I first saw Odd Future come out, I felt kind of happy inside – it felt like a continuation of an energy we brought.”
Thank You’s closing title track is an impressionistic look at his early years, filled with fleeting images of partying with his friends at 16 (“We were just kids freaking out,” he sings). It strikes me as a possible parting tribute to the Beasties, but Diamond explains it’s universal. “It’s for everyone. This combination of your social group, your passion, coming of age, and music all stirred up together.” The title of the album, meanwhile, was inspired by a visit to a Buddhist monastery (the religion practised by his old friend Yauch) which prompted him to reflect on “who I get to make music with, who I’ve made music with”. A smile spreads across his face: “I’m so grateful for all of this.”
Thank You by Mike D is out on 28 August.
