Trivia / Beastie Boys

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• Acclaimed Flop: Paul's Boutique, despite only reaching #24 on the Hip-Hop Charts, received lots of acclaim from critics, African-American hip-hop artists (such as Chuck D. of Public Enemy), and even Miles Davis!
• All-Star Cast: Their video to ''Fight For Your Right (Revisited)''.
• The Character Died with Him: Not long after MCA's death, various obituaries of his directorial alter-ego Nathaniel Hörnblowér appeared on fan websites.
• Chart Displacement: Surprisingly, they only had one song hit #1 on the Billboard Alternative Chart ("Ch-Check It Out"), and just two other Top 10 hits on the chart ("Intergalactic", "Make Some Noise"). Other songs that you'd assume were huge hits either charted low ("Hey Ladies" and "Sabotage" at #18, "So What'cha Want" at #22) or didn't chart at all ("Sure Shot", "Root Down").^note Licensed to Ill predated the Alternative chart, which debuted in 1988.
• Creator Backlash: The Beasties stopped performed "Fight for Your Right" live after 1987, think it "sucks" and are annoyed that its ironic, sarcastic nature was lost on its intended target of fratboys.
  • It really makes you wonder how Ad-Rock and Mike D felt when Coldplay preformed "Fight For Your Right" live to honor MCA after his death.
  • Also, they've apologized repeatedly for their earlier sexism and homophobia.
  • Ad-Rock also hates "Finger Lickin' Good" (because he does not rap on it).
  • They are apparently not fond of their early EPs and singles, given that they eventually re-released them on a compilation entitled Some Old Bullshit ^note They seem to at least have some affection for their early song "Egg Raid On Mojo" though - they included a lyrical reference to it in "Egg Man", occasionally played it live even after becoming primarily a hip-hop group, and it's one of two songs from this period to appear on the band-curated compilation Beastie Boys Anthology: The Sounds of Science (the other one being their namesake song).
  • They consider their first Def Jam single "Rock Hard" cheesy and amateurish in terms of lyrics and vocal delivery. The official autobiography Beastie Boys Book has a short chapter discussing the single, which ends with the lyrics cited in their entirety- in the audiobook Adam Horovitz can't get through reading them without laughing. Likewise, their documentary Beastie Boys Story includes a brief snippet for Horowitz and Mike D to poke fun at.
  • Adam Horovitz starred as a troubled teen in 1989 indie drama Lost Angels, his first acting credit - in Beastie Boys Book he half-jokingly suggests fans not look it up online; he enjoyed the process of making the film but finds his performance embarrassing. The accompanying Beastie Boys Story documentary included a brief scene from the film...which is then repeated multiple times as a joke at his own expense.
  • Both Mike D and Ad-Rock thought that "What Comes Around" off Paul's Boutique was "a dud", feeling that it was done to pad out time on the album and didn't flow with the other tracks.
• Development Hell: Since Ill Communication, they've sure started to take their time releasing albums.
  • The indefinitely postponed Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 1 may be stuck there forever after MCA's death.
  • At least one, possibly two, feature films ended up here.
• Early-Bird Cameo: "Lee Majors Come Again" from Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2 appeared on the soundtrack to Skate 3 a year before the album's release.
• Executive Meddling: After the Beasties fled to Capitol, Def Jam head Russell Simmons announced that he would assemble an album created from the band's outtakes with extra contributions by others (think Tupac Shakur's and The Notorious B.I.G.'s posthumous albums). Paul's Boutique came out first, and nothing was heard about Simmons' idea again.
  • Licensed to Ill was originally called Don't Be a Faggot. Columbia Records refused to publish it under that title. Beastie Boys were quite thankful for this meddling in retrospect.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The outtakes from Licensed to Ill have never been officially released, including a cover of The Beatles' "I'm Down" and a song called "The Scenario," though the latter did make a brief appearance in the Christian Slater movie Pump Up the Volume. There's also a leaked alternate mix of "Fight For Your Right" including a verse that seems to have been cut from the album due to being too off-color.
  • "Rock Hard", their first Def Jam single, was quickly withdrawn due to an unlicensed sample of "Back In Black" by AC/DC. Beastie Boys wanted to include it on the Sounds of Science compilation, which would have been the first time the song was officially available on digital formats... They were denied permission by AC/DC.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: The live DVD Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! was created by giving fans at a show camcorders and cutting together the best footage.
• The Pete Best: John Berry (guitar) and Kate Schellenbach (drums) left before the band signed with Def Jam and switched from punk to rap.
  • Schellenbach was forced out of the band by Rick Rubin - She has gone on record saying that he acted incredibly sexist to her and refused to allow her either to rap or continue as their drummer, believing that it didn't fit with his personal concept of the group. She remained friends with the rest of the band and later became the drummer for the '90s alt-rock band Luscious Jackson, one of the first signees to the Beasties' Grand Royal label.
• Permanent Placeholder: Their cover of "Time for Livin'" by Sly and the Family Stone: They wrote a Hardcore Punk style instrumental and struggled with the lyrics, so they had Ad Rock shout Sly Stone lyrics over it as a placeholder until they came up with something original. In the end they just put it on the album as is and credited Sly Stone as a co-writer.
• Throw It In!: A lot of their samples.
  • The well-known example of Rhyming with Itself in "Pass the Mic": Mike D meant to rhyme "commercial" and "rehearsal", but he accidentally repeated himself, resulting in "Everybody's rapping like it's a commercial / Acting like life is a big commercial". Supposedly this ended up on the album because the rest of the band thought it was funny.
• Uncredited Role: Run–D.M.C. contributed ghostwritten lyrics to Licensed to Ill. They are credited for "Slow And Low" though, as it's essentially a Cover Version of a King of Rock outtake.
• Wag the Director: The music video for "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn" was originally supposed to feature Kerry King (who performed the guitar solo) getting knocked offstage by a gorilla. King's response was "If there’s gonna be anyone knocking anyone offstage, it’ll be me knocking the gorilla", which is what subsequently happened.
• What Could Have Been: In interviews, Mike D mentioned the idea of releasing a With Lyrics version of The Mix-Up as a companion to the instrumental one, with guest vocalists on every song. M.I.A. and Jarvis Cocker were rumored to be among the contributors.
  • Stories differ on who instigated it or how serious the idea was, but there was discussion about firing Mike D when they signed with Def Jam because his image wasn't as hardcore as the others.
  • The original idea behind the self-produced full-band sessions that led to Aglio e Olio was to write and record a few short songs in the Hardcore Punk genre to include on what was to become Hello Nasty, much like how the previous two albums included some brief throwbacks to their earlier sound. They ended up coming up with more songs than planned, so rather than throw any out or leave them for B Sides, they split all the hardcore songs into a separate EP. Though Hello Nasty has its moments of Genre Roulette, it's still kind of hard to imagine any of the Aglio E Olio material fitting in.
  • After Licensed to Ill became successful, there was a small trend of rap groups getting their own movies (Run-D.M.C. in Tougher Than Leather, The Fat Boys in Disorderlies), so Beastie Boys were going to have their own movie too: Titled Scared Stupid, it would have been a slapstick comedy set in a haunted house. A script was written by Tom Cushman, a friend of the group, but it was never produced- according to Cushman, by the time they got a studio's interest, the group had fallen out with Rick Rubin; Rubin still owned the rights to their music and wouldn't let any of their songs be used in the film.
  • Later on, the members of the band would collaborate on an unproduced script called We Can Do This with film and music video director Spike Jonze. Jonze had just directed the "Sabotage" video, and it seems that the movie would have been an excuse for the band to have more fun with acting out alter-egos: Adam Yauch would play both his "Sabotage" character Sir Stuart Wallace and Nathaniel Hornblower, while Mike D's "Country Mike" alter-ego was born out of the same script, and Adam Horowitz would play Nino Vincenzi, a takeoff on Saturday Night Fever's Tony Manero with the twist that he actually dances poorly.
• Working Title: "Sabotage" evolved from an instrumental the group referred to as "Chris Rock". That Chris Rock was just becoming well-known at the time, but it was more of an in-joke/pun: They thought it had more of a "rock" feel than the rest of the material they were working on, and a studio engineer named Chris, who otherwise didn't have anything to say about their music, responded enthusiastically when he heard them working on it: So it was the "rock" song that Chris liked.

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