Why the Beastie Boys changed their tune on women

“I remember truly loving MCA when he apologised for disrespecting women,” Amy Poehler writes in Beastie Boys Book.

Adam Horowitz, Adam Yauch and Michael Diamond.

Sure Shot kicks off the 1994 Beastie Boys album Ill Communication, and, amid the usual boasts and lyrical references, rapper Adam Yauch delivered an uncharacteristically sober few lines: “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.”

It was both an admonition to men and an indirect apology for Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys’s raucous 1986 release.

The first hip-hop album to hit No 1, it got millions of young listeners to rap along with songs that painted women as scammers (She’s Crafty) or objects for the taking (Girls).

For some female listeners the 10-second Sure Shot verse by Yauch, aka MCA, was enough to confirm the Beastie Boys as allies.

“I remember truly loving and believing MCA when he apologised for disrespecting women in the past,” comedian and actress Amy Poehler writes in Beastie Boys Book, a history of the band released last month.

“I always knew I was in the club, but now I knew they knew.”

The book, which incorporates playlists, recipes and contributions from collaborators and friends of the band, is a freewheeling memoir written mostly by the group’s two surviving members, Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, who pay tribute throughout to Yauch.

Described as the guiding force of the trio, he died from cancer in 2012 at age 47, bringing an end to the Beastie Boys as a band.

In edited excerpts below, Diamond and Horovitz recalled the recording of Sure Shot.

Horovitz: We had spent a lot of time making (1992 album) Check Your Head and toured for a really long time. We were just in, what do you call it, a flow? We were in a flow state. Ill Communication came from us being obsessed with being together and making music.

Diamond: We were very entrenched in our lives at our Los Angeles studio G-Son, which wasn’t only the place we recorded our album. It was our clubhouse, our hangout, our meeting place for all our like-minded friends. So we had a lot going on all the time there, including Grand Royal (a Beastie Boys-owned magazine and record label).

At the time people were talking about the slacker generation. Who were they trying to kid? We were having a lot of fun and hanging out, but in all that hanging out we somehow managed to get stuff done.

Horovitz introduced the music­al hook that became the foundation of Sure Shot, a sample from jazz flautist Jeremy Steig’s 1970 song, Howlin’ for Judy.

Diamond: It was an exciting time for sampling. We were still bound to using either the E-mu SP 1200 or the Akai MPC60 (drum machines and samplers used often in hip-hop). Both were limited, technologically, but not compared to the way we did it on (1989 album) Paul’s Boutique, which was a whole nightmare. Now all of a sudden you had stereo sampling right there in this little box, so you just tap buttons and use a little screen where you could vaguely see what was happening.

Horovitz: Sampling at that time felt like playing video games. It was like Asteroids: a little black-and-white screen and you’re furiously tapping on buttons.

Diamond: We would sit around and write, notebooks open, in the control room at G-Son, playing that instrumental beat through the speakers over and over. When you have a loop that you stay in love with while you’re doing that, those are the ones you keep.

Horovitz: That’s how we wrote all our rap songs. The three of us would just sit there and write individually and collectively.

Diamond: After writing on our own, we’d jump into this collective editing process where you’re sort of like, “What do you got?” Then we grab the mics, do our stuff and then edit each other: “That’s good. This could be better. This makes sense with that.” We were all pretty brutal on each other, but it yielded good results.

Horovitz: Usually, 80 per cent of the time, it was about making the other guys laugh.

Diamond: It’s interesting that people strongly associate each of us with saying certain things in our songs, because it wasn’t necessarily the case that we wrote them that way. Sometimes we would completely reassign those lyrics for however it worked best with the song.

Horovitz: A lot of the time we’d just break up the lyrics. Usually it was based on whose turn it was in the song, but we did switch off a lot, so it got blurry.

Yauch’s verse about women wasn’t planned or discussed after he delivered it but its significance quickly became clear.

Diamond: I remember taking note of those lines. In terms of our evolution, I’m proud that they stick out. On Paul’s Boutique, our style changed a lot from Licensed to Ill, but lyrically we were in kind of the same place. On Check Your Head, we started to realise the effect of the things we were saying. Ill Communication was the next step, where we felt empowered to make a change and comment on things we had done.

Horovitz: We never had a conversation about that specific line, but I’m sure Yauch was referencing himself or us as a band. Or men in rap, or men in general. We said some stupid stuff when we were younger and it’s nice to know that now, in a way, we’re looked upon as men who can actually change and learn from mistakes. I hope that’s part of what that line means to people.

For a chorus that would tie the verses together they called on Wendell Fite, known as DJ Hurricane, who had been backing them on stage for years.

DJ Hurricane: I had gone back home to Atlanta for my kid’s birthday and I was dead asleep next to my wife when the guys called me on the house phone at like 2am.

Horovitz: We were stoned and forgot that it was three hours later where he was.

DJ Hurricane: They said, remember that hook you were singing? Before I left LA I was on the mic during one of our jam sessions in the studio, saying, “You can’t, you won’t, you don’t stop, keep on and you’re rocking the sure shot.” That’s in the hip-hop dictionary. I used to say “sure shot” back in the day when I started writing raps. After the guys heard the hook, they wanted me to record it right then, so I woke up a bit, got a drink of water and started doing it.

In LA, producer Mario Caldato Jr recorded Hurricane’s chant over the phone, which added a static buzz to his voice on the song.

DJ Hurricane: The Beastie Boys liked that dirty sound. After Licensed to Ill, their voices always had some of that. We called it the “ashy mic”. So that was right up their alley for me to do it over the phone to get that sound. I threw their names in there too, so they could come in after the chorus.

Horowitz: That’s why I like our band. You know the three-person weave? It’s a basketball warm-up where you lightly jog in a figure-eight weave, and you pass the ball to the person meeting you as you all move down the court. Yauch could say something profound and pass the ball, and I can say something about farts, pass to Mike, and he can say something about Yoo-hoo and pass the ball again to Yauch. We could say anything, so why not?

The Wall Street Journal