beastie boys
Beastie Boys Sue Chili’s Owner Over Use of Song “Sabotage”
The Beastie Boys are not here for their iconic hit record being used by the owner of Chili's.
“Beastie Boys Square” Street Renaming Approved By New York City
HipHopWired Featured Video Source: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty One of the most iconic groups ever are about to be immortalized in their hometown. The New York City Council has approved a petition to rename a street to “Beastie Boys Square”. As per Variety The Beastie Boys will receive a very unique distinction on the corner of Ludlow Street and Rivington Street in the lower part of Manhattan. The intersection is a direct nod to the album cover from their seminal album Paul’s Boutique. Even though the idea seems like it should have been a no brainer, the effort has been in the works for about nine years. Back in 2014 the community board first rejected the petition but on Thursday, July 14 the application was finally approved. Council member Christopher Marte expressed his enthusiasm ...
The Beastie Boys Are About To Have A Street Named After Them In NYC
HipHopWired Featured Video Source: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty With iconic rappers like The Notorious B.I.G. and MF Doom having streets named after them becoming a regular practice these days, it seems like The Beastie Boys will finally be getting the same honors sooner than later. The Gothamist is reporting that after a 9-year push by cultural advocate LeRoy McCarthy to get a street named after the OG Hip-Hop trio, it seems like the man is finally making some headway in his efforts to rename the corner of Ludlow Street and Rivington Street on the Lower East Side as “Beastie Boys Square.” Taking thousands of signatures backing the proposal to Manhattan’s Community Board 3, McCarthy just knew he was going to realize his dream come true. He didn’t. Related Stories “Yeah, they rejected...
The 90 Greatest Albums of the ’90s
This article originally appeared in the September 1999 issue of SPIN. “You must be high.” We heard that a lot during the time we spent preparing this issue. Which is understandable. Pronouncing the 90 greatest albums of the ’90s is a somewhat presumptuous thing to do. When you’re measuring the music this decade is offering to history—the sounds we partied with, copulated to, fought about, and wept over—everyone has an opinion. That ours should be more valid than yours is debatable. But hey—it’s our magazine. What, then, you ask, constitutes “greatest”? Don’t even start. Suffice it to say that, after much heated discussion and countless veiled insults, it came down to the factors of both remarkable artistry and cultural shock value. Sometimes a record’s knock-you-off-your-Skechers impa...
The 40 Greatest Music Video Artists
Music videos are the perfect bastard child of art and commerce, even more than pop music itself. A promotional visual accompaniment to a popular song doesn’t need a coherent narrative (although on rare occasions, they do). It just needs to suit the song, sell the record, and possibly make the artist look cool. But since the launch of MTV 40 years ago this week, a select few recording artists have helped raise music videos to an art form — sometimes by accident, and sometimes by carefully curating the work of brilliant directors like Mark Romanek, Hype Williams, and Spike Jonze. Here are 40 artists from the last four decades that helped video kill the radio star. 40. Lil Kim [embedded content] Although earlier female MCs like Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah used music videos to help launch th...
Mike D of Beastie Boys Remembers Biz Markie: ‘He Could Not Be Stopped’
Following Biz Markie’s death on Friday evening, numerous tributes honoring the rapper’s legacy flooded social media. On Saturday, Mike D of the Beastie Boys remembered the trio’s longtime friend in a tribute posted on the group’s social media platforms. “We are so grateful to have had so many unforgettable experiences with the truly unique and ridiculously talented Biz Markie. We will miss his presence deeply in so many ways. In the ’90s, Biz would often show up at our G Son studio in Atwater [Village], CA. Naturally every visit would start with a trip to the candy store — which in this case was actually a liquor store across the street. Regardless, he would always return happy with a brown paper bag full of treats. Once he had his sugar fix, he would typically grab a mic and sing whatever...
The 50 Best Live Albums of the 1970s
The concert industry exploded in the 1970s, and the live album, a stopgap project once reserved for only the biggest artists, became a compulsory ritual and a pivotal moment for many artists. Live albums captured legendarily loud bands like The Who and The Ramones in their natural element. Once obscure regional acts like Bob Seger, KISS and Cheap Trick exploded into the mainstream with live albums. The Band, The Stooges, and Velvet Underground put their final gigs on vinyl. Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young (as his ongoing archive series shows), and Jackson Browne recorded entire sets of new songs onstage. The Grateful Dead released several official live albums (and continue to do so) that only made fans want to bootleg shows on their own more. With the 50th anniversary of a landmark live album, Th...
Kathleen Hanna and Ad-Rock Talk Bikini Kill, Beastie Boys With Dan Rather
Beastie Boys’ Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna are the latest subjects on Dan Rather’s special “Musical Family” themed season of The Big Interview. In a clip from the show, Ad-Rock discusses last year’s Beastie Boys documentary and Hanna reflects on the catalyst that sparked Bikini Kill’s 2019 reunion. “Part of it was because of the Kavanaugh hearings and part of it was because of Me Too,” she explained. “A lot of those songs are much angrier than my later work, or a lot of them were Feminist 101, so I didn’t feel like singing those songs and then all of a sudden I wanted to sing those songs, watching the Kavanaugh hearings. I was singing my own lyrics to myself in my head. I started singing the songs in the shower, I started singing them in the car, I sta...
Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin Cover Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’ for First Night of Hanukkah
A menorah, latkes, dreidels… and now a new tradition, a song by Jewish artists covered by Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters producer Greg Kurstin for each night of Hanukkah. To kick off their Hanukkah Sessions, the duo covered the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” “As the only Rock and Roll Hall Of Famers with a lyric about kugel, we thought it would be a shanda to not kick off this party with New York’s (and Abraham’s) finest…known by some as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedenego known by their Imas & Abbas as @beastieboys!” a tweet from the Foo Fighters account says. [embedded content] The duo dropped a promo yesterday (Dec. 10, the night before Hanukkah). “This year, instead of doing a Christmas song, this year, Greg and I decided to celebrate Hanukkah by recording eight songs by eight famou...
The 35 Greatest Concerts of the Last 35 Years
We know, we know — the best concert of all-time is your friend’s obscure indie-punk band playing a sweaty neighborhood basement back in ‘94. We admit that one slipped through the cracks. Maybe it’s a fool’s errand, but this list is our attempt to narrow down three and a half decades of worthy live music events — legendary festivals, headlining tours from major artists, one-off stage collaborations, multimedia spectacles — into an eclectic and satisfying blend. – Ryan Reed 35. Heilung at Castlefest (8/5/2017) CREDIT: Gonzales Photo/PYMCA/Avalon/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Music-related viral clips tend to be silly and easily digestible, like the dude riding a skateboard to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” while sipping on Ocean Spray. So it’s heartening that Heilung’s debut l...
The Most Influential Artists: #12 Beastie Boys
As part of our 35th anniversary, we’re naming the most influential artists of the past 35 years. Today, we’re at #12. From New York City, here are the Beastie Boys. CREDIT: L. Cohen / Contributor “Just when you think you know the answers, I go ahead and change the questions.” The Beastie Boys embodied that quote from wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper: Just when you thought you had the group figured out, they’d rip your expectations to shreds. Starting off as Bad Brains and hardcore aficionados, Michael Diamond, Adam Horovitz and Adam Yauch were mesmerized by the emerging hip-hop sounds permeating through the speakers of New York City club Danceteria and what they heard at underground clubs. A chance meeting with an older NYU student named Rick Rubin set the trio on a trailblazing pa...
Public Enemy Roll Back the Years With Beastie Boys, Run-DMC in ‘Public Enemy Number Won’ Video
Public Enemy recently released their first album with Def Jam in a number of years with What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down? They also recently teamed up with George Clinton and Cypress Hill to release the animated video for “Grid,” and now they’ve done the same thing for “Public Enemy Number Won.” Featuring the surviving members of both the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC, the video features archival performance footage along with posters from those early days. “The song is an homage to ‘Public Enemy No. 1′ and that moment in time,” Chuck D said in a statement. “The Beastie Boys and Run-DMC were playing it all the time and Rick Rubin kept coming at us to sign with Def Jam. So it’s my way of bringing it all back together again.” We recently spoke with Chuck D as part of our SPIN 35 cel...
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