Beastie Boys to Release Official Memoir This Year
The long-awaited Beastie Boys memoir is set for publication towards the end of this year, although Michael “Mike D” Diamond admitted it wasn’t yet complete. He and colleague Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz started work in 2013, a year after the death of Adam “MCA” Yauch, and it had been originally expected to arrive two years later.
“We’re actually going to finish it, and it’s going to come out, finally,” Mike D told Beats 1 (embedded below) in a new interview. “Like many things we embark on, there are many false starts and, honestly, directions we went in that we realized were not the directions we should be going in. But it’s gonna be coming out in the fall of this year."
When the currently untitled work was originally announced by Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau, the surviving Beastie Boys said they were “interested in challenging the form and making the book a multidimensional experience. There is a kaleidoscopic frame of reference, and it asks the reader to keep up.”
In the new interview, Mike D explained what he meant. “To tell our story, we have to ... give the cultural history of where we came from," he said. "So New York City in the ’80s, you had all this incredible, exciting music, art, film, all that sort of has to converge to be able to explain. We just had the good fortune of being around all of it, so I think that’s number one. And the other thing is, I think a lot of times when I read a band book or I watch a music documentary ... maybe I’m just kind of A.D.D. – I get a little bored, but actually I don’t think they do the subject matter justice because it’s kinda surreal what happens in bands’ lives. So you kind of have to use all dimensions to tell the story more accurately.”
Listen to Mike D Talk About the Beastie Boys' Memoir