Fifteen years on from the final Beastie Boys album, Michael Diamond – better known as Mike D – has returned to music-making to share his debut solo release with the world, Thank You.
The project sees the 60-year-old rapper, musician and producer collaborating with his sons Skyler and Davis on a colourfully psychedelic set of thirteen tracks that marks the first new music from a Beastie Boys member since the death of Adam Yauch in 2012.
Speaking to Mojo about the new release, Diamond reflected on the trio’s history, opening up about the pioneering use of sampling on the record that many consider to be their magnum opus: Paul’s Boutique.
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Arriving on the heels of their breakthrough, Rick Rubin-produced debut Licensed to Ill – the first rap album to top the Billboard 200 – Paul’s Boutique found the group parting ways with Rubin and teaming up with songwriting and production duo The Dust Brothers, made up of Mike Simpson and John King.
On Paul’s Boutique, the Beastie Boys rap over densely layered, speaker-rattling instrumentals built from scores of samples from funk, soul, jazz and rock artists, lifting fragments from more than 100 songs to create an experimental collage that was years ahead of its time.
In modern music-making, sampling can be an expensive business – and a highly litigious one, if you don’t get your samples cleared – but in the late ‘80s, “it was a different era”, Diamond tells Mojo.
Paul’s Boutique featured samples from dozens of famous artists, from Led Zeppelin and Bob Marley through to The Eagles, Pink Floyd and Alice Cooper. Clearing that many well-known samples would be near-impossible in today’s music industry, but during the making of the record, The Beastie Boys cleared the bulk of the samples in The Dust Brothers’ instrumentals by offering one-time payments, or buyouts, instead of royalties.
“[During the making of] Licensed to Ill, we didn’t clear anything, and then that was a little bit messy,” Diamond tells Mojo. “So we were like, ‘All right, we’re going to clear everything now with Paul’s Boutique before it comes out’. We were one of the first groups to go out to every label. But it was so early on, people didn’t know that they should actually ask us for a proper royalty on stuff. A lot of times we’d do a buyout.”
Of all the music sampled on Paul’s Boutique, perhaps the most unlikely inclusions can be heard on The Sounds of Science, which samples not one or two, but five Beatles songs: The End, When I’m Sixty Four, Back in the U.S.S.R., Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and its reprise can all be heard on the track. Clearing a single Beatles sample is an exceptionally rare feat – let alone five – but Diamond remains tight-lipped about how exactly the group pulled it off.
“We’re going to go fucking nuts. We’re going to sample everything that we ever wanted to”
When asked whether it was the surviving Beatles that personally cleared the samples prior to Paul’s Boutique’s release, Diamond responds: “Well, I don’t want to say The Beatles cleared it, but yeah, somebody at EMI or Apple. So whoever you were that did it, thank you. Thank you, Sir Paul.”
Speaking about the no-holds-barred ethos behind the record’s production, Diamond says it was The Dust Brothers’ technical innovation that inspired the Beasties to go all-out in their search for samples, creating a wildly ambitious patchwork of sounds that became a landmark release in hip-hop history.
“Paul’s Boutique, we went wild,” Diamond says. “Mike [Simpson] and John [King] were computer science students. So they figured out a way to take this E-mu sampler and the earliest version of PC-based music software, and they could use the two of them to go stereo. When they showed us that, we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is it. We’re going to go fucking nuts. We’re going to sample everything that we ever wanted to.’”
