When Michael Diamond started work on his first solo album, he couldn’t help but think of his late bandmate, Adam “MCA” Yauch. It’s been 14 years since his fellow Beastie Boy died of cancer aged 47, a tragedy that brought the wildly inventive hip-hop trio they shared with Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz to an immediate and premature end. All this time later, Yauch still looms large in Diamond’s psyche. “He was a big brother figure to me,” says the rapper known as Mike D. “I feel like he had an influence on me making this record.”
It was Yauch, he explains, who pushed the group to chase their wildest dreams. “He never allowed us to be limited to things that seemed sensible or realistic,” recalls Diamond. “However big or beyond the idea was: absolutely that’s the one you’re going to go for.”
Diamond’s album, Thank You, doesn’t sound like a Beastie Boys record, but it is powered by a similar verbal dexterity and an unpredictable sonic palette that skitters from jungle breakbeats to lolloping synthesizer grooves. At 60, Diamond has returned refreshed and energized by his time away from the mic, but he is also older and wiser than the cocky MC who once declared himself the “illest motherf***er from here to Gardena”.
Diamond never imagined himself as a rap elder statesman. Back when the Beastie Boys released their debut album, Licensed to Ill, in November 1986, few people would have believed it would be talked about with any kind of reverence 40 years later. The head of their label, Def Jam, rap mogul Russell Simmons, told them the genre had no chance of longevity. “He was very clear,” Diamond says. “He literally said that to us: ‘There’s no catalogue in rap.’”
Licensed to Ill was a phenomenon, the first rap album to top the Billboard 200 chart. Produced by Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin, who arranged for members of the metal group Slayer to provide uncredited guitar work, it was a pioneering blend of rock and hip-hop – lyrics about drinking, debauchery and girls shouted over Led Zeppelin samples and punchy 808 drum machine beats – that made superstars of the Beasties almost overnight.
Boisterous single “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” was embraced by exactly the sort of frat boy jocks it intended to satirise. Not that the band minded all that much at the time, playing up loutish personas of their own. They set off for a celebratory world tour with a stage design comprising beer kegs, a go-go dancer cage and a 25ft hydraulic penis that would rise out of a box when they played their biggest hit.
“Humility was not part of Licensed to Ill,” Diamond acknowledges with a chuckle. “Being humble wasn’t part of our program at 18 or 19, as it really isn’t generally for most 18- or 19-year-olds. We were young, raging with testosterone, and running around having a lot of fun.”
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