Story highlights
The Beastie Boys are planning a memoir commemorating their music and career
Surviving members Mike D and Ad-Rock plan to create a loosely structured oral history
The still-untitled book has a planned release date of fall 2015
The Beastie Boys are planning a memoir commemorating their music and career, but it won’t be a straightforward narrative-style remembrance.
Adam Yauch’s film company carrying out his vision
Instead, surviving members Mike D and Ad-Rock plan to create a loosely structured oral history featuring a mix of their voices, outside contributors and images, cut through with their characteristic irreverent humor, The New York Times reports.
Mike Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) have signed a deal with the Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau for the still-untitled book, which will be edited by hip-hop journalist Sacha Jenkins for a planned release in the fall of 2015.
How the Beastie Boys made their masterpiece
Diamond and Horovitz are “interested in challenging the form and making the book a multidimensional experience,” Julie Grau, the publisher of Spiegel & Grau, said. “There is a kaleidoscopic frame of reference, and it asks a reader to keep up.”
The MCs want to strike a tone similar to Grand Royal, the magazine they published briefly in the ’90s to dig into their pop-culture interests, their agent, Luke Janklow, said.
Beastie Boys’ Mike D feeds Hurricane Sandy victims with free food truck
“The first words out of Mike’s mouth were, ‘I don’t want to do a straight memoir,’” Janklow said. He noted that the band had discussed the idea of a book several years ago before Beastie Boys co-founder Adam Yauch was diagnosed with cancer of the salivary gland. Yauch, known as MCA, died last year at 47.
Their publisher has experience with untraditional memoirs by rappers: Spiegel & Grau also published Jay-Z’s 2010 book, “Decoded.”
See the original story at RollingStone.com.
Copyright © 2015 Rolling Stone.