Source : the age
From the age of 16 to 46, New York City-born rapper, musician and producer Michael Diamond, aka Mike D, spent most of his time in a band with his two closest friends, Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Adam “MCA” Yauch.
As Beastie Boys, the trio forged a successful career that included their 1986 debut Licensed to Ill (the first rap LP to top the Billboard 200 album chart, it has shipped more than 10 million units in the US alone), 1989’s sampledelic masterpiece Paul’s Boutique, and 1994’s Ill Communication, a cutting-edge blend of hip-hop, punk and funk that cemented their place as unassailable signifiers of cool.
Then, on May 4, 2012 – a year and a day from the release of Beastie Boys’ eighth and final album, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two – Yauch succumbed to cancer at the age of 47. For Horovitz and Diamond, who is now 60, the freewheeling party came to a crashing end, and Beastie Boys’ time was up.
“Yauch’s passing was a shocking death because he was so tragically young,” says Diamond, post-band rehearsal in Los Angeles. “To have this figure who’s so close to you in life die, and then go through the grieving of that.
“My entire adult life until that point we were very fortunate as a band because, even if we would sometimes take long periods of time between projects, we would always have that to go back to. So it was certainly a very different thing to have this quiet time [afterwards] and there was a lot for me to unpack, obviously.”
With the preciousness of time starkly underlined, Diamond redirected his full-time focus to being a dad to sons Skyler and Davis (now 22 and 23, respectively; their mother is filmmaker Tamra Davis). Any attempts at making new music during that period were aborted due to the grief it would trigger.
Things started to shift, says Diamond, during the pandemic. His sons, who make music as the indie-pop/electronic duo Very Nice Person, began pulling out Diamond’s vintage equipment and messing around with it in the backyard pool house, causing the stay-at-home dad to rethink his retirement.
“The COVID times were very instrumental to me making my record,” he says. “My kids took over all the gear from my studio and they set up our home studio properly. That became our sanctuary and the place where we had the luxury of time to just get creative.
“That was what inspired me. It just lit this thing inside me of ‘I’m ready now to return to this happy place of making music on my own schedule’. It took a while to eventually get there but that [period] definitely was critical.”
Knowing that it was the right time to focus on music again (one of the new tracks is even titled It’s Time), Diamond hunkered down with his band 5D (Skyler, Davis, Will Graefe and brothers Eddie and Milo Ruscha) to finish his lively and experimental debut solo album, Thank You. The LP takes the Beasties’ familiar penchant for genre-blurring into the 21st century while still managing to throw in a few surprises (see: the drum’n’bass-influenced Switch Up and the tender, guitar-led title track).
Despite it being a neat reminder of exactly why the Beastie Boys were seen as coolness personified, it still leaves Diamond confronted with a hard truth that all parents must face. “Making music with my sons is nice because there’s this built-in honesty where they’re gonna call me out on stuff because I’m never gonna be cool in their eyes, right?” he says.
“Occasionally they’ll see something [Beastie Boys did] and be like, ‘that was pretty cool’, but never to the point where they actually would think that I am cool.”
I ask Diamond if anything from his friendship and long working relationship with Yauch played a part in influencing the new album. “Yauch always inspired us to think that however inconceivable or far out there an idea seemed, that was never a reason not to do it. So that was something that was very present for me when I was making this record,” he says.
“Also, whenever any of us were doing something enriching on our own outside of the band, Yauch was always, very clearly, ‘that’s great, you should definitely do that’. I felt almost like this nudge from Yauch – like, ‘just do it; block out all the noise, you should be doing this’.”
Diamond also felt compelled to tell his other former bandmate Horovitz that new music was percolating. “I actually felt really happy that I was able to call up this old friend of mine and say, ‘hey, I just need to let you know I’m making this record, and the boys have been helping me so much on it, and we used your old SP-1200 sampler on something’,” says Diamond.
“It was just cool to be able to let him know and have him be just cool and supportive about the whole situation.”
Diamond says the gratitude that’s expressed on Thank You is for his past as much as for his present. “I’m thankful for all of it – for having grown up in New York City when I did,” he says. “It was when it was the only place in the world where you had all this music absolutely popping off at the same time.
“Then you had the birth of hip-hop happening, and that started to permeate the clubs. Within blocks of each other you’d have all this incredible music and be exposed to it. We were a band but it was really just us as friends being teenagers and being able to run wild amongst all of this incredible music.”
And what advice would he give that wild, music-loving teen, with the benefit of hindsight? “Try to be kind. I’d also say don’t waste so much time – but you kind of have to waste time when you’re a kid,” he says. “Because how else are you gonna figure out the value of it?”
Thank You by Mike D is out now.
