That classic Eighties question rises again: Mike D’s in the house, whatcha gonna do? The Beastie Boys ended in 2012, when the late Adam “MCA” Yauch died way too young of cancer. His lifelong friends Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horowitz
made the tough but admirable decision not to even try pushing on without him. Since then, there’s been no music from either surviving Beastie — as Mike D has said, the grief made it too painful to even walk into the studio. But Thank You is his first solo album, the sound of a man revitalized. He’s not trying to rehash the Beasties’ sound — he’s just trying to live up to their spirit, and he gets there.
Diamond teams up with his two sons, Davis and Skyler, from their own band Very Nice Person, and his backing band 5D. It’s the first release from any Beastie Boys in 15 years, since their tossed-off 2011 jam Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. But he’s reflecting on starting fresh in middle age. “I need a Plan B, retired MC,” he toasts in the walloping “What We Got.” “Secretly you tried to vet me/Think it’s over but you haven’t even met me.”
Mike D was always the Beastie who came on like the man with the plan, overflowing with hustle and concept and angles. The boys started out as New York punk brats, then became old-school hip-hop pioneers in the early Def Jam era with their massively influential Licensed to Ill, teaming up with young producer Rick Rubin. Even their biggest fans assumed it was a one-shot. Yet the Beasties rebounded with one of the most shockingly brilliant sophomore albums ever, the sampledelic collage Paul’s Boutique, in the golden hip-hop summer of 1989. They accidentally evolved into Nineties elder statesmen, with the genre-scrambling art-funk punk of Check Your Head, Ill Communication, and Hello Nasty. But they kept using their clout to pursue bigger spiritual and creative quests, without neglecting the dumb jokes. They were the band everyone else wanted to be.
Bu the Beasties’ music holds up so vibrantly because it was always the story of a friendship, packing the grooves with musical and lyrical jokes, as these three jerks grew up in public together. That’s why their music has never faded away. (Harry Styles has “No Sleep ’Til Brooklyn” on his current pre-show playlist.) Mike D isn’t trying to repeat their music on Thank You — but he is trying to live up to that friendship and everything it meant.
At 60, Diamond has weighty matters on his mind, but he’s in festive mode, mixing up the rock and rap with glitchy, scratchy electro beats, splashes of drum-and-bass or dub, and his sorely missed nasal power-whine vocals. It’s not far from the sound his onetime NYC comrade Kim Gordon has explored on her excellent recent records. He’s not going for grand statements or sonic novelty; he always sounds like Mike D, which is good news. “At first I was like, ‘Everything has to be new and different,’” he told Rolling Stone’s Kory Grow, before realizing, “There’s certain things that are inescapably me and that’s all right.”
All over the album, he faces up to the day-to-day adult challenge of keeping inspiration alive, as a grizzled legend with a lot of history behind him but restless to go somewhere new. “Start and start and start again,” he raps in the industrial-trap banger “Make It Stop.” “What stays is always change.” He sounds vulnerable here, pondering loss and fatherhood and mortality — as he puts in “What We Got,” “Lost in the mosh pit/Pressure in the cockpit.” But he’s mostly out to let loose and have some fun, as in high-energy funk highlights like “Secret Pt 2” and “True Colors.” He also rips into modern greed culture with the furious techno-blare of “Crypto.”
But the emotional powerhouse is the title track, “Thank You,” where Mike D reflects on where he’s been, over poignant acoustic guitar with a touch of bossa nova. He recalls the early days of the Beasties, when “we were just kids/We were just figuring it out, working it out.” Those memories are encoded deep in the music as well as his voice — the sound isn’t far from the Hello Nasty meditation “I Don’t Know.” He sounds vulnerable, a bit mournful, but dazed by gratitude. By the end, he’s repeating the message “Thank you for having me,” singing it to his old friends, his audience, and no doubt, to his younger self. Mike D sounds reflective about the adventures he’s had — but the most thrilling thing about this album is how he sounds hungry for more.
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