The Beastie Boys Score A Memoir Deal With Random House

The Beastie Boys are awesome and have been for like, forever, so it’s no surprise that they’ve gone and secured themselves a deal to release a collective memoir chronicling their decades-long career and the effect they’ve had on pop culture at large.

From The New York Times:

If the Beastie Boys wrote a book, you might expect it to depart from standard memoir form. Rather than a strict narrative patiently winding its way from bygone days, such a book might — in keeping with the group’s hypereclectic style — be a pastiche of voices, images, irreverent humor and pop-culture reference points.

And that, it turns out, is exactly what the Beastie Boys’ book will be like.

Michael Diamond (a k a Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), the surviving members of the hip-hop group, have signed a deal with Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, for a book celebrating their history and aesthetic. A title has not been chosen, but it is planned to come out in fall 2015, the publisher is expected to announce this week.

The Beastie Boys are “interested in challenging the form and making the book a multidimensional experience,” Ms. Grau said in an interview. “There is a kaleidoscopic frame of reference, and it asks a reader to keep up.”

Hip hop journalist Sacha Jenkins will be editing the book, which is said to be “loosely structured as an oral history” and will feature contributions from other writers and plenty of pictures.

“The first words out of Mike’s mouth were, ‘I don’t want to do a straight memoir,’ ” said Mr. Janklow, of Janklow & Nesbit.

Mr. Janklow said he had been in talks with the group several years ago about the possibility of a book, but they were set aside as the third Beastie Boy, Adam Yauch, known as MCA, began to suffer from cancer of the salivary gland; he died last year at 47.

“After Yauch died, I didn’t push them,” Mr. Janklow said, “but I think that Adam and Mike ended up realizing that it was the right time for them.” A spokesman for the Beastie Boys did not respond to a request for comment.

Should be good, really. The Beastie Boys were (and continue to be) a major influence on hip hop and actually have a career long enough to warrant a memoir, so I’m looking forward to giving it a read.