It seemed obvious, but it’s officially official now: Beastie Boys are done. The group’s Adam Horovitz told GQ that since the late Adam Yauch started the group, the remaining two members (understandably) decided they couldn’t continue without him. There’s a bright lining to this gray cloud, though: Horovitz says that there’s a ton of unreleased Beastie Boys material in the vaults, and that he’s trying to figure out a way to get some of that out into the ether. Most of the music is instrumental, with Horovitz telling GQ it’s “hours and hours of, like, really bad jamming,” but that “then there’s a lot of stuff of us talking in the middle of it, which is priceless. We were just really stoned, talking about, like, where we should get food, or Cirque Du Soleil or some shit.”
Horovitz and bandmate Mike Diamond are also working on a Beastie Boys tell-all book, though he says it’s not a straightforward story and that it won’t be out until at least 2017.
In other Beastie Boys news, the group (sort of) won its court case against litigious, sample trolling label TufAmerica earlier this week. Back in 2012, the group sued the Beasties, saying that since it had a deal with two of the three members of Trouble Funk and the Beastie Boys illegally used a Trouble Funk sample on Paul’s Boutique, that it was owed an unspecified but large amount of money. Yesterday, a judge ruled that TufAmerica doesn’t have an exclusive license on those Trouble Funk songs, meaning that while the Beasties might have ganked those tracks in a sketchy way, it’s just as sketchy for the label to go after the group. According to a judge, TufAmerica either needs to make a deal with the group’s third member or just forget this matter altogether.