With Adam Yauch having passed away from cancer in May 2012 at the age of just forty-seven, his Beastie Boys bandmates Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz have remained relatively low-key. Soon after the passing of Yauch, Diamond, known to his fans as Mike D, was asked by Rolling Stone if he would continue to record music, to which he responded, “I can see making music. I don’t know about a band format. But Yauch would genuinely want us to try whatever crazy thing we wanted but never got around to.”
Fashion brand Kenzo Paris have now revealed that two of their designers, Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, approached Mike D to produce a song for their label. Influenced by American punk acts like Black Flag and Bad Brains, a genre that the Beastie Boys had first begun with during the 1980s, before embracing rap and hip-hop, the New York-born multi-instrumentalist was introduced to the two through filmmaker Spike Jonze, whose own career had been given a kickstart when he shot the iconic video for the Beastie‘s 1994 hit Sabotage.
Regarding his collaboration with Kenzo Paris, Mike D said, “I definitely shared Humberto’s passion for American Punk and that raw energy and I think that informs the collection and the soundtrack I did… It was more like scoring a soundtrack for a movie, but without an actual film.”
Listen to the track, Humberto vs. the New Reactionaries, here!
