Rock memoirs have been a booming business lately, with ’60s guitar whizzes Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and Pete Townshend lending their bylines to bestsellers detailing their behind-the-scenes (mis)adventures. The hip-hop memoir has, more quietly, offered itself as a more innovative form: Jay-Z’s Decoded, in 2010, didn’t dish about the rapper’s much-mythologized past so much as deftly break down his rhymes and argue convincingly for them as great art. Now, Spiegel & Grau, the same Random House imprint that printed Jay-Z’s book, is set to put out another convention-bucking hip-hop memoir, this time by the Beastie Boys.
As the New York Times reports, the publisher is expected to announce this week that Mike D and Ad-Rock have inked an agreement to publish an as-yet-untitled book, available to be ch-checked out of libraries in fall 2015. With hip-hop journalist Sacha Jenkins on board as an editor, the book will reportedly follow a loose, oral-history format, but with what the Times calls “a strong visual component”; other writers will also contribute. “The first words out of Mike’s mouth were, ‘I don’t want to do a straight memoir,'” the group’s agent, Luke Janklow, told the Times. Spiegel & Grau publisher Julie Grau described the planned book as “a multidimensional experience” with “a kaleidoscopic frame of reference.”
Janklow, the agent, reportedly said previous discussions of a potential Beastie Boys book went by the wayside as the group’s third member, MCA, suffered from cancer. MCA, whose given name was Adam Yauch, died last May. He was 47.
