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The Beastie Boys Say They Didn’t Know About Eminem’s License to Ill Tribute for Kamikaze

NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 24: (L-R) Beastie Boys rappers Adam Horovitz and Michael Diamond attend "The Punk Singer" screening hosted by Kathleen Hanna at Liberty Hall in the Ace Hotel on November 24, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images)

Eminem‘s surprise Kamikaze album from earlier this month came complete with a very familiar-looking cover: a glaringly direct homage to the cover of the Beastie Boys 1986 album License to Ill. In a new interview on The Strombo Show, Mike D and Ad-Rock from the Beasties revealed that they had no knowledge of Eminem’s plans to emulate the cover of their hit album. “I got maybe 10 text messages, 20 text messages. And I’m like, Why do I all of a sudden have like 50 text messages? I better see what’s going on,” Mike D said. “Everybody’s forwarding me the album cover from, like, the Twitter feed, or whatever. So, that’s how we found out about it.”

The Beastie Boys are promoting their 600-page, multi-source memoir, Beastie Boys Book, which is out on October 30. The book includes contributions by Amy Poehler, Colson Whitehead, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Luc Sante, and more, as well as writing by Mike D and Ad-Rock. Eminem, meanwhile, is prolonging his album cycle by beefing with Machine Gun Kelly over a 2012 tweet about his daughter Hailie and MGK’s assertion that Em banned him from his SiriusXM station. Cool stuff, indeed. Listen to the Beastie Boys interview over at the Strombo Show site. The section about Eminem begins around the 43:00 mark.