Quotes from Mike D

There is an overall seriousness in tone that pervades 'To The 5 Boroughs.'

I kind of idolized older punk-rock and hip-hop bands, and I was, like, 15 when I started the Beastie Boys. And what business did we having doing that at that age?

We have not been able to tour since MCA, Adam Yauch, died.

It's never been our intention to sell millions of albums, but if our message touches that many people, then so be it.

Leaving Def Jam was kind of a blessing in disguise because we can make whatever record we want.

I'm the first to admit that we were totally dependent on a particular place and time... for us, seeing Minor Threat at the CBGB hardcore matinee was just as necessary a force in our lives as the Treacherous Three at Club Negril or the Funky Four + One More at the Rock Lounge.

Arrogance generally is a bad thing, but with a band, somehow you have to have this gang mentality or this certain degree of arrogance to push forward an idea that's new enough that people aren't comfortable with it at first.

What was interesting about grunge was that it was this death sentence to the rock that had preceded it, which was hair metal.

It's really hard to find a lot of things that rhyme with Michael Diamond.

At the time, I was living pretty close to Ground Zero. I had to grab some necessary equipment, put it in my backpack, and flee the immediate proximity on my bike.

What a lot of the world missed was just how caring New York became post-9/11.

Music is more available than ever. It's up to people to figure out. Ultimately, it's up to the business to figure out what the business is, monetizing that.

New York isn't segregated the way many American cities are, where there are specific ethnic neighborhoods that don't necessarily co-exist, or they co-exist but in a much separate sense.

On 'Check Your Head' and 'Ill Communication,' most of the lyrics are much more, 'OK, you take that, and I'll say that' - they're split up.

I'm really kind of a little bit romantic for the lost era. There's a lot of us that are - kind like James Murphy, same thing - we feel like it's this magic era that happened before us. And it wasn't even necessarily disco.

Real life is much stranger than fiction, man.

I was a nerdy punk-rock kid.

Growing up in New York City and hip-hop are two inseparable things, two things that are totally intertwined in our lives.

That's the thing with all of us music geeks - music is the soundtrack to the things that happen in our lives, and there's music that's unique to that movie.

For a dude, I think I do cook. I'm a stay-at-home parent a lot of the time.

When I was growing up in New York, we were the anomaly. Our family stayed, but back then families didn't stay. Once you had a second kid, you immediately left, so the kids could run around outside.

The initial notion for 'Check Your Head' was just all three of us getting back to playing instruments.

We have rocked the ozone radically, man. They could probably fix the ozone if everybody stopped what they were doing and they put some cement up there.

When Yauch died, it was really like losing my older brother. I mean, I have biological older brothers, but growing up, Adam really was my older brother.