by JULIET WATERS

Last week the Smithsonian officially announced plans for an exhibit on hip hop. Grandmaster Flash has donated his turntable, Ice-T: early tour merch, Afrika Bambaataa: jewellery. Notably absent from the list of early icons were the Beastie Boys, although maybe only to me because I’d just started reading The Skills to Pay the Bills, Alan Light’s very slim biography. Nevertheless, it’s fun to imagine what they might donate. A Volkswagen medallion? An inflatable penis? Just as it’s fun to imagine what part, if any, the band will play in the exhibit.

Russell Simmons, co-founder of Def Jam, was a big part of the Smithsonian press conference. The Beastie Boys, of course, were one of the earliest bands on the label. Licensed to Ill came out in 1986, three years after Def Jam was founded, but the band had already spent a chunk of 1985 as the opening act on Madonna’s Virgin tour. Def Jam talked her into it after she decided Run-DMC were too expensive. Rick Rubin, it turns out, had been grooming the Beastie Boys for a while, buying them matching Adidas outfits, even making them wear do-rags.

What Rubin and Simmons knew, and what the Smithsonian may or may not want to acknowledge, is that the Beastie Boys would become the doorway through which hip hop became a viable commercial product. Until the frat boy anthem “Fight for Your Right to Party” hit the rotation on MTV, Public Enemy was not going to be playing any suburbs. And if you think PE didn’t care, in Skills To Pay the Bills you can read Chuck D waxing on about how nice it was of the Beastie Boys to play “Timebomb” on the Grammys and how “It was fun going to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania or Worcester” courtesy of their success.

Ironies abound in this story of a band that has re-created itself so many times that if Mike Diamond, Adam Yauch and Adam Horowitz weren’t so damn smart they’d be a baby step away from Spinal Tap. Light, a former editor-in-chief of Vibe, exploits the oral history format as a way to turn transcripts of his many interviews into this quicky book. But it does actually work to throw many of these ironies into relief.

That, for instance, they started as a hardcore band with Luscious Jackson’s Kate Schellenbach, who Rubin strategically muscled out when he decided to turn them into a bad boy trio. That the seed money for a band who made a career from sampling came from a lucrative lawsuit won against British Airways for using their first rap song, 1983’s “Cooky Puss.” That their first tour featured go-go girls in cages, often as targets for projectile beer, even though years later, now a social activist band, they would be officially asking Prodigy not to play “Smack My Bitch Up” at a concert in Reading. And that the first thing they had to fight for when they split with Def Jam and signed with Capitol was the right not to party, virtually refusing to tour for Paul’s Boutique.

The Beastie Boys soon lost the stomach for The Life, but they made up for it by marketing the The Lifestyle, starting up a clothing line, a magazine and eventually their own record label. And of course they’ve made some great, enduring albums. But there’s a complacency that creeps into the last half of the book. It’s hard to put your finger on what it is that’s a little creepy about them, about their success and about their place in the endlessly ambivalent history of hip hop. It’s all hinted at in this book, but readers are going to want more. More dirt, more insight, more context. Much more than a book that’s more likely to end up in the gift shop than the museum.

The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys by Alan Light, Three Rivers Press, pb, 206pp, $21