Also at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards they won the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award for their contribution to music videos . The following year at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards they also won the award for Best Hip Hop Video for their hit song " Intergalactic " . Beastie Boys used both appearances at the Video Music Awards to make politically charged speeches of considerable length to the sizable MTV audiences . At the 1998 ceremony , Yauch addressed the issue of Muslim people being stereotyped as terrorists and that most people of the Muslim faith are not terrorists . These comments were made in the wake of the US Embassy bombings that had occurred in both Kenya and Tanzania only a month earlier . At the 1999 ceremony in the wake of the horror stories that were coming out of Woodstock 99 , Adam Horovitz addressed the fact that there had been many cases of sexual assaults and rapes at the festival , suggesting the need for bands and festivals to pay much more attention to the security details at their concerts
US Embassy bombings
1998 United States embassy bombings
Beastie Boys