Check Your Head
You know from the opening track, "Jimmy
James," that this ain't gonna be your typical Beasties
release. Of course, after the masterpiece that was Paul's
Boutique blew the old skool style of Licensed to Ill
out of the water, we really didn't know what to expect. I literally
cut the shit out of my hands trying to get the CD packaging
open on this one, and after the first three tracks I was about
to declare it the best album ever. The beats! The loops and
bass of "Pass the Mic"--holy crap! Are those live
instruments? Man, these guys are brilliant and angry and whoa.
We even used "Lighten Up" in the closing credits of
a college film project. I interned at Capitol
Records over the summer this album was out and couldn't
believe I was working in the home of The Beastie Boys...
and Richard Marx... and MC Hammer... Anyway, "So What'cha
Want" is to this day my ultimate drunk dancing song--hands
down. There are definitely a few throw-aways mixed in here,
but for my money, this is one of the best, genre-busting albums
of the decade. |
Hello Nasty
I couldn't help but think after first listening
to this album that these guys had taken a step backward. Granted,
it had been four years since Ill Communication--an
album that was in itself a step backward from the brilliant
Check Your Head--but this felt like some weird attempt
to recapture the "fun" Beastie Boys of old. Instead
it comes off as old guys trying to act like funky youngins.
The rhymes are monochromatic and the melodies are flat. Yeah,
there is some cool layering (as is their trademark), but overall
the mood is too similar from track to track. The vocal harmonies--if
you can really call them that--are also remarkably similar in
most of the songs. There are a few real stinkers on here as
well (including some awful Beck wannabe
song, "Flowin' Prose") that must have made the cut
because the guys felt they needed some quantity after a four
year absence. If this is the direction they're headed, I fear
their follow up (six years in the making) is gonna stink it
up to high heaven. |
Hot Sauce Committee Part Two
It's funny that these guys are still the
Beastie Boys after all these years. After all, they're
all well into their forties, and some of those years haven't
been kind to them. Despite growing older, their sound hasn't
changed significantly, and their subject matter even less so.
Take the first single on this album, "Make Some Noise," and
its message about "party on the left, party on the right, part
for the muthafuckin right to fight." Yes, it's a play on their
"fight for the right to party," (and Public
Enemy's "Party for Your Right to Fight") but that
doesn't change the fact that the rest of the song surrounding
it could have been from any one of their past albums and not
at all stuck out. The lyrics are pretty much interchangeable
Legos that they snap into place with what seems like little
or no thought. You have your "ear goggles" and your "b-boy stance"
and all these phrases they've been using since the first Bush
presidency and have been recycling since they kind of went with
the retro irony thing starting wtih Hello Nasty. The
thing is they're starting to suffer from Weezer
syndrome. Where does irony stop and self-fulfilling nonsense
begin? Is this really the music they make, or are they aping
an old school style that they actually think is (to use their
own term) the new style? It's not to say there aren't moments
of fun in this album, but most of them are contained in the
first half of the album. The second half is full of some short
skits and more experimental sounding stuff that suffers from
the same lack-of-editing fatigue that befalls most of their
albums (with the possible exception of Paul's Boutique).
Nobody is ever going to confuse the Beastie Boys with innovation,
and we know every 80s and 90s band is reforming these days in
some sort of nostalgia tidal wave, but people are always more
interested in hearing the old stuff than the new crap they want
to pawn off as the same stuff that made us love them in the
first place. |
Ill Communication
This album starts with such promise. "Sure
Shot" is such a nice dose of Beastie spaziness, and then they
follow it up with a strange minute-long spurt of punk
rock? Face it guys, you ain't much in terms of a rock band.
Watching and listening to Yauch try that bass scale on "Sabotage"
is a painful experience--although it is a fun song. It's almost
as if these guys received too much praise for Check Your
Head's stylistic switch-ups and have taken it to an extreme
on this album--an extreme we could do without. It's disjointed
and thus not very memorable. I guarantee there are a
bunch of people out there who own this album and have
never listened to it past track seven--there doesn't really
seem to be a need. |
Licensed to Ill
I had to hide my love for this album back
in the day. My SST-listening
friends just didn't get it. They chastised me for liking the
silliness that was fratboy rap. How could I not like three middle-class
Jewish kids rhyming about beer and chicks? It was the life I
wanted. Like the Beasties themselves, I'm apologetic and just
a little bit embarrassed for having liked this album. It's ridiculously
sophomoric, misogynistic and hedonistic--unlike most of today's
hip-hop albums (wink). So, the guys can't seem to figure out
that Miller and Budweiser are two separate beers, but it's tough
to rhyme Bud with "killer." At this point, this album is great
for nostalgia, but little else in terms of artistic value. It's
just shocking that a mere three years later these brats put
out Paul's Boutique--an album so many light years ahead
of this rock/rap mash-up that we're hard pressed to believe
these are the same guys. Perhaps Def
Jam used their special shit wand to con these guys into
making a Spring Break record instead of what could have been
a brilliant Paul's Boutique prequel? |
Paul's Boutique
And to think the assholes at my local record
store in LA told me not to buy this thing the day it came out.
I stood there with the CD in my hand as they told me about its
muddled production, nonsensical lyrics and bizarro track sequencing.
I blew them off and never looked back. Thank God, as this turned
out to be one of the best albums of all time. Made back in the
day when stealing samples of people's music wasn't illegal (sorta),
this album is so multi-layered and deep in sounds, samples,
beats and entertaining lyrics that it makes one's head spin.
I guess I could understand the record shop guys' confusion over
the whole thing, but to not recognize the Dust Brothers production
as revolutionary and insane is grounds for being fired. "Car
Thief" is probably my favorite cut on the album, but "Hey
Ladies" and "Shake Your Rump" were the tracks
that got the party going back in the good old days. |
To the 5 Boroughs
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