Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys
I discovered the Beasties around the time of "Intergalactic" and 1998's Hello Nasty. I seem to recall MTV promoting it as a sort of glorious comeback from a long exile, so it was also my first taste of album cycle hype. Still worked on me.



"Intergalactic" is the catchiest thing the Beastie Boys have ever done, but it's a strange entry point despite containing a callback to one of the Beastie's earliest rap singles, "The New Style." Originally a punk rock band, the group's 1986 hip-hop debut Licensed to Ill is built around heavy rock riffs and goofy lyrical excess. The bulk of Licensed to Ill is simply rap style dolled up in rock clothing, most apparent in the video for "No Sleep Till Brooklyn."





But I don't mean to dismiss Licensed - it remains one of the trashiest, most enjoyable pop records of the 1980s and includes some canonical works including "Paul Revere," "Girls," and the smashing "Fight For Your Right." Compared to the rest of the group's output, though, the record seems like a smartass message written in a high school yearbook, sharp and immature and likely to make one cringe reading it ten years later.

The Beasties' second album, Paul's Boutique, marked a major step forward, realizing all the confidence, creativity, and credibility that Licensed boasted of but did not actually deliver. It was also a complex artistic achievement, replacing Rick Rubin's guitar assault with extensive sampling and layering of funk and R&B classics. I think the appropriation of Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly" on "Egg Man" is especially inspired.



Paul's Boutique is also, for my money, the first deployment of the group's trademark wit grounded in omnivorous pop culture consumption. The rhymes are jam-packed with seriously silly allusions to Mario Andretti, Yosemite Sam, Grease, and "Maggie's Farm," as well as the esoteric rejoinder "I got more hits than Sadaharu Oh" in "Hey Ladies."

It's a truth, though, that the Beastie Boys can sound repetitious - they also claimed to have "mad hits like Rod Carew" on 1995's Ill Communication. (For the record, Carew collected more hits in the majors than Oh.) Their '90s output on Communication and Hello Nasty - I've not experienced Check Your Head for some unknown reason - stretches the group's old-school appeal too thin. Large chunks of both albums still exist in the era when rap was a team sport centering on sparsely-produced tracks with a group of friends simultaneously yelling the rhymes at the end of each line. While the style does have its charms, the records are sprawling, indulgent affairs that appeal primarily to Beasties diehards, despite having their most recognizable hits, "Intergalactic" and "Sabotage."



"Sabotage" is one of Ill Communication's nods to the group's punk roots and an interesting example of their particularly malleable definition of hip-hop. The video is, I think, one of the benchmarks of Gen-X sarcasm giving way to Gen-Y "irony," mocking the stupidity and chessiness of '70s cop shows while displaying a not-very-secret affection for the form that it is lampooning. Sadly, the rest of the album fails to measure up to this level of entertainment.

Hello Nasty deserves credit for the addition of turntablist Mix Master Mike ("3 MCs and One DJ"), who inspires more experimentation with pop-style hooks and choruses ("Body Movin"). The drawback to this is that it sounds too much like a late-90s DJ record in the vein of Moby or Fatboy Slim. It's important to note that all these DJs worked more or less concurrently, but it can't help but sound derivative to modern ears.

A longer-than-usual hiatus led to the release of To the 5 Boroughs in 2004, just as the Boys began to push 40 years of age. I remember great anticipation for this record that manifested bizarrely in the launch of the single "Ch-Check It Out" on an episode of The O.C. Promotional gimmicks aside, Boroughs is both a return to form and a personal exploration of anger and angst in post-9/11 New York City.



Still, these are the Beastie Boys, not Springsteen. Their clowning is alive and well and again shines when committed to video, such as the Sasquatch-baiting, Kanye-confusing "Triple Trouble."



"Triple Trouble" samples hip-hop's oldest standard, "Rapper's Delight," and in a way demonstrates how the Beastie Boys represent a standard within the genre (indeed, within music as a whole) - the passionate poseurs who thrive when given the chance to expand on artistic impulses instead of marketing directives. Simiarly, they Elvis-ed their way into my collection as proof that I sometimes listened to rap and have survived because there is far more to them than "the white guys who rap funny."