Beastie Boys: Classic or Dud?

awwww

I only saw it on a video clip later since I didn’t go to the high school talent show but three dudes I knew approximated the costumes from the intergalactic video and lip synched it while doing the dances

its a genuinely fascinating career arc like I know they were always goofballs but they did start playing this real hip and kinda jazzy music and suddenly just took a hard turn into sci-fi and started using a ton of really goofy noises and stuff like hockey rink organ. and writing rhymes about Boggle. and it turned out to sell really really well, in fact it fit in perfectly with what MTV was doing at the time which was this proto-Adult Swim thing. not only that but it's very much a defining "CD era" album - it's stuffed, but not like other CDs are where it's just the same thing forever. it's genuinely all over the place. also it does fun things with the negative space between tracks which I'd never seen before.

I believe I am on record here as calling it their best album, and I was super into the two before it

i remember hello nasty's release being a pretty big event for the radio station i listened to at the time. they played a lot of stuff from their back catalog in the weeks leading up to it and then played the entire album on its release day. and, yeah, being 13 was the perfect age for it to make maximum impact.

I think its their best too. I even love the stuff everyone says is filler. like how do you hate Dr. Lee, PhD? one of them is making pterodactyl noises in the background! and the record ends on a really tender song which suddenly transforms into really hard Big Beat. I mean who else was doing stuff like that? you can see the funky instrumental stuff landing on other hip-hop albums but stuff like "Song for the Man", "Picture This", "I Don't Know"...not a chance

i remember driving in my car when the local radio station debuted Intergalatic - it sounded so HUGE and cool, it was very thrilling

and that whole Hello Nasty record was such a fun shared experience with all my friends. we all had different favorites.

i remember being so disappointed in hello nasty, because that hipster rap/funk/punk/tibet vibe on the previous two LPs was absolutely my sweet spot. I need to revisit.

shout out to me feeling very lonely and isolated in sixth form college far away from my regular friendship group until the day I rented Ill Communication from the central library, and walked down the road with it on my CD walkman feeling like the coolest person in school

and then just a few months later, Hello Nasty came out and like many people here it was a huge event for me and my friends who had consequently become voracious BBs fans

i remember being so disappointed in hello nasty, because that hipster rap/funk/punk/tibet vibe on the previous two LPs was absolutely my sweet spot. I need to revisit.

If anything I thought they leaned even further into that vibe on Hello Nasty.

It was definitely my favourite one when it first came out. It felt so fresh and exciting. In retrospect it was so definitive in the sound and aesthetic of what was to come from other artists over the next few years that it's probably aged the worst out of all their preceding ones bar Licensed To Ill; a victim of its own success

Hello Nasty is incontrovertibly their best album after PB.

I loved their first 3 albums, each one had a huge impact on me. Ill Communication was good but felt like a bit of a step down, mostly because it was more of a continuation of the direction they took with Check Your Head rather than something new. Hello Nasty is where I completely lost interest.

Paul's Boutique > Ill Communication > Check Your Head > Licensed to Ill > Hello Nasty > the others is how I break it down to an extent

The reason I didn't rate CYH so much at the peak of my fandom is because I'd already heard The In Sound From Way Out, so it felt like I already knew a lot of the songs

CYH made me a college-age fan after the Beasties (briefly) stopped being cool, but it's not very good. I'd rate them:

PB
LTI
Hello Nasty
Ill Communication
Check Your Head

Hello Nasty sounds very, very good, and is an extremely fun record, but it's the album where their lyrics started to fall off a little for me.

I can't rank them, but Check Your Head is my favorite.

Check Your Head is maybe a bit of a shaggy dog album, but that's part of what makes it endearing. Ill Communication and Hello Nasty came off as more polished and refined versions of this, but it all started to feel a bit formulaic.

Each of the first five sound like the best to me when they’re spinning

I actually never liked Licensed to Ill much but yes to the other four

funny enough the version of Ill Communication I had I bought from WalMart which at the time sold censored versions of CDs without labeling them as such. I thought that was pretty dumb because of all their albums I think that's the one where you can't really understand the lyrics anyway. at least I couldn't when I got it at the age of 13 or 14 or whatever. all I heard was a lot of random backmasking. but that's the version I really came to memorize. "Get it Together" in particular was such a hilarious mess, they don't just censor the swears but also all the drug innuendo as well

Nah, I'm not into LTI much at all. It's not just the content, but the sound of those snares really hurt my brain

It's impressive, to me, that the BBs were some of the first to get into 70s revivalism as early as the late 80s, and they were doing it again talking-up 80s fashion aesthetics in 1998 well before anyone was really thinking of that

Paul's Boutique was wildly ahead of its time in that respect. As a young teen with only a vague memory of the late 70s at that point, my impression of the decade was that people generally wanted to forget it completely.

Jumping in here to say that I, too, bought Hello Nasty as a teenager and felt weirdly disappointed by it at the time, but after PB, it's the one I go back to the most in part because I feel like it captures this energy of dorkily enthusiastic guys who are starting to age but insist on continuing to try new things even when they're demonstrably just okay at them. I mean, I know that Check Your Head and IC were that, too, but they felt - and still feel - so incredibly cool to me even in their left turns (leaving New York, picking up the drums, etc.), where Hello Nasty verges on corny in ways I find inspiring, or at least that puts a little gas in my family-trip-planning / grocery-getting / householding tank.

xp Yep, I was still a kid but my recollection is that seventies culture and fashion were largely deemed a punchline at that point in time, all chest-wigs and nylon and pointing at things for no reason. BBs did play on all that a bit, but it was done with playfulness and love, not snark. I know I'm old now and time seems to go by a lot quicker and I find those Insta-reels about 2024 vs 2009 fashion perplexing, but imagine a young band today playing off late-2000s tropes and doing it well. The GAPDY Boys if you will

Hello Nasty is definitely corny in ways that CYH and IC are not. They were definitely Beastie Men by HN and the intervening four years between that and IC were palpable. Still, they knew how to work it on their own terms

I never listen to anything post-PB anymore (and have never heard Hello Nasty or To the 5 Boroughs in full; I may not have heard anything from the last album at all, in fact) but entire songs from PB will pop into my head unbidden at times. That album came out when I was 17, and is one of the greatest albums of the 80s for me, in any genre. Just life-defining.

Check Your Head is still it for me, it still sounds cool and raw and inspiring.

"Intergalactic" was for me THE Beasties single: I was 23, going out a lot, and this retronuevo rap track at the height of summer 1998 seemed to gather all related threads: lounge pop, post-Beck ramshackle, etc.

This old post really hit on something for me re: the 90s beastie albums

CYH and, to a lesser extent, IC both seemed like they were about joining the Beasties' gang; like by buying, listening, and getting into those records you became a Beastie Boy friend by proxy, one of the guys they were hanging out with on the back of IC, or one of the people in the photos in the sleeve of CYH.

Hello Nasty seemed like the gang had gone, and they were ready to be friendly with the whole world. Or something.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Thursday, 10 May 2012 14:54 (eleven years ago) link

I love the first half of check your head, but i find myself kind of getting bored by its second half. By ill communication they are so much better at crafting the instrumental interludes, and everything is just so much more noisy/dubby/jazzy to me, such that I kind of disagree with the idea that IC is basically "check your head, pt. 2"

which i feel was the conventional critical take back in the 90s

"Intergalactic" was for me THE Beasties single: I was 23, going out a lot, and this retronuevo rap track at the height of summer 1998 seemed to gather all related threads: lounge pop, post-Beck ramshackle, etc.

otm, this is the peak of the "recombinant pop" era, Hello Nasty is definitely on that train

Huh it's the opposite for me, IC has some indelible hits but the funk & instrumentals on CYH are much sharper and more distinct.

xp

IC was the first album where it felt like they weren't putting out something totally new and innovative. It's a strong album, but it's similarities to CYH was a sign that the creativity was starting to wane.

CYH > IC for the longest time until maybe 5 years ago when my opinion flipped. similar feeling of getting bored more at the halfway mark of CYH whereas IC ends on a real high note.

i would rank them PB>CYH>HN>IC>L2I

Licensed to Ill was such a massive album and nowadays PB is so ingrained in the cultural consciousness that it's sometimes easy to forget it was enough of a commercial disappointment that the B Boys felt like maybe they were an '80s thing, and the world of 1992 was vastly different. so for them to come back with something like CYH that sounded so fresh and cool was an eye-opener for many who slept on PB. i hadn't really paid attention to them after 1986 tbh, too busy listening to metal and hard rock, but at a time when everyone was listening to everything (maybe 1991-1993 was the peak era for this), they fit right in so well and suddenly everyone loved them again. they were so loose and funky and it was a sick sound. i think the first five are classics overall, i think IC only losing points for being a little less inspired than the top 3 and the funk instrumentals feeling like vv solid outtakes from CYH (though the peaks rank with their best), and L2I for being a little dated.

CYH has more edge and is just a great messy splattergun collage of ideas hitting you in the face whereas I agree that IC still has a bit of that feel but seems slightly more considered and fully-formed. They're both great

Also, did I ever tell you guys my annoying pet theory:

LTI : S+E
PB : CRCR
CYH : WZ
IC : BTC
HN : TT

This checks out for me in so many ways

otm, this is the peak of the "recombinant pop" era, Hello Nasty is definitely on that train

― intheblanks, Wednesday, February 28, 2024 11:06 AM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

what made that song so cool is that everyone seemed to have a different favorite part, just so much going on at once. I had one friend who wasn't really into the Beasties or hip-hop at all but still loved this song because of all the crazy noises on it. and yeah all of Hello Nasty is kind of like that, so many wild sounds and insane production effects, even the minor tracks like "Dedication" are a trip

IC feels like an expansion of CYH to me, it feels more "out" for lack of a better term...guys who are listening to "on the corner" a lot v. guys who are listening to the meters a lot

Obviously the meters are geniuses, i'm not saying that the meters are in any way worse than "on the corner"--just that the vibe of IC feels different enough to me that I've never viewed it as a slightly inferior version of their previous album

like some have said upthread, stuff that seemed like filler to me on HN when it came out sounds pretty damn awesome to me when i put the record on nowadays--it's a front-to-back great record imo

also wanna shout out this B-side which I'm guessing was jettisoned in favor of "And Me" - gotta be one of the weirdest songs a hip-hop group ever came up with

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA60LH0Phko

that is cool, never heard it! thanks

You know what's an odd little tune? "I Don't Know." It's almost a bad song. Their goofiness redeems it.

I truly love that one

Me, too. The lyrics are pretty on the nose, but if you ever wondered how Buddhist thought - such as it could be said to exist - played into MCA's process on a conscious level, it's there. (I like hearing Miho Hatori, too.)

yeah great tune. "Twenty Questions" (which didn't make the cut but was vying for that spot) is even odder

can't be remotely rational about this because really I think pb is the 'best', but I spent a week at butlins holiday park when I was 12 and lic. 2 ill was the only tape I had for my walkman so i listened to it for maybe 10 hrs a day every day that whole week. thus it will always be my favourite. many years later I queued overnight to get u2 tickets and for some stupid reason the only tape I had with me was check yr head, it was too cold to sleep so I spent about 15 hrs straight with that one so I think of it fondly as well.