Following on from the recent re-mastered anniversary release of (the still outstanding) Paul’s Boutique, and in anticipation of their new album, possibly due out late in the year, the Beastie Boy’s have also recently dropped a re-mastered (curiously non-anniversary) version of the 1992 record Check Your Head, complete with a disc of b-sides and remixes.[1]
Check Your Head was, and remains, a pivotal moment in the Beasties’ oeuvre, pointing toward the path they would take throughout the 90’s, and returning them to mainstream consciousness after their previous commercial failure. The album appears to be simultaneously, and quite possibly contradictorily, a huge departure from their previous release and a continuation of same ethos that informed Paul’s Boutique’s creation. On first listen it provides a genuine ‘where the fuck did that come from?’ moment whilst continuing the Beasties’ modus operandi of producing albums that filter and combine their disparate influences, fashioning the music they listen to and care about into something original and, as always during their peak, enjoyable.
It’s a good idea to keep the two previous releases in mind. Licensed to Ill picked up where Run DMC left off and took it to the next stage with some genuine breakthrough moments (Slow & Low, The New Style, Paul Revere) as well as incorporating all the frat boy humour, sexism, stupidity and obvious riff samples. Three years later and Paul’s Boutique is still seen by many as a high watermark for the sampling era. Teaming up with the Dust Brothers, they made what is possibly the most sonically brilliant hip hop album of the late eighties (and there is a lot of competition[2]). It still sounds staggeringly good 20 years on.
So where is this ‘what the fuck moment’ in Check Your Head? Well, it might start out with the Jimi Hendrix sampling ‘Jimmy James’, falsely leading you to believe they will continue where they left off, but it soon becomes apparent the net has been cast much wider than that. By the time the Beasties have hit Biz Markie’s slurred singing over Ted Nugent, an unrecognisable hardcore cover of Sly Stone’s ‘Time For Livin’’ drenched in MCA’s fuzzed bass that blows everything you’ve already heard out of the water, and the talk box vocal of ‘Something’s Got To Give’, they have already touched on jazz-funk instrumentals, soul, the bosa nova rhythms of ‘Lighten‘ Up’, the alt-rock of ‘Gratitude’, and of course hip-hop (‘Pass the Mic’, ‘Jimmy James’, ‘So What’cha Want’). This is an album that followed the juvenile jokes of Licensed to Ill (see ’Girls’) and Paul’s Boutique’s layered sample buffet and intelligent wordplay with a record that references about 10 genres before ending with a spoken word number, intoned over a jazz influenced instrumental backing, that opens with the line “A butterfly floats on the breeze of a sun lit day/As I feel this reality gently fade away”. What the fuck? Where did this come from?
The Grain 