Beastie Boys - Three Mc’s And One Dj

Looking back on their history with hindsight, it's curious to note how a band that (seemingly) had no future managed to spawn musical scenarios so significant and forward-looking, destined to endure over time, just like the band itself. The off-the-cuff initial invention of Ad-Rock, Mike D & Mca (plus Rick Rubin and Run DMC) – a sort of ante litteram "b-boy band," though packed with latent talent – has proven over the years to be a uniquely rare example of longevity and the ability to reinvent itself, especially for a hip-hop outfit born and conceived as mainstream and always accustomed to sitting near the top of the sales charts. In just over a quarter of a century, the Beastie Boys have gone, in the eyes of critics, the public and industry insiders alike, from sideshow novelty to genuine musical phenomenon. From derivative to innovative. From a trailblazing all-white rap trio capable of "peddling" the "stuff" of the Black ghetto to serve it up on a silver platter to the slacker, tank-top-wearing youths of the mid-80s, to an almost Zappa-esque ensemble, an open and creative collective.

A laboratory of mad scientists ("The Sounds Of Science," not for nothing) attuned to the most interesting currents not only in the hip-hop scene but in the most distant and disparate genres (from electro/dub to "intelligent" dance, from psychedelia to jazz, from funk-core to Caribbean music), and able to filter them into their own unmistakable song-form. To the Beasties goes the credit not only for having officiated the secular wedding of rap know-how and rock music, but above all for having pushed well beyond the pillars of Hercules of the standard crossover and enormously widened the spectrum of its harmonic and aesthetic lifeblood. Shaping the rap substrate through the kaleidoscopic, omnivorous prism of a sound always in step with the times, constantly evolving and visionary enough, at times, to foreshadow the "white," alternative and abstract rap of the 2000s.

Thanks to a dense network of prestigious collaborations – from the Dust Brothers to "Money Mark" Nishita – and an exuberant audiovisual and multimedia strategy – their videos are often small, innovative films signed by the best directors in the field, they've published and directed successful fanzines and magazines bearing the unmistakable Beastie stamp – the three eternal Jewish kids from Brooklyn have developed a personal imagery halfway between Situationist avant-garde, Robert Crumb's comics, the humor of "Mad Magazine" and the zaniness of a John Belushi. All of it distilled into a carefully rationed, essential discography (seven "official" albums in twenty-five years), with virtually no weak points. From the legendary debut "Licensed To Ill" to the hotly anticipated "Hot Sauce Committee," delayed multiple times and released in autumn 2010, the road ahead promises to be long and enjoyable.

Young Aborigines and Beastie Boys: centaur-like creatures, between rap and punk, in early-80s NY

Ayatollah Khomeini makes his triumphant return to Iran after the revolution that ended the reign of the last Shah of Persia. In neighboring (and future enemy) Iraq, a certain Saddam Hussein proclaims himself president of the Republic. More bad news for the United States on the vast chessboard of the Cold War: the Sandinistas (who the Clash would also pay tribute to the following year) seize power in Nicaragua, and the USSR invades Afghanistan, subjugating it within a matter of days. Meanwhile, in the free world, Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman elected Prime Minister of Her Majesty's Britain. While in the former American colony, the disastrous handling of the Tehran "hostage crisis" closes out Jimmy Carter's presidency in the worst possible way, effectively paving the way for the dawn of the Reagan era.

On a more strictly musical front, Sony launches the first Walkmans and compact discs; out come "London Calling" by the Clash, "GI" by the Germs, "New Picnic Time" by Pere Ubu, "Unknown Pleasures" by Joy Division, "Fear Of Music" by Talking Heads, and Neil Young's "punk" record, "Rust Never Sleeps." Speaking of punk icons: while John(ny) "Rotten" Lydon releases "Second Edition" with his Public Image Ltd, another ex-Pistol, the fatuous and emblematic Sid Vicious, is found dead of an overdose in his hotel room in New York. And it's right here, in the city that never sleeps, the one with more than a million stories to tell, that our story also begins. It's 1979.

Music is like energy: nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, it can at most change form. Punk still has plenty of steam left, especially in America, where hardcore makes its forceful entrance, without knocking, while hip-hop, even though 1979 saw the first真 true hit singles by the likes of Sugarhill Gang ("Rapper's Delight") and Kurtis Blow ("Christmas Rapping," "The Breaks"), is still an underground, localized phenomenon centered right in New York, in the Bronx, with the three great DJs and absolute pioneers of the genre dividing up the turf: Afrika Bambaataa in the southeast, Kool Herc in the west, and Grandmaster Flash in the middle. In Brooklyn, meanwhile, on the other side of the river, four white kids form a band called The Young Aborigines: they are Michael Diamond, who would later go by Mike D (drums, then vocals), John Berry (first guitar, then bass), Jeremy Shatan (who often swaps roles with Berry), and the group's "tomboy," Kate Schellenbach (who first plays hand percussion and then inherits Mike D's drums). They're between 14 and 16 years old. They claim to draw inspiration from Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division. In reality they're little more than accomplished troublemakers, wild brawlers, as the name suggests, and not much survives of their bare-bones compositions. Although some of that "racket" probably fed into the repertoire of the very first Beastie Boys – a name the four young hooligans adopt starting in 1981, when a seventeen-year-old friend of Diamond's, Adam Yauch, the future Mca, joins the lineup to replace the departing Shatan on bass.

At first it doesn't mean anything at all - it's just a badass name, the kind that sounds good the moment you say it, with that nice double B, just like Bad Brains, the legendary mixed-race Washington DC group who invented funk-core, and for whom our guys harbor a kind of reverence. Then, mulling it over afterwards half-seriously, they even come up with an acronym: "Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Internal Excellence." Either way, the new moniker really does bring luck: the Beasties' sound, closely following the dictates of hardcore of those years - a cure-all for any instrumental shortcomings - becomes sharper, faster and more basic, free of frills and crammed like a molotov cocktail into one-to-two-minute songs. So much so that the group, having finally settled into a slightly more cohesive lineup, starts to find its footing. The first shows in venues of some size, the first fans beyond the circle of friends and acquaintances, the first contacts with an independent label, Dave Parsons' Rat Cage, who offers to record and release a 7" that will become the first official entry in their discography as Beastie Boys.

What they come up with is "Pollywog Stew", recorded in 1982 with home-made production by Mike D's brother, Stephen Diamond. Eight songs for just over ten minutes of music, showing a still-green band chewing over the lessons of Germs ("Beastie Boys") and Black Flag ("Transit Cop", "Egg Raid On Mojo"). Obviously Mike D is no Henry Rollins or Darby Crash - indeed it's rather striking, used as we are to the childlike falsetto that will later make him famous, to hear him here trying in vain to rough up the tracks by singing everything from the throat - and John Berry, back on guitar, is no Greg Ginn or Pat Smear, so the tracks rush by quick and monotone, with few variations worth noting, like "Jimi", where they attempt a bit of Bad Brains-style psycho-funk flourish, or "Riot Fight", where they seem to want to run the Clash through a wood chipper: epileptic, sparse and ramshackle as it is. The one who comes off best of all is Schellenbach, who indeed will "grow up" to become a well-regarded alt-rock drummer with Luscious Jackson and others.

Dignified in its urgency and expressive naivety but, it's probably worth pointing out, light years behind the hardcore masterpieces released in that fruitful year of 1982. The tracks in question, after a long period of obscurity, will resurface in 1994, when our heroes are already world-class superstars, thanks to a compilation with a telling title: Some Old Bullshit. It's hard to say whether, had they carried on along those lines, the group would have found success anyway or not. The EP, in any case, circulates fairly well in New York hardcore circles and earns the Beasties prestigious bookings at legendary venues such as CBGB's and Max's Kansas City, as well as supporting slots for greats like Dead Kennedys, Misfits, and even their beloved Bad Brains. They also play alongside a band called The Young And The Useless - unknowns destined to prove more important to the band's future than the big names mentioned above. Because in their ranks, on guitar, is a certain Adam Horowitz. He, "Ad-Rock", is precisely the missing piece who in that fateful year of 1983 joins the other two historic Beasties, after the voluntary departure of John Berry, who will go on, without much luck, to join Thwig.

Ice cream, airlines and other people's riffs: the invention of rap-rock

Having found the magic formula, our guys immediately show off one of the (extra)musical traits that will make the band's fortune: they sense which way the wind is blowing and, as Spike Lee would put it a few years later, "do the right thing." There's a whiff of something new, in fact, in the patch of sky above the City's skyscrapers: while people are talking less and less about punk (at most about new wave or post-punk), the hip-hop scene has reached an optimal boiling point, the kind that precedes success, co-option by the major labels, and real money. A barrage of singles like "Planet Rock" (1982) and "Renegades Of Funk" (1983) by Afrika Bambaataa, "Message" (1982) and "White Lines" (1983) by Grandmaster Flash, "Sucker MC's" (1983) by Run DMC and "Rock The House" (1983) by the similarly-named B-Boys have shown that this is not just empty improvisation or simple party music, but a genuine (and also profitable) "street art."

So the Beasties too - as open, curious and shrewd as each other - decide to set their guitars aside for a while and embrace the wonders of the "ghetto blaster" and the sampler. Their love - still embryonic but already red-hot - for this kind of sound takes shape in a new four-track EP titled "Cooky Puss" (1983). It's precisely the title track, released in two versions, one censored and one not, that serves as the philosopher's stone of the new "beastly" direction. A prank phone call made by the Beasties themselves to Carvel Ice Cream (makers of the notorious Cooky Puss, a sort of ice cream cookie cake that was apparently flying off the shelves that year) gets sampled and grafted onto a bare-bones backing track made of scratching and sparse guitar and drum lines sketched out by the band, set to a kind of deranged, foul-mouthed lyric (with the double meaning between "puss" and "pussy" exploited to the full, naturally). It's their first rap (or rap-rock) song in every sense. And it will drag the Beasties into their first controversies and groundless accusations of sexism for lines like "bitch, I kick your fuckin' ass", which will soon become one of the most worn-out, ineradicable clichés of the genre (and no one will bat an eyelid at it anymore). Keeping it company on the 12": "Beastie Revolution", a kind of long, goofy, deranged reggae/post-punk track (with an eye on the usual Bad Brains), which in its second half turns more openly dub and electronic, and "Bonus Batter", again somewhere between hip-hop and dub. This last influence is one the Beasties will carry with them for their entire career: certain Anglo-Jamaican music and artists like Keith Hudson and Lee "Scratch" Perry (with whom they'll collaborate on Hello Nasty) will remain a constant source of inspiration.

Also released by Rat Cage, this second EP, despite its fundamentally limited means and material, has an impact that outstrips that of the previous attempt. The track "Cooky Puss" quickly becomes a sizeable hit in New York's more "hip-hop oriented" dance clubs. And then luck shamelessly smiles on the four punk-rappers too: another track on the EP, "Beastie Revolution", is used in a British Airways commercial (!?) without the band's consent, meaning they can successfully sue the airline and pocket a cool 40 grand, which they invest in a large apartment at 59 Chrystie Street in Chinatown. From that moment the apartment turns into rehearsal space, recording studio and headquarters for a band that's starting to take its career seriously (so to speak, given the regressive, irreverent nature of these characters), determined to ride the rap-rock wave all the way and aim high - very high.

This genre (rap-rock, rap-metal or crossover, whatever you want to call it) will have a wide resonance in the '90s and 2000s, but it is essentially codified, as far as its basic elements go, in the two years following the release of "Cookie Puss", with the single "Rock Box" (1984) and Run DMC's first two albums, the self-titled one (1984) and "King Of Rock" (1985), and, more relevant to us, the Beastie Boys' third EP "Rock Hard" (1985) - all produced by the fervent hand of the very young "mogul" Rick Rubin (just twenty-two, one year older than the "oldest" Beastie). Our heroes' meeting with the producer - himself of Jewish descent, and himself having moved from a passion for hardcore to one for rap, and who had just founded his label, Def Jam, with the help of Jazzy Jay of the Zulu Nation and Russell Simmons, brother of Joseph "Run" of Run DMC - takes place in the dorms of New York University, attended by both parties with more interest in music and parties than in their degree courses. Rubin pushes the Beasties to play up their more provocative, delinquent side, that "tough guys" image, street-hardened hoodlums therefore "deserving" of respect within the Black rap community.

Partly for this reason, Schellenbach, ill-suited (and disinclined) to go along with such a transformation, is made to clearly understand that she is no longer indispensable. On the musical side, the fusion of solid rock and hardcore-punk roots with new hip-hop stimuli will become even more pronounced.

"Rock Hard" (1985) in some ways follows the formula of the previous EP (again four tracks, the last of which is merely an instrumental reprise of the first), but here we get Rick Rubin's more polished, professional production (he also serves as DJ and helps write the tracks) and a greater confidence in their own abilities and the direction to take: that of an oldschool, rocky, party-hearty hip-hop. Above all, there's an almost epoch-making blast like "Rock Hard", purely self-referential rapping over a backing track lifted from the riff of Ac/Dc's "Back In Black" (for which those concerned never granted the rights, which greatly limited the song's success and circulation), a juggernaut that sums up all the irreverence of adolescent party rap and the swagger of hard rock ("I can play the drums, I can play guitar/ Not just b-boys, but real rock stars" the lyrics declaim with solemn naivety), foreshadowing by a year the explosion of "Walk This Way" (Run DMC and Aerosmith) and already hinting at a fundamental component of what their debut album will be: Licensed To Ill. More muddled and sprawling, "Party's Get Rough" bets everything on a stripped-down, ultra-syncopated electro beat, with few scratches and even fewer samples (in one of them you can make out Robert Plant's voice, a small clue to the Beasties' Zeppelin-esque cult), before crumbling into a spoken-word sketch in the middle where Rubin and the Beasties pretend to argue, only to patch things up over the long instrumental tail that adds a distorted guitar drone to the initial backing track. Also irresistible is "Beastie Groove", classic oldschool and purely rhythmic. Even more interesting is noting the trio's vocal evolution: having abandoned their fruitless attempts at singing convincingly, they now find themselves perfectly at ease coining their own brand of interlocking polyphonic rapping, with the voices (Mike D's and Ad-Rock's high-pitched ones, and Mca's lower, raspier one) trading off and overlapping with dynamics more reminiscent of the raucous, aggressive chants punctuating certain oi and beach punk than of the call and response of blues or soul, to which they've sometimes, distantly, been compared.

The tracks (and the group's new style/image) achieve the desired effect: the Beastie Boys become the rising stars of New York hip-hop, the great white hope, their name already on everyone's lips by the time Rubin, looking to capitalize on the trio's growing popularity, decides to send them out on tour. With a bare-bones set list and without having even released a proper album.

In 1985 they open for an old idol like Lydon (the Sex Pistols coming back around once again, almost like an omen) and his Public Image Ltd, by then on the wane and briefly aligned with the New York hip-hop scene through Afrika Bambaataa on "World Destruction" (1985). Then they become regular support act on Madonna's "The Virgin Tour", which gives them the chance to perform in front of a far larger audience, albeit a rather unorthodox one. The following year it's the "Raising Hell Tour", alongside the other big guns of Def Jam - the label that, thanks to Rubin, has by now definitively secured the Brooklyn trio's services (and which, shortly after, will pull off another major coup by signing Public Enemy) - people like Run DMC, LL Cool J and Whodini. From the same period comes their contribution to the soundtrack of "Krush Groove", the first major-studio (Warner Bros) film about the world of hip-hop, a clear sign of how much media exposure the phenomenon had achieved by then. Then, in the final months of 1986, preceded by the singles "Hold It Now, Hit It" and "Paul Revere/The New Style", comes the Big Bang: Licensed To Ill.

(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party): license to raise hell

Reagan is at loggerheads with Libya and caught up in the Irangate scandal (Iran and Nicaragua involved once again). The "Iron Lady" is dealing with the IRA and the dissolution of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Gorbachev with the trappings of the late Soviet empire and the Chernobyl disaster. At stratospheric heights, in skies where a fair number of planes are being hijacked or shot down by covert military operations or Islamic terrorists (like the Boeing 727 that crashes, an ominous sign for New Yorkers, into the side of a mountain on the cover of our heroes' first album), the European probe Giotto photographs the passage of Halley's Comet. It's 1986. At the movies, Zemeckis's "Back To The Future" and Francis Ford Coppola's "Peggy Sue Got Married" are big hits: Ronald Reagan's America ("Who? The actor? Nooo!" Emmett "Doc" Brown would mutter skeptically) is craving the '50s, and Hollywood rebuilds them as a virtual, sci-fi island, carefree and conflict-free (except maybe for the Oedipal kind: with the risk that your own mother, as a young woman, might fall for you). And if 1956 had rock 'n' roll, 1986 has the Beastie Boys' raucous party rap. Mutatis mutandis, history repeats itself: Black artists have the ideas, the talent, and blaze the trail, but to reach the top of the Billboard charts you need a group of white guys (who, thank the gods of both rap and rock, aren't actually all that bad).

On the other hand, still on the subject of history repeating itself, some people think not of 1956 but of 1977: Rubin could be the new Malcolm McLaren, and the Beasties his "sex pistols", the shooting star destined to wring every last drop (economically and sociologically) out of the new street-music wave and then burn out, in a trail of wildfire, just a few years later. It won't quite turn out that way, but it will come close. Licensed To Ill, in any case, is the perfect melting pot, a mainstream mirror of its musical times, in which street rock, punk relics and hip-hop techniques - finally honed beyond the (decent) semi-amateur level of the previous "shorts" (also thanks to the support of J. "Run" Simmons and Jam-Master Jay of Run DMC) - ferment in a calculated and fruitful way. Compared to the black-rock-rap of groups like Run DMC, for instance, what the Beasties bring to the table is the deranged, regressive attitude (typical of certain strains of American punk from the Ramones onward), self-mocking irony (though, at the time, this aspect will be barely picked up on by critics and audiences alike), and a cartoonish quality (sidestepping the documentary-style identification between person and persona typical of early rap), hedonistic but never stupid even in the most absurd, childish mayhem. And this, regardless of skin color, is precisely the secret of their unstoppable success.

Musically, the album roughly splits into three types of tracks. First, there are the archetypal rap-rock numbers like "Rhymin' And Stealin'", with samples from Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and the Clash's "I Fought The Law", on which the trio present themselves as cartoonish buccaneers raiding the treasures of sampling and rockstar life; "She's Crafty", again Led Zeppelin with a flash of "The Ocean", in which they pick up a thief who leaves them in their underwear; and "Slow And Low", slow and powerful, written for them and handed over by Run DMC. Then there are the tracks actually played on real instruments, the old-fashioned way, like the high-school street-punk of "Fight For Your Right (To Party)" and the heavy-metal parody of "No Sleep 'Till Brooklyn", whose riff and climactic solo were courtesy of Kerry King of Slayer (another band working, in that same period, with the eclectic Rubin).

Then there are the more organically hip-hop tracks: the bare-bones, hyper-stylized old-school beats of "Posse In Effect"; the metallic, cutting "Paul Revere" (another track co-written "twelve-handed" with Run DMC), slow and steady, built entirely on deep, deep bass with the occasional scratch thrown in; and "The New Style", full of pauses and rhythm changes as well as brazen sexual references (even to underage girls) that Chuck Berry himself would have appreciated.

Finally, the richest and most original tracks deserve a separate mention: the dissonant collage of "Hold It Now, Hit It"; the jazzy, syncopated breakdance of the irresistible "Brass Monkey"; and the elegant, elaborate sampling of "Time To Get Ill" (where the usual Zeppelin are joined by Creedence, ranging from Stevie Wonder to Barry White by way of a New York rap master not too well known to the general public, Schooly D) — a track that in some ways anticipates the stylistic density and masterful sound of their masterpiece, "Paul's Boutique".

In their self-indulgent, post-adolescent storytelling, the Beasties make extensive reference to commercial brands, especially food brands like White Castle burgers and Budweiser beer (mentioned constantly in the lyrics, for which, it's said, they were handsomely paid for this none-too-covert form of advertising), as well as to pop culture, video games and the youth myths of the Eighties, with a salacious, wildly over-the-top humour that feels like a reissue — much cruder and more childish — of Chuck Berry's at the end of the Fifties. That was enough for many to single them out for criticism, pitting them against the more conscious, "committed" rap of acts like Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim or the Zulu Nation, and dismissing them as a vacuous consumerist phenomenon just like the ones celebrated in their own rhymes.

1987-88, success and the flight from Def Jam: we're the Beastie Boys not the Sex Pistols

Licensed To Ill is a dizzying blow. A runaway success: number one on the Billboard Top 200 chart and more than nine million copies sold within a year. Propelled by videos on heavy rotation on MTV, the singles "Fight For Your Right (To Party)", "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" (two genuine period "stracult" classics) and "Hold It Now, Kick It" also do well. The three little "beasties", however, have absolutely no intention of learning any manners: in their systematic pursuit of outrage and scandal, designed to draw even more attention to their bestseller, they embark on a world tour that would be an understatement to call turbulent.

Amid stage sets featuring half-naked girls locked in S&M cages and giant inflatable vibrators salvaged from some Seventies Stones clearance sale, the Beasties — with the tacit blessing of their sponsors and entourage — take the stage visibly drunk and provoke the crowd, with almost every date degenerating into brawls, stoppages and obscenity. The organised chaos culminates in the infamous concert of 30 May 1987 at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool: the trio stay on stage barely ten minutes before a massive brawl breaks out among the audience, into which Ad-Rock himself dives (literally, off the stage), throwing and taking punches left and right, before being arrested by Merseyside police on charges of assault and resisting arrest. It was probably the first time since the days of punk and the Sex Pistols that British self-control had been put under such strain.

But after the bender of excess and success usually comes the nausea. And after the nausea, a few moments of uncomfortable clarity, not to say self-criticism. In one of these "satori" moments, Mike D, Mca and Ad-Rock realise that Def Jam's vision of the Beastie Boys as a project (or "product"), however financially rewarding, is stifling and limiting, and that carrying on like this would eventually risk trapping them in the sterile repetition of a cliché, a caricature of a caricature (as would indeed happen to many rap artists on the same label, above all LL Cool J and Run DMC themselves). So if they want to save themselves, if they have the ambition to record something that more faithfully reflects their omnivorous, wide-ranging musical background, they need to grow up, and fast.

But before that, they have to change everything: scene, staff, label, collaborators. Change or break up, like the Sex Pistols. Luckily for them, and for us, they don't go for the second option. In 1988, after one last, symbolic appearance in "Tougher Than Leather" — the film written and directed by factotum Rubin and Rick Menello, who had already directed the aforementioned Beastie videos, with which Run DMC tried (without much success) to launch their fourth album of the same name worldwide — the Boys cut the cord tying them to Def Jam, wrestle a contract out of Capitol whose terms include extensive creative autonomy, and even leave behind their beloved New York, moving for a while to Los Angeles, California. It's in this climate of great change, inner as much as outer, that the conditions take shape for the conception of what would go down in history as their greatest masterpiece: Paul's Boutique.

The science of sound: Paul's Boutique

Great changes, as we said. The Berlin Wall begins to crack before finally crumbling, greeted by the strains of Pink Floyd. In Prague, with the "Velvet Revolution", the dream of a boy named Jan Palach comes true, twenty years and too many dead souls later. In Tiananmen, for one moment, even the yellow monolith wavers before the determination of other young people who, like "regular" hippies in shirts and jackets, face down tanks with their bare hands. Meanwhile in South Africa, judging at least by the openness shown by new president De Klerk, the "dry white season" seems to be drawing to a close. It's 1989.

The Beasties too, on their own very small scale, are about to revolutionise their sound. And the hip-hop microcosm more broadly. A Copernican shift that, starting precisely from 1989 and from albums like De La Soul's "3 Feet High And Rising" and the Jungle Brothers' "Done By The Force Of Nature", as well as of course our own Paul's Boutique, would come to be called progressive or alternative hip-hop — denoting its more refined, libertarian, nonconformist nature, both musically and lyrically. Obviously, when our boys first set foot in Los Angeles, they have only the vaguest idea of any of this. What they do have is a mountain of records they'd like to sample, a flood of ideas and chaotic rhymes, and an iron determination to make a record completely different from Licensed To Ill. Helping them in this endeavour is a friend of Yauch's (Mca), Matt Dike, who introduces the trio to a duo riding high on the West Coast scene in the late Eighties: E.Z. Mike and King Gizmo, aka The Dust Brothers. The two had started out around the same time as the Beasties, first as radio DJs, then hosting the most memorable rap parties on the LA map, before finally becoming beatmakers and producers with their own Delicious Vinyl label. In the Nineties they would find worldwide fame producing Beck's "Odelay" and later moving into film music (most notably the era-defining soundtrack for David Fincher's "Fight Club"), but in 1989 they're already riding a kind of hot streak, having just released two other hugely successful albums, Tone Lōc's "Lōc-ed After Dark" and Young MC's "Stone Cold Rhymin'".

Paul's Boutique, however, is a different animal altogether.

Listening to the tracks the Dust Brothers are preparing for an essentially instrumental project of their own, the Beasties, like Alice, step through the looking glass and find on the other side a surreal, hyper-syncretic sonic landscape, practically unexplored territory for hip-hop. And they want to dive in with everything they've got. Backed by a new team of collaborators that expands into a genuine ensemble (DJ Hurricane on the turntables, Matt Dike and Mike Simpson as arrangers, Mario Caldato Jr. as co-producer), the Boys and the Brothers create one of the boldest, most kaleidoscopic sonic frescoes of their era. Using an implausible number of samples (anywhere from three to ten per song), ambient transitions, long codas and instrumental passages, they dismantle the traditional idea of a rap album as a simple container for songs, reshaping it instead into a kind of dreamlike stream, a river of quotations, a mosaic of styles organised with perfect internal coherence. The terse, "torn" rap-rock of their debut is permanently mothballed to make way for a sumptuous, multi-layered garment of endless seams, a zen, cinematic citational style that anticipates the Tarantino of "Kill Bill" or "Grindhouse", full of fragrant relics paying homage to the music of the Sixties and Seventies. It's not just funk and black music, foundational as they are to the harmonic texture of "Paul's Boutique" — it's a hellzapoppin' where dub, Jamaican music, psychedelic pop, West Coast rock, even country and folk all intermingle. So alongside Curtis Mayfield, George Clinton, Sly & The Family Stone, Isaac Hayes and James Brown, you get the Beatles swirling by (snatches of no fewer than five of their songs embedded right in the middle of the gem that is "The Sounds Of Science"), Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Black Oak Arkansas, Eagles, Bob Marley and even Johnny Cash (his sample has become legendary: to Mike D's "I shot a man in Brooklyn..." he answers "...just to watch him die"). On this record, sampling is elevated to surrealist, cross-cutting collage, to a call-and-response thick with expressive and textual echoes, to a true wall of sound. So much so that many critics have called Paul's Boutique the "Sgt. Pepper" or the "Freak Out" of hip-hop.

Not exactly what you'd expect from the rowdy punksters, wannabe Sex Pistols, of Licensed To Ill. And yet the record doesn't skimp on knockout singles either: the monumental "Hey Ladies", a "Time To Get Ill" to the nth degree; the abrasive dancefloor cut "Shake Your Rump", with a genuine eruption of molten bass in the chorus; the combative, syncopated funk of "Shadrach" (with that looped female vocal hook in the chorus that would become legendary); the rockabilly swagger of "Johnny Ryall"; and the hard-rock stomp of "Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun" (a splendid graft of the elephantine riff from a minor classic, Mountain's "Mississippi Queen"). At the same time, the record moves in a thousand different directions without ever losing its fluidity and cohesion: the funk-dub intro "To All The Girls"; the cine-parodic blaxploitation of "Egg Man"; the magnificent Californian psychedelia of "High Plains Drifter" (which shamelessly mixes Eagles and Ramones). And finally, if we were forced to pick just one part to stand for the whole: the Zappa-esque, Beatles-esque "The Sounds Of Science" (quite possibly one of the most brilliant tracks in hip-hop history) and the closing suite "B-Boy Bouillabaisse", twelve minutes in which, through flights, lulls and fresh starts, thirty years of musical seasons chase each other across at least three continents.

Vocally and lyrically too, compared to their recent past, we're now on an entirely different planet. The group's polyphonic, biting rapping grows more complex in its metrics, becoming acrobatic and disorienting in execution, while the lyrics amplify and sharpen the deranged hyperrealism of their early days. So the opening tribute to the other half of the sky, "To All The Girls", seems to want to ideally answer the unfair accusations of sexism levelled at some songs from the past ("Girls", above all); in "Johnny Ryall" they sketch, with wit and humour, the vignette of a homeless ex-rockabilly star; in "Egg Man" they bring to life a delightful comic-surrealist pastiche; in "Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun", they ferociously mock the excesses of their past and the emerging gangsta poses.

The release of Paul's Boutique will spark diametrically opposed reactions from critics and audiences compared to those of the debut. While critics almost unanimously recognise the intrinsic value and groundbreaking scope of the record ("the hip-hop Pet Sounds/The Dark Side Of The Moon" will leave even the "conservative" Rolling Stone ecstatic), the public is initially thrown off, and a huge chunk of the band's more rock-oriented, late-teen fanbase falls by the wayside, even as the album gradually builds, year after year, a solid cult reputation. The immediate response is nonetheless rather disappointing compared to its predecessor, and the record will paradoxically end up among the least commercially rewarding of the New York trio's career: a peak of number 14 on Billboard, and 36 for its most prominent single, "Hey Ladies". Sales will nevertheless grow over time, reaching around two million copies roughly ten years after its release, mirroring the album's growing critical standing. A standing that is already considerable among insiders, given that, leafing through the chronicles of the era, among those applauding the Beasties' second opus with conviction we even find a "newcomer" by the name of Miles Davis, and that Chuck D of Public Enemy would confess in an interview a few years later what the entire Black rap community thought back in that distant 1989 but didn't have the courage to admit: the essence the Beastie Boys (and the Dust Brothers) had distilled into their beats was by far the best hip-hop sound heard up to that point.

Check (the shit out of) Your Head: the third way of crossover

A year after the fall of the Soviet Union and the first victorious campaign against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the "Reaganite dream" seems almost on the verge of coming true, but his successor George H.W. Bush's party is spoiled by defeat in the November presidential election at the hands of Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. Back in the old motherland, Queen Elizabeth II describes as an "annus horribilis" the year that has swept the royal family up in scandal and controversy. There's a storm brewing in the US too, and not only because of Hurricane Andrew, which batters the coasts of Florida and sweeps into Tennessee, causing some thirty deaths. Mike Tyson's rape conviction at the Indianapolis trial, but above all the live-broadcast beating of the (until then) lesser-known Rodney King and the bloody urban guerrilla warfare that sets LA ablaze, bring the issue of race right back to the forefront. In New York, John Gotti, the "last Godfather", is sentenced to life in prison, while in Alaska the lifeless, nearly frozen body of Christopher McCandless is found: fifteen years later his life story will be told in an anti-capitalist manifesto of a film, Sean Penn's "Into The Wild". In Mexico City, government and rebel forces sign a peace treaty ending the civil war that bloodied Nicaragua for fifteen years, causing something like 75,000 deaths. It is 1992.

Between New York and Los Angeles, meanwhile, the seeds sown by rap-rock in the mid-Eighties give rise to a new, more intricate and flourishing bloom. The buzzword of the moment, aside from grunge and gangsta rap, is crossover. And it's fairly logical, if only for reasons of lineage, that the Beasties, distant from or uninterested in the first two phenomena, should turn to the third as a source of inspiration. There's a desire to change again, to return in some ways to their roots, with an approach more direct and "played" compared to the synthetic constructivism of Paul's Boutique. Perhaps because they're aware of having reached a peak in that genre that would be hard to replicate, or perhaps because they're a little unhappy with the lower earnings the album brought in. After all, for the Beasties — who, buoyed by a renewed distribution deal with Capitol, have just launched their own independent label, Grand Royal — there's no shortage of examples to look to: in those years the heavily effected blend of hardcore, metal, funk, rap, reggae and so on was yielding excellent results on several fronts (aesthetic, commercial, etc.), as with the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magic" (1991, directed incidentally by a former colleague, Rick Rubin, the man who, as a millionaire producer, is happily ferrying this kind of mixed-breed sound into the mainstream), Rage Against The Machine, about to release their "landmark" self-titled album (1992), the Patton-era Faith No More of "The Real Thing" (1989) and "Angel Dust" (1992), Living Colour, or an isolated masterpiece like "Bring The Noise" (1991), the single credited to Public Enemy and Anthrax.

Although while working on the songs for Check Your Head, our guys probably had other models in mind besides those mentioned above: the Dutch outfit Urban Dance Squad, one of the first rock bands in the world to perform live with a DJ, who around that very time codified the genre with a title like "Life 'N Perspective Of A Genuine Crossover" (1991); the veteran Los Angeles outfit Fishbone (with whom they'd shared plenty of American dates in the Eighties); and Primus's "Sailing The Seas Of Cheese" (1991). But not before recalibrating all of it into their own unmistakable, off-kilter Beastie format. Musically, in fact, "Check Your Head" travels along a third path, alternative both to the classic Nineties crossover — mostly anchored in metal — and to the canonical hip-hop with rock-leaning guitar inserts that had defined the group's early days.

Buoyed by instrumental skills that had sharpened considerably since their days as a hardcore quartet (Mike D returns behind the drums, while Ad-Rock and Mca pick up guitar and bass respectively), by the crucial collaboration of a genius-level musician like Mark Ramos Nishita, aka "Money Mark" (effectively the fourth or fifth semi-official member of the group), who plays every kind of keyboard instrument and arranges practically the entire album, and by the returning Dj Hurricane and Mario Caldato Jr., the three Beasties, thanks to this new setup, craft a heavily expanded instrumental hip-hop album, steeped in Seventies funk, jazz and psychedelic moods and marked by a rich, skilful use of sampling (not just the usual Funkadelic, Bad Brains and Led Zeppelin, but also Bob Dylan and Cheap Trick, just to give you an idea), complementing the played parts. Which shows how thoroughly the group had taken on board the lesson of Paul's Boutique. There's no shortage either of passages looking toward the most visceral hardcore and the alternative rock brought to prominence in those years by travelling, neo-communal festivals like Lollapalooza.

The result is an interesting, experimental album that has little to envy in its more celebrated successor, Ill Communication — aside, perhaps, from the lack of crowd-pleasing singles able to win converts beyond the band's already sizeable fanbase. A track like "So What'cha Want", a dirty, sulphurous hard-funk number riding hip-hop cadences with a raucous, infectious chorus, comes very close (so much so that, remixed in various forms, it will go on to find much greater success in the years to come). The same goes for "Pass The Mic", which blends dub echoes with noisy guitars, and the rap-core of "Gratitude", almost a dress rehearsal for a masterpiece like "Sabotage" (the keystone of the following album). Elsewhere, the Beasties immerse themselves in a more dreamlike, progressive Black-music zone ("Funky Boss", "Lighten Up", "Pow"), in Zen and Eastern-tinged openings ("Finger Lickin' Good" and "Namasté") reflecting their matured interest in Buddhism and Eastern philosophies, in the jazz shadings of the dissonant "Stand Together" and of "Groove Holmes" — based, as the title states, on an organ riff by Richard "Groove" Holmes, a great name in hard-bop and a forerunner of acid jazz, who had died the year before. Their typical taste for variatio and musical sketches finds its way into the atmospheric lounge of "Something Got To Give" and the good-humoured "Professor Booty".

Check Your Head receives a more positive commercial reception than its predecessor: it debuts at number 10 on Billboard and quickly goes double platinum. Though, by way of contrast, over the years it will end up being somewhat overlooked and often unfairly regarded as a minor entry.

Still Ill (after all those years)

Over the following two years the Beasties devote themselves to expanding Grand Royal's roster, likewise inspired by an idea of crossing boundaries and blending genres, signing acts such as Luscious Jackson (Schellenbach's new band, who evidently bore no grudge for having been "dropped" back in the day), a scion of musical royalty like Sean Lennon, and a promising singer-songwriter in Australian Ben Lee. At the same time, they also make their debut in publishing with a magazine, "Grand Royal Magazine", and set about writing their new album: Ill Communication.

With their fourth record the Beasties reaffirm the idea of an expanded band — joining the previous album's lineup are Eugene Gore on violin, Eric Bobo on percussion and Amery Smith (ex-Suicidal Tendencies) on drums — and distil, even more convincingly, that special alchemy between (semi-)instrumental rap and expanded crossover already tried out on "Check Your Head". The growth between the two albums is felt in a more effective fusion of elements drawn from alternative hip-hop with the distinctive funk-core developed on the instrumental side, in a more careful, brilliant production, and in writing that is sharper and more focused on the songs themselves (which hold up brilliantly even taken individually). It's no coincidence, in fact, that Ill Communication can boast some of the most refined yet most powerful and impactful singles of the Beasties' career, such as the textbook alt-rap of "Get It Together" (which benefits greatly from the participation of Q-Tip of ATCQ), the hypnotic flute riff and cutting beat of "Sure Shot", the revisited old-school of "Root Down", and the hollow-tipped post-core, armoured with rap, of a devastating anthem like "Sabotage". Likewise, the rest of the album testifies to the creative growth of a group capable of assembling puzzles of sound and genre that are ever more eclectic and imaginative: whether it's instrumental hip-hop steeped in funk, jazz and cannabis-laced psychedelia ("The Scoop", "Alright Hear This", "B-Boys Make In With The Freak Freak"), hardcore reduced to hyperrealistic shards ("Tough Guy", "Heart Attack"), instrumental tracks like "Eugene's Lament", built on Eugene Gore's klezmer violin theme, "Ricky's Theme", a kind of cinematic lounge-funk, or "Sabrosa", Buddhist mantras like "Bodhisattva Vow" and "Shambala", or robot-funk appetizers of the futuristic sound of "Hello Nasty" ("Do It") with inflections à la Daft Punk avant la lettre. Twenty-some tracks that, for inventiveness and richness, are second only to Paul's Boutique.

On the lyrical front, the ironic, sophisticated and reflective approach already developed on previous albums (evident in the outgoing spirituality of a track like "Bodhisattva Vow") merges with a return to self-referential themes and the haunts of New York's old school, of which they sketch an ironic, affectionate portrait ("Root Down", "Get It Together", "Sure Shot"), alongside flare-ups of unruly youthful antagonism ("Tough Guy", "Sabotage"). Their by-now seasoned mastery of rapping and the vividness of their vocal interplay do the rest.

With Ill Communication the Beasties prove, once again, perfectly in tune with the musical climate of the time (post-grunge, alternative, crossover), and score their biggest commercial result since their debut, hitting number one on the American charts for the second (and not the last) time. Equally flattering is the outcome for the singles "Sabotage" (thanks to the track itself, but also to the astonishing video made by a young Spike Jonze, future director of "Being John Malkovich"), "Get It Together", "Sure Shot" and "Root Down".

Crossover goodbye, hello Mix Master Mike

Galvanized by their success, the Beastie Boys launched into one of the longest tours they'd undertaken up to that point. A massive commitment on the road that began with them co-headlining, alongside the Smashing Pumpkins, the Lollapalooza travelling circus, continued with sold-out stadiums and arenas across America, and eventually took them, for the first time in their career, to South America and Southeast Asia. During the same period they also found time for a few divertissements: releasing a nostalgic look back at their now-distant hardcore apprenticeship, Some Old Bullshit (1994), which collects tracks from the "Pollywog Stew" and "Cooky Puss" EPs, a compilation of (previously released) jazz-funk-flavored instrumental tracks, The In Sound From Way Out! (1996), and a lazy punk-rock EP titled "Aglio e Oglio" (named in honor of the frugal Italian pasta dish the three of them are so fond of). Material for die-hard completists only, though the latter, with "Deal With It", "Nervous Assistant" and "You Can't Catch A Bad One", does manage to land a few decent blows.

The best, however, they kept in reserve for an "official" comeback on a grand scale. One that would take until 1998 to arrive, but it was well worth the wait. Like dowsers hypersensitive to the most interesting new developments (and the ones most easily absorbed into their own sound) stirring the pop scene, with their fifth album the Beastie Boys execute another 180-degree turn. Having shed the last remnants of their crossover phase, while retaining their knack for blending instrumental music and electronic samples, the trio from Brooklyn plot a return to a more artsy strain of hip-hop, formally the heir to Paul's Boutique. But what they have in mind is a sound that also accounts for the many things that, compared to 1989, have radically changed both inside and outside hip-hop. And to ease this transition they opt for a lineup change that would prove pivotal: out goes the excellent Dj Hurricane, one of the architects of the group's musical growth but perhaps too tied to the oldschool, and in comes the phenomenon that is Mix Master Mike, a sort of Paganini of the turntables, already a multiple winner of every turntablism "battle" and world championship in the field. It's thanks in part to his virtuosity on the cuts and scratches, which gain real space and become a true solo instrument, and to an omnivorous approach to more unorthodox and (post)modern sonorities, that the Beastie sound is able to access a new, futuristic stage of evolution.

Heavily influenced by dance, electro, dub and trip-hop subcurrents, Warp-style abstractions and rarefactions, and sci-fi superstructures à la Daft Punk, Hello Nasty, beneath its catchy surface and dancefloor drive, is a dense, complex, refined record. True to the rap format so dear to them, yet different in craftsmanship from anything they'd made before. Anthems like "Super Disco Breakin'" (oldschool projected into hyperspace), "Body Movin'" (syncopating the "Oye Como Va" sample in inimitable fashion) and "Intergalactic" (a snippet of Rachmaninoff's "Prelude In C# Minor" plus a refrain that would send Daft Punk into fits of joy) aren't just catchy and nimble but also flawless in disguising their meticulous production strategies. And then, as per the script, the Beastie Boys make sure they leave nothing out: more denatured, recontextualized Daft Punk in "And Me", the sour, nocturnal pulse of "Putting The Shame In Your Game", somewhere between dub and trip-hop, more dub but this time essentially Jamaican in "Dr. Lee" (featuring, of course, a special appearance by Lee "Scratch" Perry), the jazz-lounge of "Sneaking Out The Hospital" and the bossa-tinged lounge of "Song For Junior", Mix Master Mike's personal solo spot on the anthem "Three Mc's And One Dj", an indie-pop ballad sung by Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, and the soul-jazz of "Picture This" (with lead vocals handed to the excellent backing singer Brooke Williams). That the Beastie Boys (and the collective that identifies with them: Mario Caldato Jr., "Money Mark", Eric Bobo and a host of session players brought in for the occasion) aren't just wizards at reworking new trends, but in manipulating them actually lay the groundwork for imaginative future developments, is confirmed by two tracks like "Electrify" and "The Negotiation Of Limerick": the first is a kind of dissonant collage sampling nothing less than Stravinsky's "The Firebird Suite", the second a stark, minimalist hip-hop track (notable for the cello recorded for the occasion by underground musician Jane Scarpantoni) bordering on the abstract rap of the 2000s.

The sonic restyling and the undeniable quality of the singles — including another superlative grindhouse video, the one for "Body Movin'", which pays homage to our own Mario Bava's "Diabolik" — also had a positive effect on sales, thanks to which the Beastie Boys hit number one on the American charts for the second time running (plus a second, record-setting number one on the UK charts) and racked up yet another million-selling bestseller. Critics, too, almost unanimously bowed to the new brainchild of the three Brooklyn tricksters.

To The 5 Boroughs: it takes time to build on Ground Zero

While Hello Nasty racked up Grammys and MTV Awards — including the Video Vanguard Award for their contribution to the art of the music video — the Beastie Boys stepped up their political and humanitarian commitment, as shown by their initiatives in support of a free Tibet and the far-sighted distinction they drew, in 1999 in the wake of the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, between Muslims and Islamic terrorists. Always attentive to new developments and changes, they were among the first artists to build an official website and distribute their music online. In 2000, however, fans of their music lost what was perhaps an unrepeatable opportunity: to see them co-headline, alongside Rage Against The Machine, the "Rhyme And Reason Tour", an ideal monument to the careers of the two groups arguably most significant to the fusion of rap and rock/metal. Mike D, who was supposed to play drums in a fully instrumental set, broke his collarbone falling off his bicycle, and by the time he recovered, Zack De la Rocha and Tom Morello's group had already announced their split. A real shame.

In the meantime, however, public attention was monopolized by far more dramatic events: in November 2000, George W. Bush Jr. won, by a razor-thin margin, the most contested election in the history of the Republic, amid phantom electronic votes and strong suspicions of fraud in the state of Florida, governed by the future president's brother. Then events spiraled: on September 11, 2001, two planes hijacked by Islamic terrorists crashed into the Twin Towers in the heart of New York, one into the Pentagon, while a fourth went down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks and Osama Bin Laden became, for everyone, the bogeyman, public enemy number one, the majority shareholder of this sort of "Terror Inc.". The response from one of the most extremist administrations ever to occupy the White House was not long in coming: that same year, on the pretext of hunting down terrorists but with the more real aim of establishing a beachhead in the oil-rich soft underbelly of the Middle East, G.W. Bush, as supreme commander of all the armed forces, launched Operation "Enduring Freedom" and invaded Afghanistan; in 2003 it would be the turn of the Iraq of supervillain Saddam Hussein (with threats, ultimately empty, to extend the campaign as far as Iran). What ties the latter actually had to the mass-murdering sheikh, in the three-card con game set up by the intelligence services of the US- and UK-led international coalition, no one would ever really figure out. An entire nation (not to mention the rest of the world) sank into paranoia over a new attack, while the multinationals cashing in on reconstruction and security contracts raked in billions of dollars.

Buoyed by a civic conscience no one would ever have suspected in them during the goofball excesses of their youth, the Beastie Boys did their part, setting up a fund for the families of the victims of the attacks and championing an idea of peace and dialogue between peoples and cultures, in stark contrast to the revanchist militarism then prevailing among Americans. In 2003, they recorded and released for free online their first genuine "protest song", a combat rap titled "In A World Gone Mad" in which, drawing on their usual weapons of provocation and irony, they launched a direct attack on the Bush administration and the neo-conservative principles underpinning it. It would become one of the most downloaded tracks of that season. During the same period the group was working in the studio on what would become their sixth album: To The 5 Boroughs.

Self-produced (forgoing, after fifteen years of partnership, the invaluable contribution of Mario Caldato Jr.) and dedicated, as the title suggests, to their hometown and to an idea of democratic rebirth addressed to the whole country, the concept album also marks a return to the taut, vibrant, stripped-down atmospheres of East Coast oldschool. Not a simple rehash, though, but a careful reinterpretation filtered through modern electronics, which often looks, with moderate interest and without ever overcommitting, to the minimal, abstract sounds of certain strands of avant-hop. Between abrasive, bombastic passages worthy of Public Enemy ("3 The Hard Way" and "It Takes Time To Build"), Bambaataa-style electro-funk updated for the times ("Oh Word" and "Crawlspace"), tributes to Chic and the Sugarhill Gang ("Triple Trouble"), cinematic moments (the epic "Right Right, Now Now" and the brooding "Rhyme The Rhyme Well"), and smart dancefloor cuts ("All Lifestyles"), the Beastie Boys prove that the six-year wait hasn't been in vain and that their ability to regenerate their own musical tissue is still working wonders. The two most high-profile singles perfectly capture the main sides of their current output: the circus-like, reference-heavy "Ch-Check It Out" and the prouder, more "engaged" "An Open Letter To NYC" (with a touch of old-school punk esprit: a sample of the Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer"), the emotional zenith of the album, a moving declaration of love for the city humiliated and wronged by the barbarians standing on both sides of the "War on Terror", the closest thing to street poetry the three of them have ever written.

A tight, forceful album, one that flips the cliché of "Fight For Your Right To Party" into "Party For Your Right To Fight". And it scores yet another commercial win, hitting number one (the fourth so far) on the American charts, with a strong showing in Europe too.

Middle-Age Eccentricities: The Mix Up

Satisfied with the success they'd achieved and with a now semi-legendary status, practically unmatched for longevity and resonance within hip-hop, the Beastie Boys broke from their usual lengthy recording hiatus only in 2007.

And they did so with an album that couldn't be further removed from everything that came before it. The Mix Up is an experimental, eccentric, somewhat self-indulgent project: conceived and played, that is, more for themselves, as an outlet for a side of their musical personality that would otherwise have risked staying cramped and overshadowed by their big rap successes, than for the wider audience that usually cheers them on. Temporarily setting aside the contribution of dj Mix Master Mike, the three caballeros went back to playing their respective instruments (backed by the essential "Money Mark" and the excellent percussionist Alfredo Ortiz), but with a very different feel from their crossover albums of the '90s.

There's a cinematic air, redolent of '70s soundtracks, running through The Mix Up, an album completely devoid of lyrics and vocals. Between blaxploitation ("14th St. Break", "B For My Name"), Tarantino-esque kung-fu movie vibes ("The Cousin Of Death"), sci-fi ("The Gala Event"), lounge ("The Melee"), funk-jazz, near post-rock touches ("Off The Grid"), the odd electro flourish (the exotica of "Suco De Tangerina") and their usual loose, goofy psychedelia, it's as if the sonorities the Beastie Boys had once stitched together and compressed into their harlequin-like samples now stretched out indefinitely, freed from any rigid rap structure, taking on a life of their own in every track. A lazy, pleasant divertissement, probably more fun to play than to listen to. Still, a decent confirmation of the Beastie Boys' musical "cross-dressing" and curiosity, pictured on the cover in a new, peculiar get-up: Italian tailored jackets and ties with dark sunglasses (a fedora for Ad-Rock, and Mike D's previously unseen, extremely bushy frizzy hair), somewhere between the Blues Brothers and cool jazz musicians.

Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 (2011)

Trailed for almost two years by the release of the singles "Too Many Rappers" (which earned a Grammy nomination for best rap performance by a duo or group in 2009) and "Lee Majors Come Again", and repeatedly delayed due to personal issues (the thankfully successful recovery from the salivary gland lymphoma that struck Adam Yauch/Mca) and production ones (an abundance of material that convinced the Beastie Boys to plan, mid-course, a double album and so go back into the studio to record new tracks for it), the long-awaited comeback of the legendary New York group finally came to fruition. Starting with Part 2, which thus came out on the date originally set, but contains practically the same songs that had, at the time, been credited to Part 1. Whether this bizarre move was dictated by promotional reasons or was simply some kind of goofy gag the trio couldn't resist, we'll never know.

The eponymous turnaround, if nothing else, is matched by a shift on the musical and temporal plane as well. With Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2, in fact, they go back to their roots, skipping clean over the last decade (which, incidentally, was thin on releases: just one album plus an all-instrumental one), and reconnecting concretely with the sound that made their name in the 90s.

There's everything from rap-rock anthems like the groovy, festive "Make Some Noise" and the sharp, fuzzy "Too Many Rappers" (here in a new guise compared to the originally released single), to the rap-core of "Say It", which harks back to the classic blueprint of "Gratitude" or "Sabotage", to the enveloping, psychedelic funky-dub that is a direct descendant of Paul's Boutique ("Nonstop Disco Powerpack", "Funky Donkey", "Crazy Ass Shit"), through to the icier, more robotic electro of Hello Nasty (the funky, gothic streaks of "Long Burn The Fire", the quasi-glitch of "Tadlock's Glasses", "Ok" sitting at the crossroads with Ill Communication). It's an archetypal journey through the amalgam that has shaped the collective imagination of the beastie-sound over the years, condensed into a traditionally built rap format that's just punchy and outgoing enough. There's no shortage of poppier detours either, like the relaxed, insinuating reggae of "Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win" (sung by Santigold) or the playful dip back into their hardcore beginnings on "Lee Majors Come Again", which nods to both "Sabotage" and Bad Brains.

The 2011 Beastie Boys are not, and could not be, a band suited to those on a desperate hunt for novelty. After thirty years in the game, it would be ungenerous to ask them for anything more than keeping their standards held respectably high.

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