Beastie Boys: Check Your Head

Beastie Boys: Check Your Head

1992

Capitol Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Jimmy James  2. Funky Boss  3. Pass the Mic  4. Gratitude  5. Lighten Up  6. Finger Lickin' Good  7. So What'cha Want  8. The Biz vs. The Nuge  9. Time for Livin'  10. Something's Got to Give  11. The Blue Nun  12. Stand Together  13. POW  14. The Maestro  15. Groove Holmes  16. Live at PJ's  17. Mark on the Bus  18. Professor Booty  19. In 3's  20. Namasté

It may be hard to believe now, but back in1989 Paul's Boutique was considered a commercial and critical failure...It was derided as being too impenetrable and sold only a fraction of what "Licensed to Ill" had sold. It turned out "Paul's Boutique" was actually a  "grower" album, and after awhile the public started to understand what an accomplishment it really was...I  can remember being excited to hear what the Beastie Boys were going to do next and in the spring of 1992 I promptly bought the cassette of "Check Your Head."

I can still remember looking at the cover in the car ride home and seeing the instruments and thinking "Woah! Do the Beastie Boys actually play instruments?"  I don't know if samples were just getting too expensive at this point or if the Beasties were courting the Alternative Nation but the amount of samples were drastically reduced this time around...The band instead made their own samples...With the help of Money Mark's jazzy electric piano, the whole thing stank of  70's funk and felt convincingly stoned...

"I did not inhale...but if we groove out to "Funky Boss," one more time,  I just might reconsider..."

 I went home and popped it in the tape-deck and can still recall hearing the dense, foggy funk of "Jimmie James" for teh first time...It sounded like a big wool blanket had been tossed over the mics...MCA's normally upfront voice was jacketed in lo-fi  crackle...How would I be able to understand the group's dense storytelling with all this distortion?  As the album played on I realized there wasn't going to be any storytelling...The vocals (the ones I could make out anyway) were limited to hip hop boasting and pleas for peace... Hell, sometimes there wasn't even vocals...A good chunk of the tape was devoted to instrumentals...

The monolithic John Bonham drumbeat on "So What'cha Want" stood out, that's for sure...I also loved the breakneck 80's hardcore of their Sly Stone/Lee Perry cover "Time for Livin'" and the "Looking Down a Barrel of a Gun" hard rock of "Gratitude..." But the rest kind of went over my head...

Fast forward a few months and I was obsessed with the tape...The chaotic jumble had cleared...It was obvious that the band had taken all their musical and cultural interests and had constructed a dense kingdom to house them all; hardcore, hip-hop, jazz, funk, psychedelia, obscure pop culture references... It's all here...and it turned out this was the way to follow up a classic album...Toss the script and come up with something completely different... The loose eclecticism and obscure pop culture references made it seem like they belonged in the 90's all along..."Licensed to Ill" suddenly seemed primitive and outmoded...

As I was writing this it hit me that I have been listening to this album for over 20 years now...This seems insane to me, but the calendar doesn't lie (unless it's a Mayan calendar that said the world was going to end in 2012...

 ... that calendar was full of shit, man..)

"Check your Head" seems almost on par with "Paul's Boutique" to my ears...I'm calling it their second best album....To celebrate this meaningless honor, let's rock out to "So What'cha Want" by the Beastie Boys...