Check Your Head
brought
the Beastie Boys
crashing back into the charts and into public consciousness, but that was only partially due to the album itself -- much of its initial success was due to the cult audience that
Paul's Boutique
cultivated in the years since its initial flop release, a group of fans whose minds were so thoroughly blown by that record, they couldn't wait to see what came next, and this helped the record debut in the Top Ten upon its April 1992 release. This audience, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, was a collegiate Gen-X audience raised on
Licensed to Ill
and ready for
to guide them through college. As it happened,
the Beasties
had repositioned themselves as a
lo-fi
,
alt-rock
groove band. They had not abandoned
rap
, but it was no longer the foundation of their music, it was simply the most prominent in a thick pop-culture gumbo where
old school rap
sat comfortably with
soul-jazz
hardcore punk
, white-trash
metal
arena rock
Bob Dylan
bossa nova
, spacy
pop
, and hard, dirty
funk
. What they did abandon was the
psychedelic
samples of
, turning toward primitive grooves they played themselves, augmented by keyboardist
Money Mark
and co-producer
Mario Caldato, Jr.
. This all means that music was the message and the rhymes, which had been pushed toward the forefront on both
and
, have been considerably de-emphasized (only four songs --
"Jimmy James,"
"Pass the Mic,"
"Finger Lickin' Good,"
"So What'cha Want"
-- could hold their own lyrically among their previous work). This is not a detriment, because the focus is not on the words, it's on the music, mood, and even the newfound neo-hippie political consciousness. And
is certainly a record that's greater than the sum of its parts -- individually, nearly all the tracks are good (the
instrumentals
sound good on their subsequent
collection,
The in Sound From Way Out
), but it's the context and variety of styles that give
its identity. It's how the
old school raps
give way to fuzz-toned rockers, furious
punk
, and cheerfully gritty, jazzy jams. As much as
, this is a whirlwind tour through
' pop-culture obsessions, but instead of spinning into Technicolor fantasies, it's earth-bound D.I.Y. that makes it all seem equally accessible -- which is a big reason why it turned out to be an
touchstone of the '90s, something that both set trends and predicted them. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine