June 21, 2004

Beastie Boys : Ch-Ch-Check It Out

The g-guvnors are b-back, d-dammit!...

Do they still spit on cripples? And what the fuck has MCA been doing to himself? He sounds destroyed, like he's spent the last seven years curled up
in a piss-stinking alleyway smoking Tarmac through a hole in his throat. While
Ad Rock and Mike D squawk away in their remarkably persistent yappy, slappable white trash voices, the real magic occurs when Yauch the grouch lumbers in like a
bad-wine ravaged Jake La Motta, all ill-coordinated badass attitude and vagrant growl. Wasn't he supposed to be the boring Buddhist one?

The new Beastie Boys album is pegged to show the trio acting their age for once. Thoughtful, political, paeans to New York, blah de blah de blah, but you'd never guess it from this broken-brained howl of retarded joy. Riding a super-heavy breakdance bounce that'll provoke knee-knocking good times from the jump off, the whole thing is a call to
party that's an arm wave away from being utterly, gorgeously irresistible.

As for the "new maturity", well, there's not a whole heap in the rhymes either. Kicking off with references to Klingons and needle nose pliers (obviously, why no mention before?), the superannuated trio wheedle gloriously onto Miss Piggy via the tragically hilarious Rappin' Duke.
The subtext is simple: "It's us again. It's time to party. Who the fuck were those scruffy Welsh berks in the cheap sportswear again?"
Listen and learn, Goldie Lookin Chain. If you manage
to sound this crazed, cool and buzzing with lunatic energy
in 20 years' time, then I for one will be enormously pleased as I'll be nuts deep in a small fortune from the odds of
a bunch of geeky white boys transforming themselves
from comedy idiots to genre-trashing trailblazers twice
in one lifetime. Current price: 25,000-1. The g-guvnors are
b-back, d-dammit!

Ian Watson