Check Your Head cover detail
Tonight’s selections from Beastie Boys third album, 1992 album, Check Your Head.
The Beastie Boys — Mike D., MCA and Ad-Rock — are back after a three-year hiatus with their most unconventional outing to date. While their first two albums, Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique, presented in-your-face rhymes, offbeat humor and a white-boy perspective on the hip-hop world, Check Your Head has a simple formula: no formula at all.
Returning to their instrumental roots — they started out as a thrash band — the Beasties play a good chunk of the music on the album, blending Parliament-Funkadelic-inspired bass with hard-core hip-hop, frantic DJ scratches and quirky samples of Bob Dylan and Jimmie “J.J.” Walker, headbanging punk, gospel sounds and any and every other element in their musical arsenal. [...]
The cross-pollination of styles on Check Your Head is confusing at times, yet the album achieves distinction because of its ingenuity. Beneath the seeming chaos, the Beastie Boys have created a harmonious playground out of their musical fantasies. — Rolling Stone
Pass The Mic
The Beasties were burnt. After the meteoric rise of their culture breaker of a non-stereotype rap group and origin story, Licensed to Ill, the trio fled their home base of New York City and label Def Jam for the greener shores of Los Angeles and Capitol Records to have artistic control in the West Coast sun on 1989’s Paul’s Boutique, an artistic breakthrough that was a commercial flop at the time. Once Mike D., MCA, and Ad-Rock hit the early ’90s, they were beaten and nearly forgotten.
So much so that Capitol Records didn’t even communicate with them for a couple of years.
The Boys were no longer hot. So they smoked weed, played basketball, built a skateboard ramp, and ultimately familiarized themselves with their instruments once again at G-Son Studios in Atwater Village. Adam Horovitz’s first outfit, The Young and the Useless, opened for Bad Brains at CBGB’s in 1982. And it became that fire, that inspiration, a punk ethos, that the group would revisit at their lowest point.
Between the bong hits, three-pointers, and skinned knees, The Beastie Boys found themselves again. The before hip-hop version was where they earned that initial street cred. As Ad-Rock puts it in the documentary made by Apple TV+ in the Beastie Boys Story, “Five years earlier, we’re at Madison Square Garden. Now we’re playing clubs. You’d think we’d be bummed out about it. But actually, falling off can be fun.” — Treblezine
So What'cha Want
Any discussion of Beastie Boys’ third album is likely to divide fans into two camps: those who contend that Paul’s Boutique was — and remains — their masterpiece, and those who feel that their second album, while amazing, was also a necessary gateway for their best material. Put another way, they had to make Paul’s Boutique, and once it was out of their systems, they could embark on new challenges. This reviewer thought Check Your Head was a surprising and refreshing leap forward in 1992, and the passing of 17 years has done little to diminish its enduring appeal. It remains vital and engaging, in part because of the way it documents a particular moment when the band embraced the past while anticipating the future. A forward-looking album that establishes a distinctive ‘70s-era soul vibe? Only this band was capable, at that time, of pulling of such an ostensibly paradoxical achievement, and bringing the masses along to the party. That the group was able to establish a foundation from which their future work would flow was only slightly more momentous than the ways in which they turned a white-hot light on the myriad influences they wore so gleefully on their sleeves.
When the boys picked up instruments and actually proved they could play them it was intriguing; that they produced an album brimming with original, occasionally indelible material remains something of a revelation. Who woulda thunk it? This is the same band that announced themselves (quite successfully) to the world as wiseass clowns on License to Ill. They rallied the underage troops to fight for their right to party and, beer bongs in hand, a nation of nitwits made them millionaires. But there was always a sense that this was a naked, calculated ploy for commercial success. To their credit, it worked. So it was impressive and, frankly, astonishing, to see how quickly they put away childish things and got busy concocting Paul’s Boutique. Indeed, the prepubescent fan base deserted them as quickly as it had embraced them, and their second album earned instant street cred simply for not being a retread of what had worked so wonderfully the first time.
Although it eventually became a cult classic, Paul’s Boutique was deemed a commercial dud when it dropped in 1989. It was such a departure from the simplistic, goofy boys-just-wanna-have-fun shenanigans of their debut, it obviously alienated some, and left many indifferent. By refusing to ride the gravy train, the band drew a line in the sand and has never retreated. It took a while for fans to catch up with them, but enough people eventually gravitated to Paul’s Boutique to ensure they had indeed made an astute decision, artistically and commercially. And so, some of these newer fans must have been shocked when, three years later, Check Your Head appeared, signifying another radical musical makeover. — Pop Matters
Jimmy James
Maybe Check Your Head doesn't hit the same rap-geek nerves that Licensed to Ill or Paul's Boutique did, but let's look at it this way: It was a worthwhile experiment that resulted in some vital music. The Beastie Boys knew that Paul's was finding appreciation as a cult album, but they couldn't recapture its feeling, not after its commercial failure left them practically forced to take a new tack. Making that approach a smaller-budget, DIY/punk mutation of everything they'd tried along the way and starting from the ground up as a band rather than a crew of MCs was an inspired idea. Going back to the studio to polish that approach up resulted in their second #1 album, 1994's Ill Communication, which does most of what Check Your Head does just a little better and funnier. But if time has diluted the impact of Check Your Head, clamping on some ear goggles and turning the EQ to its most bass-expanding level is compensation enough. — Pitchfork
Something's Got To Give
But the album is guided by a kind of audacity that refuses to recognize itself as audacity. It doesn’t even dare you to suggest that following the sunbaked rock of “Gratitude” with a conga-led organ jammer is a bad idea; it succeeds almost entirely on the power of the Beastie Boys’ conviction that it would succeed, that the contours of their map might be recognizable even if the landmarks aren’t. “They could relate and dig deeper with Check Your Head, because it fit their [evolution] in a lot of ways, too,” Diamond says of the audience they discovered when they finally took the album out on tour. “It may not have been the same trajectory of music that they discovered along the way, but they could relate.” [...]
Licensed to Ill’s artistic merits are obscured by the immaturity that is occasionally the album’s motivating force, and the Beasties’ extended demonstration of their commitment to human rights both on- and off-stage (as well as Yauch’s hat-in-hand apology in Ill Communication’s “Sure Shot”) make the album something of an aberration within their catalog. Far from signalling a reinvention, the rhyming on Paul’s Boutique feels like the natural next step: the gang-shouting is more sophisticated and the references are more oblique, but they hadn’t yet realized that they might have something to say.
“It wasn’t until Check Your Head that we discovered ourselves and how our records affected people and how our actions affected people,” Diamond says. Later, while discussing the Check Your Head tour, he notes that it was the first time that they’d played rooms small enough to actually interact with the crowd in a meaningful way, and that they were no longer “these rock star people that needed to be separated from [the audience] anymore.” — Flood
Gratitude
.
Time For Livin'
.
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Milo Ventimiglia, Odessa A'zion, Whitney
Jimmy Fallon: Halle Berry, Dylan O'Brien, Josh Safdie, De La Soul
Stephen Colbert: James Taylor, Evie McGee Colbert
Seth Meyers: Nick Jonas, John Early
Comics Unleashed: Danielle Perez, Chris Cope, Richard Chassler, Freddy Lockhart
Watch What Happens Live: Kaley Cuoco, Erika Jayne
The Daily Show: Jon Shenk, Marcus Capone, host Michael Kosta
