Beastie Boys Bring Back the Rap on “Hot Sauce Committee Party Two”

Music review: Beastie Boys Bring Back the Rap on “Hot Sauce Committee Party Two”

By The Burg Staff on May. 04, 2011
By Matt Ashare

The career length for most rappers isn’t much longer than the wingspan of your average hummingbird. It’s not just that hip-hop tends to be a young man’s game: it’s that the biggest emcees begin diversifying their portfolios early on, moving into film and TV like Ice T and Ice Cube, opening restaurants and creating clothing lines like Diddy. Before too long, rapping becomes a secondary or even tertiary concern.
     Given hip-hop’s penchant for bravado, and the ginormous egos it tends to breed, the odds a rap duo or group will stay intact for more than a couple of Congressional terms are even slimmer. So even if you ignore all of their accomplishments — and up to the release this week of the new “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” there have been many — the mere fact that Beastie Boys, a trio who stumbled into hip-hop almost three decades ago after cutting their teeth in NYC’s punk scene, are still a functioning musical unit goes beyond mere anomaly. That they’ve managed to remain relevant since the first bratty stirrings of the now classic 1983 single “Cookie Puss” is just plain freaky.
     Of course, I’ve got my theories. (After all, that’s what I’m here for, right?) Maybe they’ve just been super lucky. But Beastie Boys have scored a veritable hat-trick when it’s come to capturing cultural zeitgeist in a bottle. With their 1986 chart-topper “Licensed to Ill” they joined Run DMC in finding that sweet spot between rap and hard rock that brought hip-hop its first mainstream success. Then, on its follow-up, 1989’s “Paul’s Boutique,” they hooked up with future Beck producers the Dust Brothers, and found themselves on the cutting edge of pomo sampling collage, a kind of hip-hop-meets-musique concrete aesthetic that presaged contemporary electronica. Almost 10 years later, rather than just holding steady, they took another major left-hand turn, jettisoning samples for straight up old-school-style hip-hoppery with muscular Mix Master Mike working two vinyl turntables while Mike D, MCA, and Ad-Rock deployed their rhyming skills. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the hip-hop DJ — all but an anachronism when “Hello Nasty” hit the racks in 1998 — and the art of turntablism was undergoing a major revival in the capable hands of masters like DJ Shadow.
     That’s not luck — it’s what I’d call “good taste” coupled with a genuine passion for the genre. Beastie Boys have always been into hip-hop more as style — a mode of expression, if you’ll excuse my pretension — than lifestyle. That’s one reason the Beasties never played much of a role in rap’s notorious East Coast/West Coast rivalry and you just never hear about any of them pulling an Eminem and getting arrested for guns or drugs. Not saying they’re choir boys, but the Beasties earned their stripes in the studio, not on the streets.
     Still, when the trio returned to their original positions (bass, drums, and guitar for MCA, Mike D, and Ad-Rock respectively) on 2007’s “The Mix-Up,” an all-instrumental romp through everything from fatback funk to noisy punk, I thought they were done with hip-hop — that they were ready to ride out their career emceeing larger concerns from the wings of their Tibetan Freedom Concerts. I was wrong. There may be extra-hip-hop excursions on “Hot Sauce,” but the Beasties are fully back to rapping in 2011. “Yes here we go again give you more nothing lesser/Back on the mic it’s the anti-depressor,” boasts Ad-Rock in his now vintage whine (it’s still a bratty varietal) on the disc’s opener, “Make Some Noise,” a wah-wah-organ funk-fueled affair that finds Mike D unabashedly repeating the hook from the Beastie classic “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party!)” and Ad-Rock happily dating himself by referencing Ted Danson and dropping this giddy rhyme: “Leggo my Eggo while I flex my ego/Sip on prosecco dressed up in a tuxedo.”
     Too soon to tell whether the Beasties have again captured the zeitgeist. But the self-consciously stripped-down, lo-fi production of “Hot Sauce” suggests the Boys have been getting down with the underground — what the kids call indie-hip-hop. And the anything-goes infectiousness with which they incorporate everything from live instrumentation (metallic guitars), sci-fi samples, and DJ scratching on a track like “Say It,” along with the fearlessness with which they delve into reggae with guest singer Santigold on “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win,” return to punk-rocking out on “Lee Majors Come Again,” and indulge in some sensual instrumental dub on “Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament,” may just portend the arrival of the global genre-hopping hip-hop band.
     Of course, as long as the Beasties are still with us, keeping their ears to the ground and their wordifying mouths on overdrive, we’ve got at least one trio who are practicing masters of the form. http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_beastie_boys_bring_back_the_rap_on_hot_sauce_committee_pa
Ashare, a freelance writer based in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for The Boston Phoenix