Shock! Horror! White boys doing hip-hop!
I mentioned that I was intimidated by Sonic Youth (and The Jesus and Mary Chain) during a time when they were exactly my kind of thing because I felt that the people that liked them were far cooler than me. I avoided Beastie Boys at the time for similar, but opposite reasons - in this case it was because one of their loudest fans at college was an utter bell-end.
Neither of which are the fault of the artists themselves, and is a good demonstration of how unconscious bias works (not so unconscious, perhaps). There’s enough time between now and then that such things don’t matter to me, and I can judge the music on its own merit (and not be such a bell-end myself).
Beastie Boys merge rock and hip-hop. The Boys – Adam “Ad-Rock” Horowitz, Adam “MCA” Yauch and Michael “Mike D” Diamond were originally a punk band and started doing spoof hip-hop tracks, before morphing into a (somewhat more serious) hip-hop group entirely. There’s a rock element, often using samples from the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath behind their tracks. Other samples include War's Low Rider in the track Slow Ride. Slayer’s Kerry King joins in on the famous tracks.
Most of the tracks are bragging tracks, also incorporating punk themes about being drop-outs - “I'm the king of the classroom, coolin' in the back/ My teacher had beef, so I gave her a smack. She chased me out of class, she was strapped with a ruler / Went to the bathroom, rolled myself a wooler” from Slow Ride for example. And, of course, “Your mom busted in and said, what's that noise? Aw, mom you're just jealous it's the Beastie Boys” from their classic Fight For Your Right. This is probably the quintessential Beastie Boys track – the mix of rock and hip-hop that builds on what Run DMC had laid down, coupled with the tongue-in-cheek teenage angst of the likes of the Circle Jerks.
What’s wild to me is that No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn is a take on Motorhead’s No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith. As a Brit, I’ve always assumed it was the other way around, with the dull mundanity of Hammersmith substituted for the exoticism of Brooklyn, much like calling an album Straight Outta Croydon or something like that. Realistically, Brooklyn and Hammersmith are probably not dissimilar in vibe.
They’re at their best when they blending rock and hip-hop, but there are some pretty fun samples and mixes on here. Brass Monkey, especially with it’s run into Slow And Low is a good bit of utter chaos that defines the Beastie Boys ethos of this era.
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