Sandwiched between the sampling sorcery of 1989’s Paul’s Boutique and the wild roar of 1994’s Ill Communication, the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head suffers from an odd sort of Middle Brother Syndrome. It is eclipsed in a way that can only happen in a family of overachievers and big personalities.
To be fair to the record, which turns 25 today, it is a child that is clearly loved by its three parents — Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), Mike Diamond (Mike D) and the late, great Adam Yauch (MCA), and its success should be more apparent to those of us outside the family.
Check Your Head has moved more than 2 million copies and was widely acclaimed by critics upon its release. Still it’s hard to be born between a couple of landmarks. When hip-hop textbooks are written, the Beastie Boys chapter is likely to be littered with references to Paul’s Boutique and Ill Communication. The former is ingenious and soulful. The latter has an iconic moment to commend it: the cop-rock camp of the video for “Sabotage” will forever be burned into the brains of those who’ve seen it.
But, like any child, Check Your Head deserves to be understood for who it is in and of itself. It no doubt bears a family resemblance. But it also goes out of its way to do its own thing. Check Your Head is the most colorful, tattered freak flag the Beasties ever flew. The whole album sounds like the photonegative video for “So What’cha Want” looks — tripped-out, practically vibrating with color and energy.
Like a comic-book empire, the Beasties’ universe has its own particular set of landmarks, minor characters and color schemes. They all stay put for Check Your Head. “Finger Lickin’ Good” contains a quintessentially Beastie boast with MCA singing the praises of his recipe for “pasta with pesto,” then claiming to have “more spice than the frugal gourmet.”
Even at the record’s headiest, the band lightens the mood with a tune called “Professor Booty” or pits Biz Markie against Ted Nugent in the most out-there battle royale ever (“The Biz Vs. the Nuge”). The trio’s verses reflect its patented blend of hip-hop-isms, hyper-specific pop-culture references and pressing personal concerns.
A tune like “Pass the Mic” does it all: It invokes one of the holiest hip-hop phrases (“yes, yes y’all”), name-drops Jimmie Walker, Clyde Frazier and Stevie Wonder and finds the Beasties both deconstructing, then rebuilding their own mythology. That tune, incidentally, includes one of the all-time great Beastie lines in which Mike D rhymes “commercial” with “commercial.” Yet somehow it works as a trenchant critique of the group’s chosen art form: “Well everybody’s rapping like it’s a commercial / Actin’ like life is a big commercial.”
But Check Your Head breaks free of any personal history or external expectation in a couple of crucial ways. The album is as stylistically diverse as anything else in the group’s catalog. But it lands on a vibe that is immediate and uncommonly fluid. This is the Beasties’ take on free jazz. This is their Brian Wilson fever dream. This is the sound of the band taking punk kindling, dousing with it funky gasoline and sitting around the campfire singing a warped version of “Kumbaya.”
There are still sweet samples, repurposing the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Cheap Trick, Bad Brains, Kool and the Gang, Jimmy Smith and more. The beat and bottom drop out of “Finger Lickin’ Good” to let Bob Dylan sing a few bars of “Tom Thumb’s Blues.” Mike D has proudly claimed he talked Dylan down from $2000 to $700 for the right to that sample.
But Ad-Rock, Mike D and MCA team with cohort Money Mark, aka Mark Nishita, to play most of the instruments you hear. There are big, booming drums, crunchy guitars, fuzzed-out bass and a heavy helping of B3. Money Mark’s organ playing is the instrumental heart of the record. Greg Kot, the Chicago Tribune critic with a historically high batting average, hit again when he called Money Mark the record’s “secret weapon.” On tunes such as “Lighten Up,” “So What’cha Want,” and an instrumental tribute to organist “Groove Holmes,” he plays like a church lady whose switch has flipped, electricity flowing through his fingers.
Here the Beasties built a reputation they would only burnish on records such as To the 5 Boroughs and The Mix-Up. For the next 20 years, they were the best white funk band on the planet.
Musically, Check Your Head trips a number of wires. Lyrically it’s just a trip. On top of the typical wordplay and chest-thumping, it’s littered with mystical explorations and themes of personal empowerment. This is a version of the Beastie Boys that could hold Buddhist tenets in one hand and spin a basketball on the other. These are the Beasties who wanted to free Tibet. If the belching frat-boy sympathizers who made Licensed to Ill foresaw this version of the Beastie Boys, they would have formed a circle and taken turns beating the sensibility out of each other.
Opener “Jimmy James” shouts out Mother Earth and treats music as a precursor to racial harmony. For all its quirks, “Pass the Mic” preaches the message “be true to yourself and you will never fall.” “Gratitude” is centered on just that, and reflects the sort of maturity that would bleed into future albums. This kinder, gentler side of the band was most fully realized in MCA’s famous ode to “all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and the friends” on “Ill Communication” standout “Sure Shot.”
The most obvious example of the band’s spiritual seeking comes on “Stand Together.” Over the rumble and squawk of the track, they talk of musical vibrations and chase this mantra: “Love vibe / contemplation time / Love vibe / Intuition time / Love vibe / Evolution time / Love vibe / Resolution time.” The most hippie-fied collection of lyrics on a Beasties record keeps good sonic company. There is drum-circle percussion throughout; chant-like passages on “Lighten Up”; and closer “Namaste” feels like the Beasties doing some deep-sea crate-digging and coming up with the music of Sun Ra.
No discussion of Check Your Head is complete without a few words about “So What’Cha Want.” It exists within the pantheon of signature Beasties songs, alongside the likes of “Brass Monkey,” “Sabotage,” “Sure Shot” and “Intergalactic.” It just might be their high-water mark. Money Mark’s organ is filthy; drums echo in a sort of self-contained call-and-response. And the band finds a flawless mix of braggadocio and goofiness that is embodied in, for my money, the best Beasties lyric of all time, courtesy of Mike D: “Y’all suckers write me checks and then they bounce / So I reach into my pocket for the fresh amount / See I’m the long, leaner Victor the Cleaner / I’m the illest motherfucker from here to Gardena.”
With 25 years’ worth of hindsight, Check Your Head isn’t the Beastie Boys’ magnum opus. It’s too strange, too stream-of-consciousness. But it is a fine middle brother, worthy of love, recognition and being addressed without mention of its siblings. It is the sound of the coolest band on the planet spending some of the capital it earned, but getting a whole lot back.