FEATURE:
Three MC’s and One DJ
Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty at Twenty-Five
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FOLLOWING 1994’s Ill Communication…
IN THIS PHOTO: Beastie Boys in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Danny Clinch
Beastie Boys released their fifth studio album, Hello Nasty, on 14th July, 1998. It sold 681,000 copies in its first week, debuting at number 1 on the Billboard 200 album sales chart. Hello Nasty also won Best Alternative Music Album and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group (for Intergalactic) at the 41st Annual Grammy Awards. It splits people as to whether it is in the top-three Beasties albums. One of their members, Ad-Roc, revealed it was his favourite. Some fans put it up there with Paul’s Boutique and Ill Communication, whereas others feel it not up there with their best. I am in the former camp. Hello Nasty is the album that got me into Beastie Boys. Intergalactic is one of the songs of my teenage years. The album will always have a special place in my heart! I don’t think there are any plans for a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. I would urge people to listen to the album ahead of 14th July. One of the best albums of the '90s, Hello Nasty got a lot of love upon its release. I will bring in a few reviews/features. Rolling Stone reviewed Hello Nasty upon its release in 1998:
“SEE ALL THOSE stars up there? That means I can’t walk down my block for a whole month. For a black man, championing the Beasties is like being down with Madonna or rooting for the Utah Jazz. Whether it’s from a well-merited overprotectiveness of our precious culture or from mildly sour grapes, we ain’t supposed to like people who take black culture and refract it through white lenses.
Now, I hate the Salt Lake Celtics as much as the next guy, but the Beasties are complicated. Unlike nearly all white rap acts, the Beasties aren’t white boys in blackface. They’re the embodiment of the modern lower-Manhattan street kid. If hip-hop is as much a New York thing as it is a black thing, if keeping it real means faithfully representing your social aesthetic, if it’s another way of saying perfect pitch, then the Beasties keep it as real for their peoples as Jay-Z and Snoop do for theirs. For modern lower Manhattan, Kids is The Godfather and the Beasties are Sinatra.
Now comes a ludicrously fabulous, oftmanic, sometimes mellow 22-song long player of such astounding variety that it seems a lot longer than 67 minutes: Hello Nasty. Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA opened their career with a pair of hip-hop albums (Licensed to III and Paul’s Boutique), then shifted gears for a pair of records that were more punk influenced (Check Your Head and III Communication). With their fifth proper album, a playfully mature Beastie record (if that’s possible), they turn the focus back toward hip-hop — there’s not one hárdcore punk song here — but with an understanding of how to conflate their two largest influences into one smooth-flowing package. Imagine the collaboration that Black Flag and De La Soul might have made, mixing jaunty samples and esoteric beats with punk-guitar crunch while shifting between that old we’re-havin’-fun-on-the-mike ethos and a primal, post-vocal wail. Imagine a sonic mix that’s about sixty-five to seventy percent the frenetic, sample-crazy hip-hop eclecticism of Paul’s Boutique and about 25 to 30 percent the funk-punk fun of III Communication — with a cool, Latin-influenced near-instrumental (“Song for Junior”) and a sublime Brazilian-flavored acoustic number called “I Don’t Know,” which is sweetly delivered by MCA(??): “I’m walking through time/Deluded as the next guy/Pretending and hoping to find/That distant peace of mind,” and at that point you, too, will do a double take What? Did my Smashing Pumpkins CD sneak into the player? No, that’s just one of the many nice surprises on Hello Nasty — they wail, they whisper, they sample Spanish, they sample a little kid, they let Biz Markie and reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry do whatever they want. Still, it all flows so neatly, it’s like a single, multigroove, multisample, multihook sound collage that kinda morphs into something else every few minutes, with movements titled in a classically smart-aleck Beastie fashion — “Super Disco Breakin,'” “Song for the Man,” “Sneakin’ out the Hospital,” “Dr. Lee, Ph.D.” Good luck digesting all this sonic info before Labor Day. Hip-hop hasn’t unleashed anything this fantastically dense since the heyday of De La and Public Enemy.
On “Unite” the Beasties chant, “We’re the scientists of sound/We’re mathematically puttin’ it down.” Here’s the equation. In one rhyme, Ad-Rock tells you, “Well, I’m the Benihana chef on the SP-12/Chop the fuck out the beats left on the shelf”; and later they add, “I keep all five boroughs in stitches.” That’s the Beastie dichotomy — they’re silly on the mike to make it fun, but they’re Ginsu sharp on the samples and beats, throwing their pure love of sound all over the place. And I’m not supposed to like it? I’m supposed to prefer formula-clinging stereotype promoters who, every so often, catch a ridiculous arrest and make us cringe? The Beasties, as innovative musicians and good citizens, contribute more to the hip-hop community than a lot of MCs. And I’m not supposed to like it? Yeah, right”.
Melody Maker, NME and Rolling Stone ranked Hello Nasty as the second-best album of 1998. Reaching number one in the U.S. and U.K., there is no denying the popularity and commercial success of the album! Albumism revisited Hello Nasty for a feature celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2018:
“By the time the Beastie Boys released Hello Nasty 20 years ago, they had pretty much won over most of their numerous doubters and haters by remaining true to themselves while maintaining a proper respect for hip-hop. That’s not an easy feat for an all-white rap act. While their 1986 debut Licensed to Ill bordered on parody and what some had perceived as mocking the then very new genre, Paul’s Boutique (1989) was the bellwether of what was to come for the band.
The Beastie Boys started out as a punk band who experimented with using samples. Their first single “Cooky Puss” was also the group’s first hip-hop single. On a personal note, it was in heavy rotation on my radio show back in 1984 at KSCR (now KXSC), USC’s student run radio station.
After Paul’s Boutique arrived to critical acclaim, their following LPs Check Your Head (1992) and III Communication (1994) dipped back into their punk influenced roots, and eventually led them to what was to be the peak of their career. The Beastie Boys willingness to stretch their boundaries while combining all of the elements of their first four LPs resulted in Hello Nasty.
Well, it’s…Fifty cups of coffee and you know it’s on / I move the crowd to the break of break of dawn / Can’t rock the house without the party people / Cause when we’re gettin’ down we are all equal / There’s no better or worse between you and me / But I rock the mic so viciously / Like pins and needles and words that sting / At the blink of an eye I will do my thing” (“Super Disco Breakin’”)
The Beastie Boys are unapologetically a New York band. They’re a hip-hop act with the aesthetic of a rock band from lower Manhattan and it comes through loud and clear on Hello Nasty. The group’s addition of Mixmaster Mike only further strengthened their old school vibe while adding a futuristic feel throughout the entire album.
“Intergalactic” sounds like it could have been the theme from a campy sixties sci-fi movie you’d watch at two in the morning on Channel 9. With samples from the theme from The Toxic Avenger, the song sets itself apart from whatever else was on the radio in 1998. The big surprise at the end is a freestyle rap from Biz Markie that does not come off as a gratuitous cameo appearance. It also makes it clear that The Beastie Boys were musically at another level. The beauty and genius of the Beastie Boys is that they continued to add new elements to the music, while keeping their feet firmly rooted in ‘80s hip-hop without sounding dated. “Three MC’s and One DJ” is further proof of this. The title is ripped straight from the ‘80s and the song gives props to the DJ, who always gets the party started.
It’s hard to write about the Beastie Boys now without thinking of the late Adam Yauch a.k.a. MCA. He was always my favorite member of the group because I always dug his style. MCA’s flow throughout the album had never sounded better and unfortunately, he is also responsible for the LP’s one debatable misstep, “I Don’t Know.” It was his first attempt at singing on wax and luckily it doesn’t ruin the album. It only adds to its quirkiness and spirit of the recording. The cherry on Hello Nasty’s sundae is an appearance by none other than Lee “Scratch” Perry on “Dr. Lee, PhD.” It’s spacey and out there, but it works. Don’t ask me how, but it fits in with the previous 20 tracks.
Hello Nasty proved to be the Beastie Boys’ commercial peak, and remains an important album in their discography. It combined all the elements from their previous output and spit out daring and original material. They could have taken the easy way out and given us a weak greatest hits album, but they chose to show us what they’ve learned and what they intended to do going forward. Hello Nasty is long and dense, but hang in there, it’s definitely worth your time”.
I am going to finish off with a review and retrospective from Stereogum. There will be a slew of new features coming this and next month ahead of a big anniversary for the mighty Hello Nasty. I think this is the last of the ‘classic’ Beastie Boys albums. They followed Hello Nasty with To the 5 Boroughs. Although underrated, I don’t think it has the same sort of ingenuity, layers and quality of previous albums:
“The Beastie Boys never disowned Licensed To Ill, the masterfully assholish frat-rap classic that made them famous. But they did spend the entire rest of their career distancing themselves from it, and sometimes apologizing for it. By the time all three Beasties hit 30, they’d achieved social and political consciousness. They were decrying misogyny and tirelessly lobbying for Tibet. They only barely did Licensed To Ill songs live. Still, Ad-Rock’s delivery on that “New Style” intro lingered. Ice Cube sampled it on “Check Yo Self” in 1992. DJ Kool quoted it on “Let Me Clear My Throat” in 1996. In 1995, the Pharcyde built the entire song “Drop” around the way Ad-Rock said that one word, and Ad-Rock and Mike D showed up to make cameos in the amazing filmed-backwards Spike Jonze video.
So when the Beasties sampled that line on “Intergalactic,” it wasn’t just a fun, goofy, exciting moment. It was the first time that the Beasties really embraced their own legacy — where they picked over their own old records for something cool, the same way they’d already picked over everyone else’s old records. It was the moment that they recognized themselves as cultural forces. And it was also the moment when they effectively became a legacy act. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so excited that afternoon in the minivan if I’d realized that.
If a band gets famous enough and then sticks together for long enough, legacy-act status is practically an inevitability. It’s going to happen; it’s just a matter of how you slide into it. All through the ’90s, the Beasties had been building themselves their own tiny empire of cool. They had their own label and their own recording compound. They had their own interconnected web of associated acts. They had their own magazine, read religiously by dorks like me. They ventured away from rap, into scratchy instrumental funk and dirt-stache hardcore. And yet they always had something to do with mainstream rap. Check Your Head and Ill Communication, their two previous albums, could be heard as distant branches on the Native Tongues family tree, and the Native Tongues were still making popular records at the time. But by 1998, Native Tongues were a distant memory, and the Beasties couldn’t have possibly had less to do with Bad Boy, or DMX, or Master P.
The Beasties weren’t willing to be like their old Def Jam labelmate L Cool J, ferociously and sometimes desperately clinging onto the rap zeitgeist and rapping over whatever sounds would keep him on rotation in rap radio. They had the luxury of letting that go, making music for the vast and mostly white cult that they’d spent the ’90s cultivating. The Beasties had been making music for themselves, but they’d been keeping an eye on crossover success. Hello Nasty — named for the phrase employees at the Beasties’ PR firm recited when answering phone calls — is more or less the album where they let that go, where they colored within the lines that they’d already drawn and stopped trying to grab anyone from outside that cult.
It was still huge, of course. The Beasties were still making music with focus and drive and energy, and a song as big and silly as “Intergalactic” or “Body Movin'” still got plenty of love on alt-rock radio. The Beasties spent the next few years touring arenas, doing a gimmicky and silly live show where they all wore matching jumpsuits and new recruit Mix Master Mike, late of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, got a whole lot of chances to show off. But Hello Nasty was still the moment when they’d play live and you’d wait patiently through the new songs. When I saw them that summer, I was excited to hear “Intergalactic,” but I was a whole lot more excited to hear “So What’Cha Want” and “Sure Shot.”
The Beasties would release three more albums after Hello Nasty — none of them especially good, all edging close to self-parody. At a certain point, their infrequent records sounded less like artistic statements and more like excuses to tour some more. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s the legacy act way. And so Hello Nasty now stands as a fulcrum point in the group’s career, the moment where they started transitioning from boho-rap world-builders to the cool rich dads that they are today. (It’s been six years since we suddenly and tragically lost MCA, but he’d probably be doing a slightly more activism-heavy version of the same shit as his two surviving bandmates if he was alive today.) Hello Nasty was the Beasties coasting on goodwill, but it generated plenty of goodwill of its own. And while it’s far from the best Beasties album, it still sounds plenty good on a July afternoon. Try it for yourself and see”.
On 14th July, the world celebrates twenty-five years of Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty. Alongside Body Movin', Intergalactic and Three MCs and One DJ, there are some wonderful deeper cuts from the genius minds of Beastie Boys. I would encourage anyone who has never heard the album to do so when they can. Even if Hello Nasty divides some people, I think that it is…
ONE of their very best.