Crossposted from hipsterjew.com
Maybe hip hop has just moved on from the Beastie Boys.
I don’t want to be the one to say it, but listening to Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is, while not painful, not something I’d do more than twice. All the problems of the album you can hear on track 3, “OK”; a keyboardy beat that sounds like it’s going for dubstep influence but ends up just sounding budget, a cheesy vocoded hook, and (this is key), flows that just sound dated. The Beastie Boys have never been the lyrical cats with flow for days, but here they come off as old dudes trying to do what the kids are doing, and pulling a back muscle in the process.
A Nas guest verse on “Too Many Rappers” has some interesting bars, but more because they sound like something Jay-Z could have used in Takeover. Seriously, doesn’t “You ain’t a shot, a mobster, or a drug dealer/a slug peeler you’re not, mafioso, no” sound more like it’s about Escobar himself than the archetypical sucker MC? The bars from the Yidden aren’t too great either.
This is not to say that that there’s no good ish on the album— leadoff track “Make Some Noise” brings the punk energy the Beasties always had over a buzzy, bluesy guitar riff and boom-bap drums. But so many of the beats here are just not good, honestly just embarrassing— I respect that the Beastie Boys are trying to get experimental, but it doesn’t feel like they have the musical vocabulary to expand that much. And their flows are very limited—when Andre 3000 or MF Doom put together bizarre soundscapes, they brought weird offbeat flows too, but the Beastie Boys still rap like they did in the 1980s. If they want to get further away from their classic sound, they seriously need to improve their flows.
This is not to in any way spit on their legacy—just today I was thinking how the Beastie Boys were the first cats to really be callous about sex and violence like that. It’s a short walk from “”Now my name is M.C.A. I’ve got a license to kill/I think you know what time it is it’s time to get ill/Now what do we have here an outlaw and his beer/I run this land, you understand I make myself clear” to Jay’s “Y’all don’t want to witness s—/we squeeze hammers mang/bullets breeze bayou/like Lousiana mang”. It’s the same attitude, same cynical distance. It’s Jewishness in rap. Tell me Asher Roth and Mac Miller aren’t just doing “You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Party” minus the irony, swag, and credibility. The Beastie Boys are pioneers.
But that doesn’t change the hard fact— this isn’t a good album. It’s always hard when punks get old, especially when they don’t know music theory. Right now, the Beastie Boys are old school cats trying to make beats that don’t bump, sounding out of date. Call it arthritis rap.
