FEATURE:
Beastie Boys at Forty
The Importance of 1998’s Hello Nasty
___________
I often associate…
IN THIS PHOTO: Beastie Boys in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Danny Clinch
Beastie Boys as being a 1980s act. They formed in July 1981. I am marking forty years of their existence. Even though they created some sensational music in the 1980s, of course, they released music until 2011 (following the death of Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch). Even though the group are no longer recording music, ‘Mike-D’ and ‘Ad-Rock’ are keeping the name and flame alive. There have been books and documentaries. New generations are discovering the music of the Beastie Boys. For me, there are albums that hit me in different ways. Each of them holds a special memory. The album that scored happy memories and was especially formative was their fifth studio album, Hello Nasty. The trio were releasing genius album after genius album. In 1994, they put out the sensational Ill Communication. Hello Nasty is a different-sounding record to its predecessor – to me, it is no less potent or memorable. In 1998, I was still in high school. I was as involved and immersed in modern music as at any other time in my life. At school, we would talk about the charts and swap albums. This was a post-Britpop period in the U.K. I think 1998 is one of the strongest years for music ever. I say that a lot about various years of the 1990s. Look at what was released then. Lauryn Hill’s only solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill sat alongside Madonna’s Ray of Light, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine and Fatboy Slim’s You've Come a Long Way, Baby!
It was a wonderful time and one that was accompanied by lots of discovery and experimentation. I discovered the Beastie Boys in the early-1990s I think. The first album of theirs I really bonded with was Hello Nasty. Compelled by songs such as Intergalactic, I was immersed in the album pretty quickly! I have written about Hello Nasty before. As Beastie Boys are forty this month, I wanted to revisit a classic album. Beasties fans will debate which is their greatest album. I think most would argue for Ill Communication, Licensed to Ill or Paul’s Boutique. Although there is a lot of love for Hello Nasty, I feel it is one of their more underrated albums. At twenty-two tracks, Hello Nasty could have been sprawling and a drag. As it is, the album is a delight from start to finish. There is so much variety throughout - this means one does not get bored. Apart from Intergalactic, I think The Negotiation Limerick File is my favourite track from the album. Hello Nasty is so special because I was listening to it with friends after school. It is the sound of freedom and a happiness that I have been thinking about. At such a hard time, albums like Hello Nasty are on my mind. I am going to do a few more Beasties features to mark forty years. Before moving on and wrapping up, it is worth bringing in some reviews to show what critics thought about the album.
I don’t think the Beasties released an average album. Maybe their instrumental album of 2007, The Mix-Up, is for diehards only. Hello Nasty is definitely among their best. In their review, AllMusic noted the following:
“Hello Nasty, the Beastie Boys' fifth album, is a head-spinning listen loaded with analog synthesizers, old drum machines, call-and-response vocals, freestyle rhyming, futuristic sound effects, and virtuoso turntable scratching. The Beasties have long been notorious for their dense, multi-layered explosions, but Hello Nasty is their first record to build on the multi-ethnic junk culture breakthrough of Check Your Head, instead of merely replicating it. Moving from electro-funk breakdowns to Latin-soul jams to spacy pop, Hello Nasty covers as much ground as Check Your Head or Ill Communication, but the flow is natural, like Paul's Boutique, even if the finish is retro-stylized. Hiring DJ Mixmaster Mike (one of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz) turned out to be a masterstroke; he and the Beasties created a sound that strongly recalls the spare electronic funk of the early '80s, but spiked with the samples and post-modern absurdist wit that have become their trademarks. On the surface, the sonic collages of Hello Nasty don't appear as dense as Paul's Boutique, nor is there a single as grabbing as "Sabotage," but given time, little details emerge, and each song forms its own identity. A few stray from the course, and the ending is a little anticlimactic, but that doesn't erase the riches of Hello Nasty -- the old-school kick of "Super Disco Breakin'" and "The Move"; Adam Yauch's crooning on "I Don't Know"; Lee "Scratch" Perry's cameo; and the recurring video game samples, to name just a few. The sonic adventures alone make the album noteworthy, but what makes it remarkable is how it looks to the future by looking to the past. There's no question that Hello Nasty is saturated in old-school sounds and styles, but by reviving the future-shock rock of the early '80s, the Beasties have shrewdly set themselves up for the new millennium”.
Every Beastie Boys fan has their favourite album and reasons for loving it. NME were impressed with Hello Nasty when they reviewed it in 1998:
“It's a tough one but remarkably they pull it off. True to form, 'Hello Nasty' is a sprawling schizoid mess, but in the best possible way. It is a 22-track, genre-busting, brain-and-body-stimulating party with a conscience. A tense space-age blowout before the morning after's monastic retreat. There is so much here - from the wisdom and virtuosity of the lyrics to the dense, innovative layers of music - that it seems conceivable the Beastie Boys could've spent every day of the past four years since 'Ill Communication' working non-stop in pursuit of the ultimate very-long-playing experience.
Of course, they haven't. Four years without new music (save the purgative hardcore EP, 'Aglio E Olio') has hardly seen their profile drop. Indeed, in spite of their Grand Royal label releasing a stream of almost unmitigated cobblers, and their Grand Royal magazine becoming progressively less interesting, their position as big-trousered arbiters of taste seems, bizarrely, to have grown. It's the myth of the Beastie Boys that is so all-pervasive: the dream of joining their laid-back, ethically aware wiseguy fraternity; of rhyming and stealing and shooting baskets and being namechecked in one of their epically self-referential raps. The most successful elite movements are the ones that appear just accessible enough to give the plebs a glimpse of the glamour; it's not hard to see the Grand Royal life as worth aspiring to. That said, when you're being sold that myth in the shape of a Sean Lennon album, it feels like more of a con trick.
'Hello Nasty' is no such disappointment. Rather, it's a benchmark album that successfully integrates Zeitgeist-friendly pre-millennial angst into the block-rocking gameplan. Fundamentally, it's hip-hop: there are no hardcore tracks this time round, and little evidence of the rap-rock hybrids that have popularly defined them. Instead, the starting point is warped retro-futurism, drawing from both original visionaries like Afrika Bambaataa (check the dippy electro of 'Intergalactic') and the current crop of cut'n'paste technicians like DJ Shadow, Jurassic 5 troopers Cut Chemist and Nu-Mark and the Invisibl Skratch Picklz. In fact, the latter crew's Mixmaster Mike is the featured DJ on 'Hello Nasty', scratching up a storm through a wah-wah pedal down the Beasties' answering machine, deified on the sparse old-skool homage, 'Three MCs And One DJ'.
Elsewhere, everything is going on. Opener 'Super Disco Breakin'' begins with a fucked-up riff from 'Are Friends Electric' before exploding with scratches, beats, fuzz, sirens, whines and those familiarly petulant voices. The effects are dazzling and bewildering, like Lee Perry and Sun Ra joining a DJ tag team on Planet Rock. During 'The Move' someone claims, "Dogs love me 'cause I'm crazy sniffable" over a drawing-room harpsichord fl”.
Forty years after the Beastie Boys name was created, they have influenced so many other artists. Having released so many iconic albums and put their names in the history books, we definitely have not heard the last of them. Aside from the re-releases, books and documentaries, I am sure that we will see some album reissues and other stuff coming through the years. It is amazing to think that Hello Nasty sold 681,000 copies in its first week! I am not surprised though. It is a tremendous album that means a lot to me. On the fortieth anniversary of their formation, I felt compelled to return to…
ONE of their greatest achievements.