Bumpy Backspins — Beastie Boys — Hello Nasty (1998)
There’s a line in Sure Shot, the opening track of 1994’s Ill Communication, that’s stuck with me for almost 30 years.
Right near the very beginning MCA proclaims; “I’ve got more rhymes than I got grey hairs, and that’s a lot because I got my shares.”
As a teenager it was incongruous to imagine that people with grey hairs could ever be so funky.
But all evidence proved otherwise.
Amongst many other things, the Beastie Boys taught me that there are exceptions to every rule.
Now that I have more than my fair shares myself, I can look back at that line and laugh. I might not be anywhere near as funky as the Beastie Boys, but at least I’m still striving to be.
Ill Communication, then their fourth album, was a far more mature and conscious album compared to its predecessors, showcasing an even broader range of styles, from instant hits like the single Sabotage to more contemplative instrumental tracks like Eugene’s Lament.
The production was slicker, their musicality showed phenomenal progression and the lyrical content was as far removed from the “bad boy” image of the Licenced to Ill era as it was possible to be, while still being true to their punk roots.
It also made its point clear to all the critics who had ever dismissed them as an obnoxious fad; we’re still here, we sound better than ever and we’ve grown up — time for all you industry jerks to do the same.
As a teenager in the early 90s, Ill Communication was the total package. It had noisy punk, it had a whole lotta funk plus some of the dopest hiphop I’ve ever heard.
But when the Beasties beamed down Hello Nasty four years later, they once again rebelled against the music industry’s expectations with an abrupt and unexpected rock and roll U-turn.
Keep in mind this was in 1998. We’d already had a decade of Bomb Squad, G-funk, Wu-funk, glitchy MPC funk, Premier, Muggs, Mo Wax, Ninja Tune, Wagon Christ, trip hop, jungle, drum ’n’ bass, garage and big beat — new styles and new sounds emerging almost on a weekly basis.
The Beasties were clearly aware of all of it, but at the same time determined not to emulate any of it.
Opting instead to unleash an entirely new mutant variant of electronic-driven, extraterrestrial hiphop, further augmented by entirely new genres which still don’t have names for yet, all crammed in a sardine-packed, 22-track masterpiece.
Even now, a full quarter century later, Hello Nasty still sounds like it was conceived and recorded on a distant alien planet, far from earthly distractions and record company interference.
Nothing Sounds Quite Like An 808
While the vibe of the two preceding albums was very much that of a bunch of friends jamming in the studio, Hello Nasty sounds like it was cooked up by mad scientists in a lab full of drum machines, exotic-coloured beakers and sizzling Tesla coils.
From the get-go, the Beastie Boys want you to know this is a new kind of space-age b-boy music, less punk rock, more Planet Rock, with even more studio trickery and stylistic breadth than ever before.
The album kicks off with Super Disco Breakin’, a two-minute funk assault which blends 808s with live drums, freaky synths and vigorous scratching. (Also, extra sci-fi props to this one since it appears on an inaugural episode of Futurama.)
It’s swiftly followed up by The Move, with more b-boy shoutouts and phat boombox bass.
Funny story about this one, we had it cranked up at a party one night, round about five past ridiculous o’ clock, as you do. There’s break in the middle with a speaker-shaking sub bass line and wobbly LFO effects which suddenly prompted a mate of mine to jump out of his seat and declare that, “The Beasties invented dubstep!”
He then proceeded to play the same section over and over until we were worn down enough to agree with him.
“…on and on, on and on, on and on” -BOOOMMMM-wubwubwub!
Looking back I still think it’s a ridiculous theory, until you realise this album did in fact come out during peak garage, 3–4 years before dubstep was even on the horizon… 🤔)
Remote Control features fuzz guitar over some boom-bap beats topped off with more delicious scratching. Let’s also take this opportunity to mention how much I love those trademark Beastie similes, “like Don King I got a crazy hair do” — always silly but they never fail to make me giggle.
Song for the Man is a marked departure from standard Beasties fair, full of jazzy brass, piano tinkling, blues guitar, gospel organs and flangy 60s psychedelic rock-style vocals.
It’s perfectly placed within the album to throw you off the scent and make you realise that, whatever you were expecting this album to be like, you were waaaaaay off.
Just A Test and Body Movin’ strut their stuff with more crunchy beats and funky basslines guaranteed to get your head nodding until your neck gets sore.
Intergalactic, the first single from the album, is one of the Beasties’ all-time classics, with its oddball organ melodies, hard beatbox percussion and that infectious voice transformer hook.
It’s the Beastie Boys song we all know and love, a perfect party-starter that’s not just lots of fun to listen to and dance to, it’s probably the one track that best showcases the Beastie Boys unique and infectious flow.
The Beastie Boys learned long ago not to take themselves too seriously, which adds to their charm.
Their lyrics are never wack but often wacky, occasionally profound but generally bordering on ridiculous, “I’ll stir-fry you in my wok!”
From a purely technical perspective, their rhymes are quite basic, one might even say stuck in the early 80s, where hip-hop was defined by short, snappy delivery and flat, staccato hooks.
But instead of that vintage Sugarhill swagger, readily distinguishable through badly-dated braggadocio and shout-outs to the VHS-era consumer products, we get shout-outs to Mr Spock and long-forgotten episodes of the Flintstones. (Proof, if ever any was needed, that the Beastie Boys were proper geeks way before it was cool.)
The component ingredients might be as old as hiphop itself, but it’s all about that secret Beastie ingredient, the interplay.
This is how they’re able to whisk up that special Beasties batter before baking it, twisting it up like pretzels, flipping back and forth on rhymes, as they snap together as one to finish each other’s sentences or chime in as a single voice to emphasise specific words.
Intergalactic is the distilled essence of this, three MCs in perfect synch like a ravenous three-headed hip-hop monster — Cerberus with a Shure shot.
After Intergalactic, Sneakin’ Out The Hospital flips things again with some pure jazz fusion stylings plus quality live drumming and scratching throughout.
Putting Shame In Your Game has an angular melody and the trademark echo we know and love from Ill Comm, while Flowin Prose is a tight head nodder with slick percussion and more layers of dub echo.
The next track, And Me, is another one of the more experimental tracks on the album that sounds like they borrowed the Tardis to use as their vocal booth. It makes heavy use of pitch-shift effects and up-tempo breakbeats with an almost junglist flavour.
Three MCs and one DJ delivers exactly what it promises and nothing more, but who needs more?
Once again the Beastie Boys are in top flowing form over scratches and beats by Mixmaster Mike, “Gawd damn that DJ made my day!” Quality stuff.
The Grasshopper Unit (Keep Movin’) brings back the boom bap with more fuzzrock guitar.
Song For Junior, this is another standout track for me, a (mostly) instrumental jazz-fusion jam which sounds way more like Bobbi Humphrey or Roy Ayres, for example, than the “fight for your right to party guys.”
I Don’t Know is a bright and poppy guitar-driven number that, once again, sounds as far away from the Beastie Boys you thought you knew as it’s possible to get.
The hiphop returns on The Negotiation Limerick File and Electrify before the dreamlike hippy groove of Picture This.
Next some more straight-up hiphop in Unite followed by the shout-out track Dedication.
And then, another album highlight — hell, another career highlight — as the Beasties meet the Upsetter downtown in Dr Lee, Phd, a languid studio skank with vocals from the late, great Lee Scratch Perry. (You can just tell they’re all having a lot of fun in the studio with this one.)
The album finishes with Instant Death, another intriguing piece of songwriting on the topic of death that sounds more like The Eels than the Beastie Boys and is, let’s be honest, a strange choice to end what’s otherwise such an upbeat album.
But then everything about this album is strange. (Which is exactly why we love it.)
With Their Beastly Toys
The cover promises you the Beastie Boys in a can, and that’s exactly what you get — 22 glorious tracks of them — packed in with flava, fresh as the day they were caught and still stewing in their own juices.
Are those creative juices far more piquant than many of us were expecting? 100%.
And Hello Nasty is all the better for it.
If you took just the hiphop tracks on their own, you’d still have a decent album and fans would have been more than happy at the result.
But it’s all the other unexpected stuff that accentuates it, the actual bone-fide songwriting that’s on show here, not to mention all those funky (there’s that word again) instrumentals in between to keep listeners on their toes and make sure the things don’t get too predictable.
And finally, there’s also a lot of oddball stuff that exists to challenge our misconceptions of who the Beastie Boys are and what their music’s meant to sound like. Until you realise that’s precisely what they’ve been doing their entire career.
Rappers were blindsided by Paul’s Boutique when it came out back in 1989. Check Your Head and Ill Communication done the same for music critics. But there’s distinct vibe to Hello Nasty that’s unlike anything the Beasties delivered before or since.
It’s got as much go-go dancing as it has breakdancing, somehow managing to sound like classic b-boy hiphop, 60s retro groove, 70s jazz fusion and futuristic music from deep space all at the same time.
It has the distilled essence of everything we know and love about the Beastie Boys, despite having some of the least Beastie-sounding things they’ve ever released.
It should be a huge mess, yet together it all just somehow works.
Is it the best Beastie Boys album? I’ll fully support anyone who says yes. But I choose to be neutral on this one.
I’m incapable of making an objective choice between Hello Nasty and Ill Communication without some deep Eternal Sunshine synaptic surgery beforehand to remove all the load-bearing memories that I’ve built around both albums.
So next question then; is Hello Nasty the most forward-thinking, far-out and imaginative music the Beastie Boys have ever created?
And the answer to that is, without a doubt, yes.
Originally published at https://joeybeltdrives.com on July 14, 2023.
