Crib Notes Close-Ups:

Beastie Boys — “Get It Together”

This track and I are karaoke life partners. It’s the only hip-hop I can stammer through without the assistance of the lyric screen. For that, I am proud. For re-pronouncing Q-Tip’s colloquial n-words and being really white the entire time, I am sorry. I deliver them like it doesn’t mean a thing – if you’re gonna do it you might as well own it – but the only reason I’m comfortable spouting that word into a mic is ‘cause it’s in the middle of a Beasties song. “Get It Together” could be Tip’s finest few minutes ever, and it’s beautiful the way Ad-Rock, Mike D and MCA stand back and let him rip, knowing he’s on the holiest of rolls, but in spite of his command this is still, at the end of the day, a Beasties song.

What it isn’t, however, is the quintessential Beasties song (that prize has to go to something more playful – possibly “Hey Ladies”). “Get It Together” has none of that License to Ill-style snot. Precious few of its lyrics are rapped by voices in unison – seriously, like twelve words total – and the Beasties don’t leap frog each other syllable for syllable as on Paul’s Boutique. There’s no trace of punk, either. The simple beat, precise even as it shuffles, plugs along over a low, fuzzed-out drone and a single bar’s worth of looped piano (is it piano?). The music’s minimal, the production’s dingy, and the effect is an ice cold groove, one of the hardest in their catalog.

Ill Communication throws these unvarnished qualities into particularly stark relief by sequencing “Get It Together” between the balls-out guitar onslaught of “Sabotage” and the bass n’ chicken scratch funk of “Sabrosa.” They’re all top flight Beastie Boys tracks, representative both of the band’s range and the manner in which they synthesize their influences, but “Get It Together” is the one that’s most purely hip-hop, and the Beasties are hip-hop before anything.

That brings us to the rap itself, which upends the gritty production via warmth (Grandma Hazel, Grandma Tilly, Ione as the cheese to Ad-Rock’s macaroni), whimsy (the pineapple Now & Laters, the Timbos on the toes and Tip’s unsuppressed giggle), and a flow – from all four dudes – that sounds so effortless you could swear the whole thing was free-styled. Probably not too far from the truth. SO rapalongable, though. SO fun to enunciate. Drivin’ the lane like you was Evan Bernard; mace in the face; spacin’, zonin’, talkin’ on the phone and mumbling your way through that last and illest communication.

Get to the karaoke bar. Throw this one DOWN. You’ll be king of the room for four minutes and you’ll prove, like the Beasties did opening for Run-D.M.C. back in the day, that white’s got nothing to do with it. Skills keep it on (and on and on), and “Get It Together” kicks them ‘til dawn.