The Beastie Boys’ ‘Check Your Head’ Album Started With Pause-Tape Battles
While describing the Beastie Boys’ sampling process in an unidentified 1992 video interview, the late MCA said, “You gotta have some idea of what labels are gonna be cool with you and what artists are gonna be cool with you and what ones don’t allow sampling. The more you do it, the more you try to clear stuff, you start to get a feel of what you can clear. We sampled a lot of stuff of us playing on the new record.”
This interview captured a pivotal turning point in the Beastie Boys’ career. After experiencing legal issues as a result of the sample-happy production of The Dust Brothers on Paul’s Boutique, the group moved towards the live instrument/sample fusion of Check Your Head. This style would define their sound on both Check Your Head and 1994’s Ill Communication, and although the group continued to incorporate samples in their work, they never made another album like Paul’s Boutique due to the ever-constricting sample laws of the music industry.
Check Your Head may have abandoned the sample-stacking methods employed on its predecessor, but the album’s origins did come from sample-based pause-tape battles between Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D — a technique they were well versed in from years of practice. “It’s some caveman shit, that’s what we used to work with,” Ad-Rock said in a 2010 interview with Propellerhead. “Banging stones together to make a fire.”
“In a lot of ways, ‘Check Your Head’ is a pause-tape of that style — but we played music on it.”- MCA
Though he described himself as “a pause-tape battler” in the video, Ad-Rock realized that pause-tapes were somewhat of an acquired taste for the casual listener. “You smoke a lot of weed and you make pause-tapes,” he told Propellerhead. “Then you try to play it for somebody and people are like, ‘Why am I listening to this. Who cares?’”
Even though peers of the group may have not understood the value of their creations, pause-tapes played a crucial role in the making of Check Your Head — from inspiration to the actual composition. “Part of the objective of that record was that we were making a mixtape,” MCA told Wax Poetics in a 2004 interview. “It was around that time when we started making mixtapes — basically trading pause-tapes with each other.”
According to MCA, the hodgepodge mix of music each Beastie Boys member compiled on their tape fueled their creative process while simultaneously informing the way the album was composed. Though Adrock is referring to pause-tape beats in his interview with Propellerhead, it seems like the tapes that inspired Check Your Head functioned a bit more as continuous mixtapes made with the use of a pause button. Based on the available interviews out there on this topic, it’s unclear what percentage of their tapes were composed of pause-button beats and what percentage was just a collection of songs. “On a lot of those pause-tapes, there would be a hardcore song and right after that a groove song, then a funk song and then a hip-hop song,” MCA told Wax Poetics. “In a lot of ways, Check Your Head is a pause-tape of that style — but we played music on it.”
“It’s some caveman shit, that’s what we used to work with. Banging stones together to make a fire.”- Ad-Rock
Ad-Rock further confirmed the significance of their homemade tape experiments in Brian Coleman’s book Check the Technique. In this interview, it seems like there was a definite element of producing employed by the Beasties in the way the tapes connected disparate genres together. “The tapes we were making would jump around with different styles, just quick parts of different songs,” he said. “Hip-hop to jazz to funk to whatever else. And in a way, Check Your Head ended up being like one of those pause-tapes.”
Though some fans may lament that they were never made another project like Paul’s Boutique, it seems the Beastie Boys found a happy medium between sampling and playing live that worked for them and used this technique for the bulk of their catalog. And sampling enthusiasts should find solace in the fact that the art of sampling was never far from their creative process.
Before his untimely passing, MCA revealed how the pause-tape aesthetic was still alive and well as the group recorded their final album Hot Sauce Committee Part Two in 2011. “It’s a combination of playing and sampling stuff as we’re playing, and also sampling pretty obscure records,” he told the website earsucker in a 2009 interview. “There are a lot of songs on the record and there are a lot of short songs and they kind of all run into each other.”
It seems they were using the pause-tape formula down to the bitter end.
You can connect with The Beastie Boys on Facebook, their website, and on Twitter @beastieboys.
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