Beastie Boys
Check Your Head

This album doesn't like half measures or compromises. It is bold, irreverent, raw, and not very advisable, just like the three individuals who put it together: on stage, MCA, MikeD, and AdRock, three bad boys from New York City. And like the city it draws inspiration from, it's dirty, chaotic, alienating, and disturbed; "Check Your Head," released in 1992, aims to be a musical portrait of it: partial, biased, and contradictory, perhaps, but equally genuine and sincere from the first to the last sound.

In this sonic melting pot, a true melting pot of music, you'll hear all sorts of things: hip hop above all, and this is one of the strengths of the Beastie Boys, three white guys who adopted the musical language of choice for blacks in the '80s-'90s, but infused it with influences and contaminations from rock, punk, and garage. Thus, hip hop is just one of the stylistic components of this album, and indeed, it too is scratched and made dirty by the use of distorted voices, as in the hit "So Watcha Want" or in "Stand Together." For the rest, there is an entirely acoustic rhythm section: MikeD on the drums and no less than four percussionists scattered throughout the 20 tracks of the album; MCA on bass and AdRock on electric guitar to give the ensemble that "white" touch, sometimes hardcore punk as in "Time for Livin'," which spares the Beastie Boys the sonic monotony typical of much of less creative hip hop; finally, there is an additional musician, Mark Ramos Nishita, on keyboards, organ, and Wurlitzer to make everything even warmer and groovier.

And it doesn't end there; the effects of scratch are not missing, live recorded snippets, sampled voices from TV shows or calls left recorded on answering machines, the sitar present in "Finger Lickin' Good" which then gives way to a sample of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" by Bob Dylan (which cost $700 in rights, though Dylan had asked for 2,000), and so on.

A photo in the CD booklet tells the story of this album better than words ever could. It's the recording studio where the work was created (near Los Angeles): the Beastie Boys plus the associate Mark Ramos Nishita behind the instruments, dim lights, packed everywhere with cables, microphone stands, turntables, amplifiers stacked in every corner. An image that perfectly conveys the idea of sonic saturation that never lets go during the 53 dense minutes of this album.