The three hip-hoppin’ wiseacres from Brooklyn are back with their first album in six years. The Beastie Boys’ “To the Five Burroughs” is a blissed-out tribute to both rap music and the city of New York. The record is a hip-hop boutique that, behind glass, showcases seminal sturdy beats and ingeniously inane rhyme flow. It is one of the most well-crafted rap albums of all time.
Although they’re approaching forty, the Beasties still sound like the juvenile detention-center exiles that ollied onto the scene in the mid-’80s. Ad Rock’s caffeine-addled lyrics are as gorgeously nonsensical as ever, and Adam Yauch’s raspy, two-pack-a-day delivery makes couplet rhymes like “What the pony tail/I don’t eat snail” sound like the coolest thing you’ve ever heard.
And don’t fret: Mike D is still around to remind us that “The D is for Diamonds.”
Thankfully “To the Five Burroughs” is devoid of the filler and guest appearances that crowd the tracks of lesser hip-hop albums. There’s no fast-forwarding through 30 seconds of dialogue to access the beginning of a song. This album doesn’t waste a second in getting started – all it wastes are sucker MCs.
While the front half of the album is somewhat glutted with baldly expressed political commentary and redundant song structure, the album soon hits its stride as the tracks coalesce toward a thesis of coolness and MC one-upmanship.
The track “Ch-Check It Out” is a 4 a.m. house party rant that soars over the contours of a slinky, kamikaze drum solo. “Oh Word?” employs a stripped-down beat that accentuates the wide-open spaces lurking between bass, keyboard and percussion.
Amazingly the mix accomplishes the difficult feat of sounding both loaded and spare: The beats are crisp and percussive, swirling up eddies of Atari-arcade resonance that envelop the listener. “Burroughs” is an analog wall of sound, a concatenation of rudimentary Casio keyboard effects that sound more vintage than retro.
The album is peppered with echoey, spectral samples ranging from Krs-One to Big Daddy Kane. “Triple Trouble” appropriates the beat from The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and pairs it with phony British accents to create an altogether weird and triumphant sound.
On the track “Crawl Space,” with its hushed, leisurely vocals and pop-culture allusions, the Beasties seem to be channeling A Tribe Called Quest circa 1992. By sampling these pioneering MCs from the past, the album functions as a comprehensive appraisal and reworking of the history of hip-hop.
The caustic guitar feedback in “An Open Letter To NYC” induces paranoia but ultimately acts as a salve on collective urban phobias. The chorus is an ebullient roll call of the five burroughs and the various ethnicities that populate those places. “Burroughs” is all grit and grime, subways and graffiti, basketball courts with chain nets – its foremost objective is to extoll the virtues of an urban existence.
One of the reasons why “Burroughs” is such an appealing and thoroughly listenable album is the Beasties are constantly passing the mic. While the songs are light on chorus and heavy on verse, the momentum never falters because Ad Rock, Yauch and Mike D are taking turns every four lines. They also employ tempo changes and minor tweaks to the principal beat as an effective way to punctuate and strengthen the track as a whole.
In the vast desert of hip-hop music, it’s good to know the Beasties have erected a shining signpost to guide future hip-hop artists. Let’s hope someone is listening.
Brad Peters is a junior in English. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
