There are reasons why it takes five years between each Beastie record, not least being that self-produced projects always incite higher levels of fiddling, tweaking and general perfectionism. If it takes time to digest the intricate rhythm scaffolding, dense substrata and even denser rhymes that make up their opuses, it takes even longer to build the beast.
That said, in terms of innovation they never really topped the sampladelic smorgasbord of Paul’s Boutique; each successive album has been a process of refinement rather than expansion. Indeed, To The 5 Boroughs may be their most conventional hip-hop record to date – there are no jazz-funk noodlings, no metal benders, no punk runt epidermal eruptions. Conventional by Beasties standards that is: the two Adams and Mike D are way too itchy in the scratchy, too ADD-afflicted, too downright curious to ever go homogenous on us. They are ever the amateur nuclear physicists, mixing up potions and wondering ‘What’ll happen if I put this with this?’
Cue explosions.
Many a novelist will tell you that the moment of inspirational fission required to drive the narrative engine over 100,000 words occurs when two disparate elements are introduced to each other, a sort of moment-of-clarity meltdown. Similarly on BB albums the sparks fly when apparently irreconcilable differences suddenly express an irresistible attraction and start getting it on. With Hello Nasty it happened all over the shop: cheesy Latino showtunes would get rear-ended by heavy ‘Levee’ breaks, old Tubeway Army synth riffs suddenly found their white blood cells attacked by malarial syncopations. This is the reason Beasties records always sound fresh; it’s in the filigree, the additives, the fizz. On 5 Boroughs that means we get a high-strung guitar line from the Dead Boys’ ‘Sonic Reducer’ paired with barrio beats on the storming ‘An Open Letter To NYC’. We get baroque harpsichord jostling with RZA-style pitch-shift trickery on ‘Right Right Now Now’ and Moore-ish manifestos reiterated over hyperactive snare/kick configurations on ‘It Takes Time To Build’. We get Shazam! pop art punctuation on ‘Ch-Check It Out’ and X-Files synth drones seeping under the creaking floorboards of ‘Rhyme The Rhyme Well’. Not to mention samples nicked from The Flaming Lips, Don Costa and The Partridge Family as well as Run DMC and the Sugar Hill Gang.
Hip-hop was founded on the magpie principle. It always flounders when the frame of reference gets too narrow, resulting in a sort of sonic regression into incestuous beat-nicking and shared sample cannibalism. Bambaataa never settled that. Nor do Outkast or NERD. And neither do the Beasties. With PE and Wu Tang and other rap pioneers in seemingly terminal decline, they are among the last remaining old-school scholars still kicking out the jams with anything like the alacrity of 20 years ago.
To The 5 Boroughs resists academic exegesis or undue analysis. It is what it is, and what it is is a vibrant, inventive and engaged piece of work. In the words of Grandpa Burroughs, it ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.