The flip of the millennium discovered Beastie Boys in an enviable place. Coming off the again of Hey Nasty, they’d staged their largest tour because the Licensed To Unwell period; carved out an aesthetic that was uniquely their very own; and remained a significant voice in hip-hop throughout a time when particular person personalities have been pushing the idea of the MC collective apart. By the point they got here to file To The 5 Boroughs, nevertheless, the world had irrevocably modified round them – and with it, the hometown that had influenced them greater than anything of their careers.
Hearken to To The 5 Boroughs now.
By Advert-Rock’s account in Beastie Boys Ebook, the group got here off the again of the mammoth tour for Hey Nasty and “spent most of ’00-’01 in New York doing nothing but being people who watched TV, went on errands, and walk their dogs.” However the recording studio’s pull finally turned too sturdy to disregard and so they ensconced themselves in a brand new facility on Canal Road, full with a big window to let the sunshine in.
Accidentally or design, the scene had already been set for probably the most New York album Beastie Boys ever made. Their first self-produced album, MCA had already determined that Hey Nasty’s follow-up needed to be “an all-rap record,” whereas the Canal Road studio made it inconceivable to neglect the place they have been. “On one end the window looked onto a classic NYC alleyway,” Advert-Rock recalled, “and out the other end’s window you could see the tops of the World Trade Center.”
After which 9/11 hit. The World Commerce Middle disappeared. Checkpoints sprang up in a single day. The streets teemed with police. Assault rifles turned an on a regular basis sighting. It “kind of set the tone for an un-slap-happy mood,” Advert-Rock wrote, with no small understatement.
From its art work down, To The 5 Boroughs is located within the reverse of Hey Nasty’s intergalactic headspace: firmly rooted, the road drawing of the Twin Towers recalled not solely a misplaced skyline, however a misplaced time and place when the hip-hop aesthetic was stripped-back; all you wanted have been a handful of DJs backed by a mixture grasp on those and twos. In protecting it old style and never over-complicating issues, Beastie Boys made certain their message was loud and clear.
Opener “Ch-Check It Out” might sit comfortably in Beasties’ nice custom of party-starters, however, with its straight-up Golden Age sound it solely partially set the scene for what would come. With Beasties at their most overtly political, “It Takes Time To Build” calls out President Bush and US international coverage (“We’ve got a president we didn’t elect… And still the US just wants to flex/Keep doing that, what, we gonna break our necks”); “Right Right Now Now” takes a stand for gun management; “An Open Letter To NYC” is stuffed with love for his or her dwelling turf in a approach that eschewed the Bronx-Queens territorialism of hip-hop’s previous for a collective shout out to the 5 boroughs.
Not that To The 5 Boroughs was solely fixated on New York Metropolis within the aftermath of 9/11. Launched on June 15, 2004, nearly three years after these occasions, “Triple Trouble” discovered them decided to recapture the nice instances, grabbing the mic from “Ch-Check It Out” and lengthening the block-party stylings. Elsewhere, “Crawlspace” finds Beasties creeping round of their rival MCs’ properties, delivering a weirdly spoken-word rap over a squelchy synth that’s like little else of their discography. “This may be one of my favorite songs we ever made,” Advert-Rock recalled. “Not a lot of weirdo stuff in rap… It makes me laugh out loud every time.”
Hailed by PopMatters as “their best album since Paul’s Boutique” and Rolling Stone as “an exciting, astonishing balancing act: fast, funny and sobering”, To The 5 Boroughs finally discovered Beasties straddling two worlds: the irreverent humor they’d mastered with ease over the earlier 20 years, and a newfound political outlook which will by no means once more have been given such free rein on file, however which chimed with the group’s latter-day place as husbands, fathers and elder statesmen of hip-hop.
As Advert-Rock later put it in Beastie Boys Ebook: “I’m proud that in a serious time, we got serious.”
To The 5 Boroughs might be purchased right here.
