Last week I had a post where I came to terms with some long-running issues I have with The Beastie Boys, post-enlightenment. In a nut shell I’d been a fan for years and then pretty much stopped being one. Not because I didn’t still love the albums by them I love (Paul’s Boutique and Check Your Head) but for other reasons I won’t rehash here.

Paul’s has long been what I would probably say in casual conversation is my favorite B-Boys album. However Check Your Head… that’s just something else altogether. A fellow Chudite Andy Bain commented on said aforementioned previous post and it really got me thinking – thinking and salivating for “This next one is the first song on our new album*”, so I broke out Check and gave it a little spin…

Which has now lasted about a week.

I’ve always loved CYH – in fact, after being introduced to The B Boys via Fight for Your Right on Chicago’s B96 (*gag*)around the time I was, what, ten? (Jesus…) I missed Paul’s entirely and didn’t hear from the band again until I was in High School and a friend purchased CYH around the time it came out in the spring of 1992. Of course due to this the album will always hold a special place in my heart because we ground it into our senses over the course of a long, hot Chicago summer full of, for soon-to-be Juniors in high school, a lot of partying and teenage debauchery. Later, when I found Paul’s (and wondered just how the hell I’d missed it to begin with, only to find out later that Capitol had, at the time of its release in 1989, pretty much ignored it promotionally speaking) it’s strong hold on me had a lot to do with partying too. However, this also shed some light on CYH, and how the Boys had… evolved. Overall that evolution has been a good thing for the Boys me thinks, but it has also, on occasion, caused some of us to distance ourselves from those who once so cheerfully contributed to our dirty thoughts and dirty minds…

The point I really want to make with this post is that although I’ve always considered Check Your Head a great, important album, I don’t think it was until Andy Bain’s comment spurred me on to really consume the thing in a variety of different critical ways after a couple of years distance from it that I realized just how important an album it really is. I have now come to the conclusion that Check Your Head may just be the zenith of the “alternative” zeitgeist of the 1990’s**. I mean, the thing has everything – the 90’s was big on interlacing, evolving and muddying genres and CYH does all of that, but in supremely cohesive maneuvering and songwriting that doesn’t just anthologically jump from one type of song to the next, but in a way that every song is a fluid amalgamation of different genre textures. The follow up to CYH, Ill Communication pales in comparison to me because it ‘reads’ far more as though the boys are saying, “this is a punk song, this is a hip hop song, this is a funk jam instrumental” etc. Check Your Head, while containing elements of all of those genres, never solidifies into one particular style for even a mere moment. Take for example the song ‘Stand Together’ – it has a tightly woven and uniquely executed blending of electro/hip hop/punk musical elements and vocals that run in and out of being rap-delivery/punk rock. This makes sense when you look at where the B Boys came from, starting out as a pre-teen punk band with Luscious Jackson’s eventual drummer Kate Schellenbach, morphing into the Party-time Teenage metal-rapsters on their Rick Rubin-helmed debut License to Ill, and then working up to actually playing their instruments and airing toward the down home, natural ingredients-influences of their funk ancestry more than those stripped down punk roots. But a lot of groups go through phases of influence, and most of them don’t ever put down a musical statement as original and powerful as Check Your Head.

………………

* A sample of live Cheap Trick if you didn’t know.

** And as I’ve pointed out here before the term alternative can only, in my mind, be legitimately used for music circling the underground until about the time In Utero came out – nothing against Kurt, Krist and Dave, it wasn’t their fault the coprorates latched onto them and then subsequently sucked the life out of a great rock underground that, touting groups and artists like Frank Black, The Breeders, The Flaming Lips, Ween and a host of others, truly was an alternative to motley suck, bell biv devoe and everything else mainstream.