Beastie Boys - Check Your Head
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Free Music Notes for Check Your Head
Free Music Review: You have got to be kidding me
Hit: 5 Stars
Simply unreal. What happened to the B Boys? The time they took between Paul's Boutique and this album was very well spent. This album exudes creativity and originality. It's funky, it's sharp, it's just plain fun. Boatloads of fun. The instrumentals are a real treat, but Pass The Mic, So What'cha Want, Lighten Up, and Jimmy James are the best tunes. Seriously, folks, one of the best 5 hip hop albums ever. 14 years later I still listen to it monthly.Free Music Review: Thee BEST
Hit: 5 Stars
To begin, this record has more intensity than any other Beasties disc. Songs like the aforementioned "So What'cha Want", "Pass the mic" and "Finger Lickin' Good" compliment the more laid numbers like "Pow" and tracks like "Gratitude" and the opener "Jimmy James". No joke, these guys were sent to kill, and all we can do is watch.Free Music Review: keep checking it til you die!!!
Hit: 5 Stars
whoever is selling their copy of this cd/album has lost their youth, and possibly their mind!! the album blends jazz, rock, punk, alt-rock, hip-hop and various other astral elements into a perfect puzzle. i heard this for the first time when i was 12, and it turned me inside out. classic. Free Music Review: It's certainly a record that's greater than the sum of its parts
Hit: 5 Stars
Check Your Head brought the Beastie Boys crashing back into the charts and into public consciousness, but that was only partially due to the album itself - much of its initial success was due to the cult audience that Paul's Boutique cultivated in the years since its initial flop release, a group of fans whose minds were so thoroughly blown by that record, they couldn't wait to see what came next, and this helped the record debut in the Top Ten upon its April 1992 release. This audience, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, was a collegiate Gen-X audience raised on Licensed to Ill and ready for the Beastie Boys to guide them through college.
As it happened, the Beasties had repositioned themselves as a lo-fi, alt-rock groove band. They had not abandoned rap, but it was no longer the foundation of their music, it was simply the most prominent in a thick pop-culture gumbo where old school rap sat comfortably with soul-jazz, hardcore punk, white-trash metal, arena rock, Bob Dylan, bossa nova, spacy pop, and hard, dirty funk. What they did abandon was the psychedelic samples of Paul's Boutique, turning toward primitive grooves they played themselves, augmented by keyboardist Money Mark and co-producer Mario Caldato, Jr..
This all means that music was the message and the rhymes, which had been pushed toward the forefront on both Licensed to Ill and Paul's Boutique, have been considerably de-emphasized (only four songs - "Jimmy James," "Pass the Mic," "Finger Lickin' Good," and "So What'cha Want" - could hold their own lyrically among their previous work). This is not a detriment, because the focus is not on the words, it's on the music, mood, and even the newfound neo-hippie political consciousness.
Check Your Head is certainly a record that's greater than the sum of its parts - individually, nearly all the tracks are good (the instrumentals sound good on their subsequent soul-jazz collection, The in Sound From Way Out), but it's the context and variety of styles that give Check Your Head its identity. It's how the old school raps give way to fuzz-toned rockers, furious punk, and cheerfully gritty, jazzy jams. As much as Paul's Boutique, this is a whirlwind tour through the Beasties' pop-culture obsessions, but instead of spinning into Technicolor fantasies, it's earth-bound D.I.Y. that makes it all seem equally accessible - which is a big reason why it turned out to be an alt-rock touchstone of the '90s, something that both set trends and predicted them.
Free Music Review: So Whatcha Want?
Hit: 5 Stars
The best of the Beasties' IMHO. Simply amazing! Punk/funk/hip-hop with a little bit of flavor that only the B-Boys can add. I love all Beasties' up through "Ill Communication" but this album takes the cake. The idea to pick up their instruments and lay their own background music to MC over was just pure genius. This is the best of the best folks! This is a MUST own for any hip-hop, punk rock, or funk music fan.