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When Adam “MCA” Yauch passed away two years ago, people mourned him as an artist and a human while also taking the opportunity to celebrate the group he belonged to, the Beastie Boys. It was obvious to most that there could be no Beasties without Yauch—and last week that was officially confirmed, when the New York Daily News reported that the two surviving members of the group would never again release music under that name.
The news is, of course, another sad reminder of MCA’s passing; it also means that their 2011 album, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, will be the final Beastie Boys LP. And that record—for my money, their best since 1994’s Ill Communication—is a great way to go out: a resurgence and celebration of everything that defined the group, from their high-octane goofiness to their forward-thinking approach to beat music to their roles as ambassadors for the city they loved.
The Beasties released just three albums in the 21st century, and only two with lyrics. The first, their post-9/11 album To The 5 Boroughs, sounds a bit dated now. On that record, the Beasties celebrate New York as if from afar. Their fun sounds forced, the music stripped-down, safe—this from a band that had been getting ever closer to its hardcore roots and making left-field explorations into jazz and funk. The album is an incredible cultural artifact, but the group doesn’t sound like itself (a fact they‘ve come to terms with.) 5 Boroughs is best understood today as an emblem of a wounded city, a call for solidarity that felt necessary at the time of its release.
There’s a quote from Jonathan Lethem about artists who get stuck in a single identity, declaring, “'I’m this kind of artist’—and then living inside the stiffening armor of that proposition for the rest of their career.” The Beastie Boys didn’t quite avoid this plight, but the identity they chose as New York Artists almost always left room for growth. And so, when the monochrome period that produced To the 5 Boroughs had passed, the Beasties struck back, first with their instrumental record, The Mix-Up, and then with Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.
The latter was a full-fledged return to form. The first thing that strikes you as a listener is just how heavy it is; it sounds like them, but it also sounds new, an updated version of Ill Communication’s progressive funk that’s both bass-heavy and energetic. The album is diverse but cohesive, and the fact that it's one of the few wholly self-produced Beasties records makes its technical expertise all the more impressive. Originally planned as the second part of a double release, it was delayed by Yauch’s illness. But the extra time allowed the Beasties to record more tracks, and to prune the weaker cuts from the record.
There are cues from earlier hits: “Make Some Noise” is a callback to fighting for your right to party, and “Let It Out” has a lot of shared DNA with“Sabotage”. But there are also the sweet little bites of novelty that we’ve always expected from the Beasties: the rap chops and playfulness on “OK”, the experimental, dubby lo-fi of “Tadlock’s Glasses”, the perfect summer brass on the Santigold collaboration “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win”.
That collaboration is just one of two on the album; the other features Nas. Two New Yorkers: one representing Queens, the other, the Lower East Side. One from an older musical generation, the other, current. It’s unforced symbolism, serendipitous, yet hardly coincidental. The diversity of the album required those two voices, just as it required the same kind of genre mash-up that the Beasties pioneered. And just as it required the closer, which now serves as a fitting coda to the group’s entire career, “The Lisa Lisa/Full Force Routine”. The track is a fifty second tribute to one of the innumerable musical acts that informed the Beastie Boys, and its closing lyrics double as their ethos:
"Full (Full) Force (Force)
Lisa Lisa, Cult Jam
All (all) night (night)
Listening to dope man
You could (you could) say (say)
Yes, we're looking pretty (pretty)
Money (money) making (making)
New York City"