The Beastie Boys: The World's Best (and only) Kraut-Hop Group

By: Miles Silverstein

To most, the Beastie Boys were an awkward and sometimes corny party band that emerged from the wild infancy of the early hip-hop movement. Characterized by a romping sexuality, echoed loudness, and over-enthusiastic verse deliveries, the Beastie Boys built a reputation out of the ethos of “we don’t take ourselves seriously, but you’ve gotta!” That’s a polarizing thing to be in a musical scene characterized by pornographic glamor and white-hot celebrity. It was a moment in music that managed to subvert the mainstream, alienate the purists, and attract the remaining dispossessed weirdness. The Beasties were a bold amalgam of music style, theory, and taste, able to thread The Eagles, The Commodores, Arabic jazz, and bluegrass ditties buried deep in the Deliverance soundtrack. There’s a very special genius in the ability to chisel out the hip-hop from such disparate raw material, and translate it so poetically into the 80’s milieu. The Beastie Boys were trailblazers, enthusiastically swinging the machete through then-uncharted hip-hop territory while still finding time for a few fart jokes. Seven platinum albums later(!), the Beasties still hold the Billboard record for biggest-selling rap group and are among only five hip-hop groups to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Call ‘em corny all you like – the numbers speak truth. 

While the big chart-topping Beastie Boys hits were all hip-hop, seldom is a light shone on the underbelly of their career – when they weren’t stomping around Tokyo in overalls and hard hats or parodying seventies cop drama rocking horseshoe mustaches and aviators, these three Jewish kids from Brooklyn regularly played CBGB’s and worked up an output that rarely featured vocals at all. Hidden beneath the insult-laden veneer of joke-around hitmakers is one of the most creatively genreless instrumental trios in recent memory. 

Before the megahit ultra platinum, earth shaking cultural milestone Licensed to Ill, there was the brash but little known Polly Wog Stew. The 1982 eight-song EP ekes out 11 minutes of music, and is decidedly NOT a hip-hop record. The Beasties lit the fuse as a Brooklyn punk band (BEASTIE apparently stands for Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Inner Excellence, though this claim is disputed), frequently supporting more famous and established acts such as the Dead Kennedys, the Misfits, and Bad Brains, with Polly Wog Stew reflecting this eclectic period of their early experimentation. Polly Wog Stew was a singularity in the Beastie Boys catalog, a sound that would fail to reverberate across the band’s oeuvre, but suggested a willingness and determination to experiment – to generate the happy accidents that fuel great art. Tracks like ‘Holy Snappers’ or ‘Egg Raid on Mojo’ see Mike D in rare form, squeaking his trademark high Brooklyn nasal over distorted instrumentals that often ended as abruptly as they began. The EP is fast and loud, an imagined salute to Black Flag or a toss to the Circle Jerks. The tracks remarkably differ from anything the Beastie Boys would go on to produce. There was punk on later records, but a blind side-by-side comparison of something like ‘Time for Livin’ from Check Your Head and ‘Michelle’s Farm’ from Polly Wog Stew would not be easily identifiable as the same band. Some ten years later, during the recording of Hello Nasty, the group recognized that the surplus of punk tracks they found themselves with was not conducive to the vibe of the album they aimed to cultivate, so the final exclusively-punk release from the Beastie Boys was put out in 1995: the eight-song EP Aglio E Olio. While the same energy from the band’s early days is clearly present, there is a maturity in both instrumentation and production. The band continued to pepper their subsequent releases with heavier punk moments, most recently and finally, ‘Lee Majors Come Again’ from 2011’s Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. Two. Even into their twilight days as a band, and as Adam Yauch battled bravely into what would be his last moments, they never lost their sense of the chaotic, that mysterious and inscrutable thing that fans loved, propelling millions in album sales.

Arguably more important than their punk work was the quasi-funk (krautrock?) they stuffed into their 90s output. Picture this: It’s 1991 and your last album Paul’s Boutique bombed. You knowingly moved the goalpost and unknowingly changed the game forever – but today you bombed. Hard. What do you do when you've got no money to make your next record? You stand up, rebuild, and start from scratch.

The story behind 1992’s Check Your Head goes something like this: Fresh off a costly stinker, the Beastie Boys had to find a way to save money. The solution for this new release was to revisit their instrumental roots (Yauch is said to have shown up to Check Your Head sessions one day with a standup bass and random innate ability). The music on Check Your Head isn’t a patchwork quilt of recognizable expensive samples and backbeats, as was the case with Paul’s Boutique, but the Beasties’ experimenting with instrumental sound instead. Samples and scratches still crop up here and there, but for the first time in close to ten years, the Beastie Boys work more on live instrumentation than with tapes or vinyl. And for the first time in their career, the Beasties drop an instrumental track recorded in the studio. Track 13 off Check Your Head is ‘Pow’, an entirely instrumental (except for a single shout of “Pow!” about a minute in) funk romp composed and played by the Boys themselves. This cost-effective new way of making music was the X factor the Beastie Boys needed to revitalize their public image. Returning to their instruments gave them an edge up on every other hip-hop artist still working with the limitations of analog sampling and beatmaking – and opened the door to an entirely new and trademark sound. 

The Beastie Boys would continue to make these instrumental beats for the rest of their career, coming to a head with 2007’s The Mix-Up, an entirely voiceless 47 minutes of the Beastie Boys playing with funk, krautrock, electronica, and all the space in between. Only the knowledgeable fan would be able to discern that ‘Shadrach’ and ‘Off The Grid’ were written by the same band. It is certainly true that the instrumental underbelly of the Beastie Boys’ discography never received the notoriety and recognition that the hit-laden hip-hop early work did, but no other group will ever replicate the creativity of the Beasties’ efforts to eschew genre and boundaries. Through their extensive, chameleon discography, one thing is constant and certain: there will never be another Beastie Boys.