Even more so than career high-point Paul’s Boutique, Hello Nasty tries to squeeze in every interesting record, old or new, that passed through the Beastie Boys’ orbit at its time of recording. So why is one album considered a masterpiece while the other belongs in the bottom end of the band’s catalog, just above the tedious instrumental EPs and second-rate hardcore? For one thing, Hello Nasty lacks the energy of almost every other Beasties album. It’s got all these sounds to work with, that little-bit-of-everything agglomeration that characterized the late-1990s underground’s listening habits: electro, drum’n’bass, lounge, folk, turntablism, tropicalia, dub. Basically anything you’d find in the collection of a given member of Tortoise. But the further the album strays from straight-up hip-hop, the less excited it sounds to do anything with these new influences.
That makes it sound like a chore, and it is, albeit intermittently. At 22 tracks, Hello Nasty is less boundary-pushing, carefully collaged risk-taking than the excess that comes from unlimited home studio time and no fear of mercenary label owners or turncoat audiences. “Song for the Man” is the first real evidence of the trio’s slide into overextended, self-satisfied slackness. When you take the kitchen-sink approach to making an album, you better make damn sure you bring your A-game to each idea you try. It’s not like the Beasties lacked the chops or wit to turn “Song for the Man” into something worth listening to. And there’s nothing wrong with froth for frat boys, provided there’s a hook. But this little-too-laid-back hip-hop lite is barely a song. Even the Beastie’s post-Paul’s instrumental funk noodles had more bite.
It sounds all the weaker coming from a band whose prime draw was a exuberance, even mania. Sounding lazy rather than effortless or playful is a bad look for any band– especially when you’ve previously prided yourself on proving a don’t-give-a-fuck-attitude is compatible with hardcore studio experimentation and pop savvy. If the Beasties anticipated so much of the cut-and-paste hip-hop sound on Paul’s Boutique, then why does their contribution to the downtempo glut, passably whimsical instrumental interlude “Sneakin’ Out the Hospital”, sound less like elders schooling their disciples than three aging magpies trying to keep up with the Ninja Tunes and Mo’ Waxes?
Elsewhere, the Beasties fall into the usual traps that beset smart dudes with wide ears, a lot of heart, and plenty of industry clout: go-nowhere studio trickery (murky mumblefest “Flowin’ Prose”); eye-rolling heart-on-sleeve earnestness (MCA channeling George Harrison’s high guru era on “I Don’t Know”); and of course your standard case of guest star-itis. If you can make it through the starstruck Boys’ inability to reign in Lee “Scratch” Perry’s ramblings on “Dr. Lee, PhD”, well, you’ve got a stronger stomach for superstars kowtowing to their heroes than I do.
The good bits tend to stick to what the Beasties do best– hyperactive rhyme-lobbing with more bad puns than a MAD magazine sub-editor and a brain-melting overload of one pop-cult ref after another– with a pre-millennium dancefloor sheen. Thankfully pre-millennium dancefloors– some of them, at least– were increasingly in thrall to the recycled rigidity of old-school electro. So you get the Beasties keeping current by referencing the sounds that reared them when they were hip-hop obsessed hardcore kids. Unsurprisingly, the Boys rarely fumble when playing with a sound they’d been loving and perfecting over a decade.
It was also– lest we forget– the era of dunderheaded big beat and jungle’s last gasp of crowd-pleasing jump-up dumbness. The Beasties were clearly trawling New York’s import bins in the months before they laid down Hello Nasty, making the live-from-London remixes of tracks like Fatboy Slim’s rework of “Body Movin'” (included on the bonus disc) almost superfluous. The original album tracks have all of the club-centric subgenres’ antic energy, plus plenty of trademark Beasties stupid-unto-genius wordplay to make them more than dance comp filler. Ad-Rock rhyming, “I’m the king of Boggle/ There is none higher” with “quagmire” tends dangerously close to both being show-offy and plain cringeworthy. But I’m smiling as I roll my eyes, so I guess he wins.
Elsewhere things get odder, less predictable in the good way. “The Negotiation Limerick File” and “Electrify” don’t fit the party-hard schema, but they’re good reminders of the sonic diversity of the era’s not-quite-mainstream hip-hop. And “Three MC’s and One DJ”, where Mix Master Mike offers a late-1990s turntablism master-class handily condensed to the length of a single, makes me long for that brief moment when Wire-reading avant-heads shared common ground with straight-up b-boys, the pleasure principle of hip-hop colliding with a noise head’s preference for abstract expressionism.
The length of the bonus disc nearly rivals the original’s length (21 tracks to the parent album’s 22) and contains mostly cutting-room excerpts and drag-assy alternate mixes. Oh boy, an even more meandering “dub mix” of “Dr. Lee, PhD”! There are plenty of short snippets of heavy, kitschy jams where the Beasties indulge their love for the muddy, slo-mo funk of the mid-70s. Get ready for a lot of blaxploitation-in-two-minutes-or-less like “Dirty Dog” and “Aunt Jackie Poom Poom Delicious”. As far as the bonus instrumentals go, only the porn-ready mystical mumbo-jumbo minimalism of “The Drone” and the pensive quasi-rock of “Creepin'” justify running the tape past two minutes. And the bulk of the remixes by other artists are inessential, save the stop-and-go stutter-funk Colleone and Webb’s “Intergalactic”, compelling because it never quite seems to gel with the original.
For an album already in need of a stern editor’s hand, the bonus disc just reinforces the impression that the Hello Nasty-era Beasties were bursting with interesting starting points they never bothered to see to completion. I remember loving Hello Nasty at the time in part because it was so much, even the undercooked bits and gimpy hippie schlock. Hell, there were still plenty of tracks left to justify the sticker shock of the just-prior-to-MP3s new CD. But it’s hard hearing the positives in such a shapeless mush of half-formed sorta-songs with the weary ears of the post-iTunes playlist compiler. Let alone bothering to pay for it again in full. As an object in itself, we’ve got the album we’ve got, and that means assessing the whole unshapely mass/mess, the of-the-moment experiments with the actual tunes worth keeping a decade-plus later. And that whole, less a glorious mess than the exhausting sort, is the least essential Beasties disc until we hit the new millennium.
— Jess Harvell, October 2, 2009
