A Look Back at the Beastie Boys Part 7: The Mix-Up

Not my bag, baby. But this was a long gestating pet project. In Dan Leroy’s awesome book about the making of Paul’s Boutique, Tim Carr, formerly of Capitol Records, says that Ad-Rock spoke to him about an instrumental album as early as 1994. Carr’s response: “Great, everyone’s so tired of those adenoidal, nasal voices anyway.”

Not me. I’ve heard The Mix-Up, and I missed my favorite MC’s.

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SPECIAL BONUS! A LOOK FORWARD AT THE BEASTIE BOYS: THE HOT SAUCE COMMITTEE PT. 1!

In 2009, The Beastie Boys debuted a new song at a Tennessee music festival. “Too Many Rappers,” featuring guest vocals by Nas, quickly leaked to the web, and it’s pretty damn good, an old school lament about the current state of rap music. In other words, something I can agree with them on. “Too Many Rappers” was nominated for a Grammy, Best Rap Duo or Group, but lost out to Jay-Z (who is also awesome). The band announced that they would be touring in late-2009, in support of a forthcoming album called “The Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 1,” which was scheduled for release on September 15, 2009. My wife and I bought tickets to see them at The Hollywood Bowl, and we were planning to take our son, who has become quite the fan.

But the tour didn’t materialize. On July 20, 2009, I and many other fans received an email with a video attachment. In the video, Adam “MCA” Yauch informed the world that he had been diagnosed with a form of cancer that I cannot pronounce. The tour and the album release were postponed, which I thought was very selfish of Yauch – I’m kidding.

Thank God, Yauch has made a full recovery, and he told Entertainment Weekly that the album will probably come out in September. He explained that he, Mike D. and Horovitz were giving the album another listen and that they might tweak some of the songs a bit before the release. If they tour, I’ll be there. I haven’t followed any band’s career like I have the Beastie Boys. If any other band had made a weird (weird to me, anyway) switch and become political, I would have just rolled my eyes and chalked it up to a phase, a sign of the times. Of course I shouldn’t have taken it as personally as I obviously did – as though my views should be the norm. They’re the one band I’ve followed from the moment they burst onto the scene. I put in any of their albums, except for “The Mix-Up”, and crank it up to full volume (“All the way up, daddy!” my kid delightedly screams from the back seat).

You can call this series self-indulgent. Indeed, I would agree. Maybe you don’t like the Beastie Boys. But even a non-fan would have to admit that the band had amassed a career that’s also a great story. They were no-name bratty punks who inexplicably crossed over into hip hop…and it somehow worked. Roundly dismissed and forgotten after their debut album, they come back with an album that makes Time Magazine’s list of greatest albums ever, but no one cared. Urban radio would no longer play them, pop radio thought they were a joke, and Alternative radio was still Alternative. So, they retool, and a third album makes some noise, but not much…at least at first. Their dismissed second album gains popularity, and their fourth album is the first in their career to be anticipated at all.

Riding a wave of clever videos and the mainstreaming of Alternative Rock, they achieve new heights of success, culminating in “Hello Nasty,” their fifth studio album. Riding the success of “Hello Nasty,” they release “To the Five Boroughs” in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, which itself led to America’s involvement in two wars. From the very beginning, they were the unlikeliest of success stories. I remain convinced they overreached their grasp in becoming critics of politics, but it ultimately illustrates the cultural and political divide in the good old US OF A. They had, after all, built up a lot of artistic goodwill over the years.

Will “The Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 1” be any good? Bush is gone…can the Beastie Boys let it go and move on and just go back to making fun music? Man, I really hope so. My wife says “The Hot Sauce Committee” is a stupid title, just like the rest of their albums (except “To the Five Boroughs,” hmmm?), so it will probably be good. She’s smarter than me. When they got political, she just hit next on the CD player, and shrugged.