On walks around Manhattan, even on sun-scorched days, mysterious precipitation falls on your head. Whether this comes from urinating birds, air conditioning condensation, observation deck spitting, or suicide jumpers breaking down into their constituent beads of bloody moisture over the long 145-story leaps from skyscrapers, I've yet to determine. The Times Square subway station has been under construction for at least four years. The majority of Village eateries I frequent do not accept credit cards. The city tobacconists all spell the first letters of "Smoke Shop" with two pipes, making the storefront signs look more like "Jmoke Jhop." Garbage is laid out on the sidewalks, as real estate shortages allow for no alleys. The Mormon Temple across from the Lincoln Center has fantastic free peanut butter cookies, if you sit through one of their thinly veiled brainwashing video tours.
None of these elements of New York, which I find more indicative of the town, are mentioned on the Beastie Boys' To the 5 Boroughs. Instead, Adrock, MCA and Mike D offer obvious demographic and transit information on their "Open Letter to NYC". "Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin/ Black, White, New York/ You make it happen," they croon together on the chorus to the centerpiece of their sixth album. "Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten/ From the Battery to the top of Manhattan," they read like a free hotel map. What, nothing rhymed with Inwood? The song makes fantastic use of a Dead Boys sample (who were from Cleveland), but fumbles the execution with their Up With People chants.
Lyrically, the Beastie Boys fail to make a convincing justification for their hometown pride beyond slogans that could fit on a t-shirt. The answering machine message of Paul's Boutique conveyed more giddy pride in the nuances and uniqueness of the metropolis. In a trademark (or typical, or tired, depending on your perspective) deep pop culture reference, Adrock mentions Gnip Gnop, a 1970s Parker Brothers game that was like a cross of Pong and Hungry Hungry Hippos. "Jmoke Jhop" would have rhymed perfectly. In their attempt to point out the details of their city, the Beastie Boys offer little more than the view from the top of a sawn-off double-decker tour bus.
At this point in time, no measure of analysis regarding cadence, meter or goofy references will sway the pros and cons of the Beastie Boys' lyrics. They do what they do, and even my mother knows their M.O. What To the 5 Boroughs offers, contrary to naysayers who mock aging bands, are three voices showing intriguing texture from wear and experience. MCA sounds like the Harry Nilsson of hip-hop after a lost weekend. Adrock, especially, shows greater range in style. From his leisured easy-speaking on "Crawlspace" to the Eminem-like syllable play on "Hey Fuck You", he puffs his chest with laid-back economy and moves away from the stereotypical nasal whine of their younger days.
Where the true influence of New York exerts itself on To the 5 Boroughs is in the stark rhythms, which filter the cold continental-sampling breaks of rap pioneers like Jimmy Spicer and The Treacherous Three through Apple processors. The streamlined foundations both pay tribute to the crews that influenced the Beastie Boys to put down their Bad Brains and Reagan Youth aspirations and lays a hard digital direction for the Bush Youth to follow.
Unlike all previous Beastie Boys albums (with the possible exception of Licensed to Ill), To The 5 Boroughs sounds homogenous and singular in purpose-- dark, steel, and dirty like that incomplete Times Square station. Ill Communication and Hello Nasty reveled in genre-dipping, from hardcore and salsa to dub and disco. Their decision to settle into a focused hip-hop direction here seems like a sage move. The album succeeds in its seeming spontaneity. "Seeming" in that they possibly spent years making it. But whatever length of gestation, the album's easy air speaks to veteran, nothing-to-lose attitude of both the city and the group.
Still, my interaction with music goes well beyond simple, academic analysis of sound. Nostalgia, emotional context, the continued story and history behind the artist, the packaging, and everything else matters in my love and fascination with music. This is why writing for Pitchfork, which prides itself on discovering unknown underground artists, means so little to me anymore. Listening to music as some form of continued, insular experiment with recording driven by faceless, MP3-based rock bands bores me. I was immediately prepared to love To the 5 Boroughs from my history with the band-- from listening to Ill while playing Atari with Andy Eberhardt, to mowing neighborhood lawns with Gregg Bernstein and Paul's Boutique in a walkman, to holding my portable CD player off the front cushion of my Buick Century to keep Check Your Head from skipping as I passed over the speed bumps in the Marist parking lot every day after my Junior year, to shooting bottle rockets from poster tubes at passing trucks on 400 off the roof of the AMC multiplex I worked at when Ill Communication came out. It is not mentally possibly for me to switch on apathy towards the group.
When all is said and done, I have spun To the 5 Boroughs at least 30 times while working on some of the most rewarding and enjoyable creative work of my life in the past couple weeks, while visiting a city I love, and seeing people I missed. The album has become intrinsically linked to these experiences-- from my movie premiere this week to the surreal tour of the Manhattan Mormon Temple last week. The little number at the top of this piece reflects little of personal relation to the record. It's an arbitrary guide to how I would expect people to gauge the intent of this review. I will listen to this album for years to come. You might. Or not. It depends on your own complex web of past interaction with the Beastie Boys, linked memories to the music, or preconceived notion of how hip or not it is to listen to them in 2004.
Though I would fail to quantify the comparative "quality" of such albums, as I said before, I love Carl & The Passions as much as Pet Sounds. Divorcing the lives and backstory from the recorded product of a musical artist equates to making movies without characters. The sixth Beastie Boys album holds much more intrigue than some young dudes with bedhead thinking they're going to evolve rock and roll. I've ended up listening to it more than any other release this year.
This process has become unexciting and routine, which is why I bid the world of music writing farewell. Explaining why I love a record in the confines of its production, lyrics and instrumental "tightness" without detailing the first time I heard the band's song drifting from bowling alley in Poland or whatever confounds me. More power to those who discover new music from this site. I've figured out where I stand at this point, as have the readers. Like the Beastie Boys, I could continue to crank out divisive pieces of writing here until I go gray. I have more interesting stories to tell.
