Beastie Boys
To the 5 Boroughs [Deluxe Edition]
UME
By 2004, the boys of the Beasties had become men, often serious men. The threesome spoke in unison to world-conscious causes and spirituality, along with acting more even-handedly and progressively toward women’s issues. That’s not to say that Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D had completely eliminated the raunchy humor of their youth, such as their first tour’s gigantic inflatable penises or early goofball song-making such as “Cookie Puss” and “Girls”; contagious tracks from their then-new To the 5 Boroughs LP such as “Ch-Check It Out” and “Rizzle Rizzle Nizzle Nizzle” (a deluxe-edition addition remixing “Right Right Now Now”) show just how much the Beasties still liked their laugh lines two decades into the project’s existence.
But a sparer sound (or at least one that was less ornate and congested than the record’s predecessor, 1998’s Hello Nasty) backing their sociopolitical ruminations on their hometown was the way of the walk when it came to the self-produced 5 Boroughs, then and now in its era-intensive, extended three-LP version. Of course “An Open Letter to NYC” and its various iterations speak to the open wounds of 9/11, while showing deep, youthful, romanticized love to Hollis, Battery Park, and beyond. But it’s certainly a world-wearier, even more rueful romanticism than you’d expect from the artists who penned “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”
Then there’s the likes of “We Got The” and its rant-rap about “Christian Coalitions, the right wing, and cones of silence”; the many, many remixes (including one from Blur’s Graham Coxon) of “Triple Trouble”; and “It Takes Time to Build,” which lists how “it takes a second to wreck it” before going into its cranky displeasure with a dangerous bozo president, messed up international treaties, and increasingly higher gas prices. And that’s when, in the best Beasties fashion, the listener goes, “Hey, wait a minute, aren’t we still stuck in the muck and mire of the conversations that fill the suddenly way-more-prescient 5 Boroughs?” Hold that and hit it.
