Beastie Boys’ 1998 album Hello Nasty fell into my hands exactly when I needed it.
I was going through a particularly painful break-up, and I desperately needed a distraction. Music was incredibly important to me, but I found I was particularly vulnerable to sad songs, ballads, break-up songs. In fact, almost any love song. Of course, it transpires that most songs on the radio and in our personal musical collections are about love – whether it’s about a crush, the excitement of early coupling, or loss.
Beastie Boys weren’t singing about romantic love. They were rapping about sentient cable boxes and Buddhism and their Boggle scores.
While Hello Nasty is apparently Ad-Rock’s favourite Beastie Boys album, the critical consensus seems to be that it’s just too baggy to reach the heights of their earlier work. Yet if this has been a shorter, better album then it would have been less useful to me at that point.
In my situation, Hello Nasty’s perceived vulnerabilities – its length, its frequent cameos and solo jaunts, its indulgent genre-hopping – became virtues. It was good company, plain and simple. As Jess Harvell observed in Pitchfork when the record was reissued, ‘I remember loving Hello Nasty at the time in part because it was so much, even the undercooked bits and gimpy hippie schlock.’
Just as important as the content was the production. Hello Nasty expands the familiar Beastie Boys soundscape through a late-nineties filter; the songs bounce between multiple musical styles, the spaces between are grouted with non-sequitur exclamations and voicemails. In those joyous moments when all three band members are present, you’re buffeted between MCA, Ad Rock and Mike D’s restless call-and-response delivery.
Through the opening triptych of songs there’s barely a moment to get your bearings. Opener ‘Super Disco Breakin’’ is barely longer than two minutes, but it feels absolutely huge. ‘The Move’ ends with an absurdly fun interpolation of ‘El Rey y Yo’ by Los Angeles Negros, before we crash into the hulking riff of ‘Remote Control’. From there, there’s a short exhalation in the form of the suave yet satirical ‘Song for the Man,’ before the pace picks up for ‘Just a Test’ and ‘Body Movin’’.
Another dimension
Thanks to its heavy rotation on my stereo, many of the album’s lyrics lodged in my brain in perpetuity. They still return to me on a regular basis, prompted by environmental cues in hotels (‘All I wanna know is when is checkout time’), displays in supermarkets (‘Fresh like a box of Krispy Kremes’) and breakfast on the stove on a Sunday morning (‘I don’t mean to brag / I don’t mean to boast / but I’m intercontinental when I eat French toast’).
The album even provided something like moral guidance for me during an early moment of personal reckoning, reminding me that there ‘ain’t no time like the present to work s*** out’ and – most potently of all – that ‘until your back’s up against the wall / you never know yourself that much at all’. At that moment, I could briefly imagine the Boys were in my corner.
And while it’s not quite Paul’s Boutique in terms of cultural references, there was certainly enough there (Pannonkonnen, ‘O-o-h Child’, Chateauneuf du Pap) to provide a little education for an impressionable young mind.1
Excerpt from Lousie Weir illustration. Select magazine, August 1998
Arguably, Hello Nasty was the last time Beastie Boys were a significant cultural force. They weren’t young anymore, but neither were they old. The Tibetan Freedom concerts and Grand Royal magazine had kept their profile high even when they weren’t releasing much product. As Ad-Rock remembers, the LP – which won a Grammy for best Alternative Music Album – was “the end of an era […] after this, things were different. After this we were grown-ups.” Their next album wouldn’t appear for six long years, by which time the world, and their hometown, had changed significantly.
Of course, while Hello Nasty boasts some of the band’s biggest songs (‘Intergalactic,’ ‘Body Movin’) and moments of treasured sincerity (‘I Don’t Know,’ ‘Instant Death’), even the hardiest fans will agree that it tests the listener’s patience during its final quarter.
The Brooke Williams collaboration ‘Picture This’ is pleasant enough, but feels off-topic. Plus, do we need two slightly ramshackle shout-out tracks – ‘Dedication’ and ‘Unite’ – sequenced back to back? And for all its chilled charms, ‘Dr Lee, PhD’, is yet another meandering Beasties-free track, deployed as the album’s runtime coasts past the hour mark.2
Thankfully, there’s ‘Instant Death’ to bring the album to a definitive close with a bittersweet, Haiku-like meditation on loss and mortality. It’s one of the few moments of real uncertainty and vulnerability on the album. It was the first and only moment where the subject matter leaned close to the tear-jerking love songs that I’d been I was avoiding for my mental wellbeing.
But as those final notes played out, the CD would follow its pre-programmed path back to the beginning, and ‘Super Disco Breakin’’ would drift back into the room, ready to provide me with comfort through chaos.
* * *
- I wasn’t alone in taking Hello Nasty to heart. I remember an ex-girlfriend gleefully prank-called me to play the juvenile I don’t like your attitude, boyyyyy pronouncement that kicks off ‘Song for the Man,’ before immediately hanging up. Other friends used the benefit of their Spanish studies to translate the mysterious and poetic lines sampled from ‘El Rey y Yo’: There was once a great King. He had many lands, a castle and also a love. ↩︎
- ‘Dr Lee, PhD,’ was a harbinger of further lapses. A year later, on their sprawling anthology The Sounds of Science, the Beasties would find room for Biz Markie’s slurred cover of ‘Benny and the Jets,’ while the likes of ‘Looking Down The Barrel of A Gun’ and ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’ were conspicuously absent. ↩︎
Image excerpt from Lousie Weir illustration from Select Magazine August 1998. Copyright Select Magazine. Artwork depicted under Fair Use allowance. No copyright infringement intended.
