Artless and Bored

Now to all the playa haters out there, fuck yourself.
The Beasties have returned and with a vengeance.
Their new outing has me singing their praises with
abandon. I am biased. Really biased in that I have
not once questioned any turn that the Boys have taken
in their career. Along with Run DMC and Public Enemy,
they brought the hip hop streets to the spikey haired,
mullet locked kids, spinning them around and slapping
them silly with a perfect hybrid of rock and rap.
Terribly sophmoric, but tasty as all getout, it was the
cure for the summertime blues and a education to
the landlocked, anti-culture flyover states (Read
neither East Coast or West Coast).
On their new, white hot, disk, the Beastie Boys pay homage
to the old school, and throw in a bit of their amazing
experimentation along the way. Some critics, namely
Jon Pareles of the New York Times, take the boys to task
for throwing down some politics. (Not a fan of Pareles, as he reminds
me of a lame dad trying to maintain some air of cool, while
embarassing the hell out of his kids.) Me thinks that they doth
protest with little knowledge of hip hop history, or a
convenient loss of memory. (Maybe they didn't get enough
free swag from the record execs.) Try KRS-One, Grandmaster Flash, PE,
Arrested Development,Paris, to name a few of hip hop masters who
rocked the mic with the news of the day. Anyway, with our nation's
credibility hanging on a short thread, The Beastie Boys are
taking the message to the kids who need it most. The message:
We got a fucked up government, that's doing fucked up things,
that are not helping to make us a loved or more secure nation.
Bravo, Bravo. Get off your ass and vote these Stepford men
and women out of office. Don't vote them out at your own
peril.
I'm not going to do a track by track breakdown, so trust me.
Go out and buy it. The Beastie Boys make me damn proud
to have chosen NYC as my home.