Beastie Boys: 25 years of the provocative and the pointless

25 years later, The Beastie Boys are still at it.

I like the Beastie Boys. But I have a hard time wrestling with the following question: Why?

A lot of what I like about the band has to do with their place as a constant companion in my junior high and high school years. No one my age disliked the band's 1986 Def Jam debut License to Ill and its anthemic single "(You Gotta) Fight for your Right (to Party)." The Beasties did more to accelerate the rise of hip hop in the suburbs in the late '80s than nearly any other force (Run DMC's Aerosmith collaboration of "Walk This Way" is a close second, though). As a kid, I thought that song -- as stupid as it was -- sounded awesome.

From there, the Beasties only got better, as far as I was concerned. Paul's Boutique was a rollicking fantasy of a record with more samples and sounds than anything I'd ever heard before. Listening was like entering another world. There was nothing like it texturally in rap.  Paul's Boutique flopped commercially,  but just as the band was considered washed up, it charged back in 1992 with Check Your Head, an album that accompanied me to the beach every weekend throughout the summer after my senior year in high school. The Beasties had made the transition to indie with me, it seemed, taking up instruments and dabbling in a blend of hip hop, lo-fi and punk rock that seemed fresh and well ahead of  its time in the early '90s.

Looking back, though, its hard not to notice just how pointless the Beastie Boys career seems. Forget that "Fight for your Right" was practically an ignorant slap in the face to the black social consciousness and politcal awareness that was rising in rap at that time  (Of all the rights worth fighting for, a new group of white rappers were choosing the right to party?) They never stopped composing "rhymes" that were any different than the sort of nonsense that passed for rapping in 1986 --  put downs of "suckas," going "on and on to the break of dawn," blah, blah, blah and yadda, yadda, yadda... Thinking back across all the hours I've spent listening to the Beasties, there are no memorable lyrical messages, really, just one big frat house come on/ sophomoric pop culture reference. Was it funny? Sure. Meaningful? Not even close.

The Beastie's latest record, Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 (there is no Part 1) begins with more of the same. From the first track, "Make Some Noise," (an imperative that dates back to the dawn of rap)  it's clear the Beastie Boys are still playing the same game they did in 1986. In fact there's not much different here than anything you might have heard from any other record. And the Beasties were never (and still aren't) great rappers. Track 4, "Too Many Rappers," features a guest spot by Nas, who, when he opens his mouth, demonstrates the gulf between Mike D., MCA and Ad Rock and rappers with actual talent.

So why did I like these guys anyway?

While Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 doesn't really demonstrate any serious progress (and why would they grow 25 years into a winning formula?), it does remind me of what has always made the Beastie Boys provocative: their attention to song structure and sound. Beastie Boys records sound great. Unlike most rappers, or anyone in the rap game for that matter, the Beastie Boys had cut their teeth as  musicians -- they started as a punk rock outfit that idolized Bad Brains and Minor Threat. That and the band's wide open and eclectic music tastes have guided them well through the years. I'm not saying they are great musicians, but they know enough to compose good tracks -- they wrote choruses and codas and paid attention to what their songs sounded like.

By the time the Beasties began to really play their own instruments on Check Your Head, they had effectively moved rap into a whole new sonic territory, mixing samples and sounds with live playing and even samples of themselves -- they'd record themselves playing and then sample it back. To my knowledge that was never done before, and I'm not sure I've heard anyone really do the same since. They were able to keep the DJ sounds of hip hop -- scratching, loops, vocal samples -- but on a foundation of original tracks. At a time when record labels were cracking down hard on copyright infringement in rap, the move was important. And it also put the Beasties a sonic step ahead of their peers.

Fans of the Beasties will not be disappointed by Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. It's vintage Beasties, -- inane and forgettable lyrics over pretty impressive tracks. There's a lot to the record that recalls Check Your Head and Hello Nasty. The record is full of sound effects, great drum tracks and the Beasties actually playing (particularly some good bass playing samples). The rapping might be from the golden era, but Hot Sauce doesn't sound like it was made by a band of hapless geezers with microphones. The Beasties still have a knack for crafting sonic spaces that exceeds that of many younger practitioners in the game.

Are the Beasties great or just god awful? It's hard to tell. At the very least, they never pretended to be much more than they were: three jewish kids from Brooklyn with a yen to mash up punk rock, funk and rap, and have a good time doing it. And when it comes to music, they made stuff that sounds good for what it is. For that, I can't call them frauds. But I still wonder what might have been had they stepped from behind the jokes and committed to writing something that had a little more heft. Perhaps they never would have been able to pull it off. Who knows? I can still  enjoy their records just fine. As long as I don't think about it.