Greatest Songs: #18

Beastie Boys - "And Me" (1998, from Hello Nasty)


The great thing about the Beastie Boys, on their first five albums, anyway, is that they always shifted their sound. Having birthed rap-rock on Licenced To Ill, they begat the Sample Age on Paul's Boutique, became a real band with real instruments again on Check Your Head, and gave us the Buddha-Booty-Shaker with Ill Communications. Yet each one is definitively a Beastie Boys album, and a handful of tracks would be at home on any one of them.

Hello Nasty, depending on who you ask, is either the Beastie's Exile on Main Street, or their Goat's Head Soup, either their peak or the beginning of the inevitable decline. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference (isn't the peak, by definition, the start of going down?), and sometimes, it's harder to care. At any rate, their are several choice cuts here, and I've picked the one that did the best.

Oh, but surely not. That two-note vamp? The reverbed vocals? The cartoony sound effects? Yes, yes, and yes. We've all heard the party-to-the-break-of-dawn club grooves, you know, "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" Parts 2, 4, 5, and 6. On To the Five Boroughs they filled a whole album with it. I love them as much as the next man, but they aren't the best things the B-Boys have done. This is.

First of all, it's mellow. Thirdly, it's funky. Sixth and lastly, its lyrics express a simple idea with vast possibilities; the definition of poetry. And to conclude, it's all of these at once.

The first is achieved by the aforementioned two-note vamp. The shifting beat and phased-in effects accomplish the third. The sixth depend on iterations of "Once again I'm all wrapped up in me," a commentary on the great human paradox: the more we focus on ourselves, the weaker and weaker we become. It is only when devoting the self, at least in part, to something held in higher value (truth, justice, freedome, country, God) that we tap into our potential. It's a good deal more persuasive than the Earth-mother rants they subjected us to on Ill Communications (remember, rhyming "commercial" with "commercial" is a sign of your PASSION, not of your STUNTED VOCABULARY).

Like the best of their work, the song doesn't stay put, but constantly grows and gurgles and horns into a wonderful piece of fusion. And you know what? I DO wish I could be outside playing basketbal, in the reign, and not get wet. Wouldn't that be great?


#19