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I thought the Beastie Boys doc sucked. And they were the soundtrack to my skatelife 85-95.
I’m a fan, but objectively they are not great musicians and the only flow they managed to make work was ‘Ch-Check it Out’, where they finally found an off-kilter cadence that tied up their amateurish rhyming with Jr High school humor, and faux-old school beats and made it work perfectly, and sound like something of their own.
Everything else has parts of good songs. Some have great beats ahead of their time (Paul’s Boutique and Check your head), some have good rhyming (but usually mitigated by nasally high voices) but mostly they sound second-rate at everything they did.
That amateurish approach was endearing, but not anything near the skill and quality that came from all other areas of rap.
There's good rhymes on basically every album from Paul's Boutique to Hello Nasty, mainly in the Paul's Boutique, Check Your Head, Ill Communication era. Specifically MCA had solid flow a lot of times. I would definitely not call it amateurish, just their own thing. Honestly for the late 80's and early 90's they were kinda on point - unless we're talking Tribe, De La Soul, or Public Enemy or something the rapping was probably kinda trash. We still had like LL Cool J type shit and Run DMC. This was a few years before Nas, Biggie, and Wu revolutionized shit. Fucking A the Beastie Boys had more solid flow than most of the guys in NWA.
I had a job interview at a music company in New York. Flew out there from CA for 24 hours to get grilled for 10 hours and do random tasks to verify whether I could get the job or not.
The last part of the interview was filming current team mates on my potential team and coming up with the questions. One of my questions was, "You're on a deserted island for an entire year and you can bring one album. What album is it?".
Every time I asked a new person, they first said, "What's yours?". Between 6 people, my answer was interchanged between Paul's Boutique and Hello nasty. Without fail, every time I responded, they looked at me like I was a fucking kook.
That was years ago and I still work there. To this day, I silently thank the Beastie Boys for making those albums because they were possibly the reason I got that job.