E-Mail This Article to a Friend Absence of malice Beastie Boys turn down the heat on To the 5 Boroughs BY FRANKLIN SOULTS

Whether you believe the media hype or not, you can’t deny the heat generated by a certain release that hit the streets last week. It sold out everywhere in my blue-collar, rock-and-roll home town of Cleveland. This isn’t the first time this name brand has hit big, of course, but when it first thumbed its cookie puss at the man in the 1980s, it was often dismissed as a snot-nosed, party-crashing novelty gag. It wasn’t until later releases that the plebian culture the early stuff had exploited for yucks was championed with dignity. And today, the stakes are so high that the question is whether this latest release can burst the brand’s fan base and finally earn the respect of mass plebian culture in return.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m referring to filmmaker Michael Moore and his eagerly awaited anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. As it happened, Beastie Boys also released an eagerly awaited, explicitly anti-Bush project last week, the trio’s seventh studio album, To the 5 Boroughs (Capitol). But despite the media attention, the heat generated by this new disc will probably never reach anything like the swelter of Moore’s documentary. Spin gave the Boys a cover story, Rolling Stone honored the disc with five stars (in a lead review that bumped Wilco’s, no less), and you could catch something about the album on every media outlet that makes music a mainstay. But aside from David Fricke’s Rolling Stone review, every piece I saw acknowledged to some degree that the coverage was largely in reaction to the fact that Beastie Boys hadn’t dropped a new album in six years. And this was news, I suspect, only because there aren’t enough stars in today’s downsized market to fill the void the Boys had left. Some of these stories also suggested that the music biz isn’t even sure the Beasties can fill their own void any longer. Given everything that’s happened since their last studio album, 1998’s Hello Nasty, those fears are at least as justified as the hopes for Michael Moore’s film.

For starters, there’s the downsizing that the absentee artists have themselves committed. In 2001, the Beasties closed their ambitious label and culture magazine of the same name, Grand Royal, and got busy doing plenty of nothing ("We ate a lot of sandwiches," says Adam "King Adrock" Horovitz in one video interview). Last year, they reappeared with the free download "In a World Gone Mad," a simple ditty with skip-rope electronic beats and an anti-W rap. The combination was so lightweight that it seemed less hip-hop than hippie: "Murder going on all day and night/Due time we fight the non-violent fight" went the sing-song chorus, which was delivered with extra passivity to stress the desired result. And then a few weeks ago came To the 5 Boroughs’ opening cut, "Ch-Check It Out." The video is a mildly amusing revival of Beasties video characters from the past, and the song itself is equally inconsequential, laying out old-school catch phrases and TV Land similes that suggest the Boys are now full-fledged boomers. The chorus’s climactic couplet: "Work-wa-work it out/Let’s turn this motherfuckin’ party out."

Now in case you non-boomers don’t know, the Beasties were the first rap group not to work it out; instead, they wrecked shop with their bad attitudes and badder imaginations. Their mission was partly to remake rap in their image, partly to remake their image any way they liked. In the beginning, they played the aforementioned snot-nosed party crashers, rhyming and pillaging to the dismay of everyone from old schoolmarms to old-school masters. What’s more, unlike Michael Moore, these purported suburban lowlifes were actually the sons of successful, cosmopolitan professionals (Horovitz’s father is Gloucester playwright Israel Horovitz). Which means they were the first whites to exploit rap as a vehicle for bohemian slumming — a rite of passage for America’s adventurous scions of middle-class comfort ever since Tom hitched a ride with Huck down the Mississippi. And then, after they’d proved themselves Licensed to Ill in 1986, they spent the next dozen years rebuilding a spacious, quirky, thoroughly stylish home from that wreckage.

So why would they want to go back to the prefab housing they originally took the sledgehammer to? The short answer provided by the compact To the 5 Boroughs is that it’s "Time To Build." Partly that’s because we’ve now got a "president we didn’t elect" who has proved to the world that "it’s easier to break things than build it correct." Partly it’s a response to the other downsizing that occurred in 2001, the one that all New Yorkers felt so deeply. The cover art’s lovely line drawing of the New York skyline dates from 2000, and the Beasties made sure that the section with the Twin Towers fell onto the album’s front panel. Despite its narrow focus, the rest of the album is just as lovingly structured, offering up a fantasy of the past that reflects the concerns of the present. Gone are the instrumentals with which the Beasties once padded their hodge-podge mansion, and also the whumping bass and chattering guitar that helped them live so large. In their place is a stark, jittery backdrop of electronic grooves that nestles halfway between yesteryear’s electroclash fad (Miss Kittin, Felix da Housecat) and the Neptunes’ easy sleaze. In other words, it sounds something like the early ’80s, but it’s also thoroughly contemporary. In their urge to purge, the Beasties have also jettisoned all outside producers, which means this is their first self-produced album in 21 years of recording hip-hop — another forward step masked as a backwards move.

The disc is rife with these progressive regressions. The Boys indulge in the dumb disses and bald boasts of their youth ("Here’s a match: my ass and your face"), but the raps are modulated with a softness of tone and a subtlety of timing these three rappers have never dared before. And if "3 the Hard Way" and "Crawlspace" are paeans to the battle raps of yore, they’re interspersed with political messages like "Right Right Now Now" that build to the centerpiece, "An Open Letter to NYC." Riding a haunting sample of the Dead Boys’ "Sonic Reducer," that song sweeps through New York’s geography, honors its diversity, and mourns its losses with sweet swiftness and ease.

Which is exactly why it doesn’t quite take the album home — when but in a fantastic dream does anyone sweep through New York with swiftness and ease? If the Beasties’ New York fantasy is as finely drawn as their cover art, it also feels as empty, distant, and passé. Worse yet, it seems mildly delusional. The most vibrant hip-hop today — like almost all the most vibrant pop since the dawn of post-WW2 youth culture — is constructed on the margins, even when it looks back to some golden era, the way Muslim albino rapper Brother Ali does on his righteous Shadows on the Sun (Rhymesayers) or Boston’s own Akrobatik does on his race-conscious Balance (Coup d’État), or Beastie Boys–inspired female trio Northern State do on Dying in Stereo (Star Time). All those discs were released during the latter half of the Beasties’ long hiatus, after the towers fell, when underground hip-hop exploded across this continent with a political acuity that belies the necessity of the Beasties’ "can’t-we-get-along" passivity.

It’s easy to see why the crew felt backed into that stance. The Beasties’ own career has shown them too well how unbridled testosterone can be a menace, how quickly popular music’s rebellion can turn into a blunt instrument of oppression. The same point is driven home by Fahrenheit 9/11 when US soldiers in Iraq talk about how they blast a Bloodhound Gang CD inside their tank to pump themselves up as they mow down the enemy. But Moore’s messy, sometimes brilliant documentary also shows the value of fighting fire with fire, of answering Dick Cheney’s "Go fuck yourself" with art to that same effect.

Even so, the slight, easy-flowing, nostalgia-ridden To the 5 Boroughs may still be one of Beastie Boys’ bravest discs. The last time they made such a momentous change in direction was 1992, when they decided to play their own instruments on their third album, Check Your Head. Although that album became a touchstone of the alterna-rock era, it was a bong-water-stained throw rug in comparison with the dense tapestry of the Beasties’ previous release, Paul’s Boutique. After Check Your Head, it took the group six years to find a style that could survey the heights they’d reached on Paul’s Boutique. That was Hello Nasty. Now, if they want to start from scratch once again, in penance for having moved hip-hop from the projects and into the dorms, for having lost touch with their urban roots, they need to do the exact opposite. We’re all sorry the towers are gone. But it’s time to let them go and come back down into the shout of the streets.