"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Prelude: 1992 – Weird Summer (featuring Check Your Head)

It doesn’t seem like it yet in my part of the world, but summer is almost here, and that means that I will once again be starting a summer movie retrospective. This year I’ve decided to look back at the summer of 30 years ago in a series I’m calling 1992 – WEIRD SUMMER. ‘Cause it was kind of a weird summer, you know? The overall selection of films was unusual, and a bunch of the movies – even the big blockbuster sequels – were not exactly aimed at the normal people with the normal tastes. I’ll try to review most of the major movies of interest, and when applicable I plan to zero in on the theme of weirdness (both intentional and unintentional), the artists who managed to push weirdness into major movies, and how people reacted to it at the time.

I was a teenager in ’92. Most of the summers back then I still associate with a certain movie or movies that loomed large in my mind. ’88 was the summer of DIE HARD and (honestly) WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. ’89 was BATMAN, of course (plus DO THE RIGHT THING). ’90 was DICK TRACY, DARKMAN, DIE HARD 2, and GREMLINS 2. For me ’91 was mostly about T2 and BOYZ N THE HOOD. (I was excited about ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES, but it didn’t stick with me long. And I didn’t see POINT BREAK until later.) Skipping forward, ’93 belonged to JURASSIC PARK. ’94 was SPEED. ’95 was DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, WATERWORLD, DESPERADO, UNDER SIEGE 2, and BABE. etcetera.

But ’92? The movies I saw at the time were an unruly mix of indies, a foreign film or two, and unusual Hollywood offerings. The big blockbuster, collectable-cups-available-at-McDonalds type movie I was most hyped for, and most satisfied with, is one I sometimes forget was even a summer movie because it’s gothic as all get out and takes place at Christmas. The other most interesting event movie was even gloomier, interpreted as aggressively nihilistic, definitely flawed, compromised by the studio, hated by audiences, and disowned by the director to this day. It still got a Pepsi ad.

(update: just now realized that must be Jeremy Davies, right?)

Even if Weird Summer was an off summer it was significant to my development. I sincerely think it played a major role in shaping my ideas about popular art. We will be exploring the pros and cons of artists who work in a popular medium but go against what is expected in their genre, or what is considered commercial, or “what the fans want.”

At least one of these movies could be said to be a story comparing and contrasting different types of weirdos. Many of my heroes were weirdos – or you could say individualists, non-conformists, people voted “most unique” in their yearbooks. Some of my weirdo heroes have since been disgraced, their alleged acts reinforcing the stereotype that people who stand out are not to be trusted. But I still ride for the concept of weirdos in general. I think people who do their own thing make life beautiful. I try to be one of them.

In this series there will be some pretty odd movies, for good and bad, and some more standard ones for palate cleansing. I’ll be looking at calendars and trying to remember what else was going on at the time. As always, I don’t really know if the series will take me where I expect it to. There will surely be some nostalgia. There could be revision of long held views – who knows? There are some movies I’ll be seeing for the first time, and some I’ve been meaning to review for years. There’s a Bruce movie I haven’t seen since at least the VHS days. Maybe the theater.

I think we’ll have a fun time with this. I’ll be starting with a few of the movies released in April that set the stage for and continued playing into the summer, and then we’ll dive in.


“People, how ya doin? It’s a new day dawnin”

Now, in relation to both yesterday’s review and the launching of this series, I would like to have a MUSICAL INTERLUDE. Yeah, I know it’s self-indulgent to wax nostalgic about music I listened to when I was a teen, but I think there’s a parallel between what I see in these movies and what was going on in music. So let’s talk a little bit about the Beastie Boys’ third album, Check Your Head, which was released on April 21, 1992. Apparently it wasn’t gigantic by pop music standards (by the metric of Billboard album charts it’s the group’s sixth most successful album) but to me and my friends it was seismic, one of the few things in pop culture that almost everyone I knew was over the moon about.

For many, it was a comeback for a group that had been huge in ’86, but soon written off as a novelty. Not for me. They had not left my attention. I bought their second album Paul’s Boutique (on the green cassette tape) the day it came out, loved it on first listen, still do thousands of listens later. It’s still my favorite of their albums. But Check Your Head was in some ways more important.

I don’t know about other places, but where I grew up, young people often categorized each other by the music they listened to. I guess there wasn’t really a name for the normal people who listened to the top 40 stations (some of them were “preppies” I guess?), but there were “rockers” (called heshers in some places) who listened to heavy metal, there were punks who listened to punk bands, a few goths who listened to whatever goths listen to, and (because rap had not yet taken over popular music) they called the kids who listened to rap “gangsters.” I remember some guy asked my brother if he was disappointed I was a gangster. It was dumb.

Then in the early ‘90s, certain music started being called “alternative,” and people who listened to “alternative music” or dressed a certain way or had a certain type of hair were “alternative” people. In August of ’91 a new “alternative rock” station, 107.7 The End, started in Seattle. They lucked out because three huge albums by Seattle bands (Nevermind by Nirvana, Ten by Pearl Jam and Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden) came out within a month and a half of their start. And the first Lollapalooza tour hit Washington State five days after their first broadcast. (I went mainly to see Ice-T and came home a Fishbone fan.) The next summer – August 8, 1992, specifically – The End kicked off their own annual outdoor music festival called Endfest. The first one (which I also attended) featured The Charlatans UK, L7, Mudhoney, Sarah McLachlan, The Posies, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Sonic Youth and, as the headliners, Beastie Boys.

A year earlier it might’ve seemed weird for them to be in that lineup, but Check Your Head had obliterated traditional genre boundaries. Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique were both radical spins on rap albums, and Check Your Head is too, but they didn’t approach it with any consideration for what section it should go into. They were still rapping, using breakbeats, samples and scratches, but they weren’t observing any boundaries. They picked up the guitar, bass and drums they had played when they were younger, in punk and hardcore bands. They added conga players. They built a studio called G-Son so they wouldn’t worry about recording sessions, just take their time hanging out, listening to records, jamming, coming up with ideas. Mark Nishita, a carpenter who fixed a gate for them and later built them a half pipe and basketball hoop, became their organ player, a huge addition.

We take it for granted now, but the album still has a one-of-a-kind sound and mix of styles. It opens with dusty loops on “Jimmy James” but goes right into the live instrument funk jam “Funky Boss.” “Pass the Mic” smothers old school hip hop lyrics in layers of distortion and guitar squeals. And if we didn’t already think of these guys as rappers how would we classify “Gratitude”? Ad Rock yell-rapping over MCA’s fuzzed out bass groove and rockin guitar breakdowns until it explodes into Money Mark’s organ solo. I don’t know how to classify it. It’s just “Gratitude”!

That’s only the first four tracks out of twenty, and it keeps swerving around like that – hazy funk jams (“Lighten Up,” “Pow,” “Groove Holmes,” “In 3’s”), a messy hardcore song borrowing lyrics from Sly Stone (“Time For Livin’”), an interlude of Biz Markie singing Ted Nugent karaoke (because it made them laugh), dialogue snippets from WILD STYLE, Chico and the Man, and some crazy-sounding fan who left a message on the answering machine MCA set up on the “Ask For Janis” phone number from the last album. “Something’s Got To Give” reminds me of a couple different modes of early Funkadelic without coming across as pastiche. According to the excellent Beastie Boys Book, that one was built around a sample from the middle of a long jam session, while “So What’cha Want” kind of went the reverse route – Ad Rock put together a song with samples that they then decided to replay on their instruments.

(I remember the video for “So What’cha Want” playing constantly on MTV, both at home and on the TVs that were in the school cafeteria thanks to a deal with Channel One. In the same year as Guns ’n’ Roses’ indulgent “November Rain” video here were Ad Rock, Mike D and MCA just bouncing in front of some trees with a some slo-mo and a messy chroma-key effect. Wearing t-shirts, flannel and knit caps they looked like us now.)

And while everybody else was (according to Mike D) “rappin like it’s a commercial,” the Beastie Boys were going wild experimenting with recording techniques – playing drums through a long cardboard tube, distorting vocals by using crappy mics from a home karaoke machine, using a kill switch to cut up guitar tracks like a terminator scratch.

In 2017 Mike D told Flood Magazine that the commercial failure of Paul’s Boutique made the experimentation of Check Your Head possible. “Nobody at the record company wanted to have anything to do with us. So it gave us this total freedom and this vacuum in which we could create Check Your Head. If it were an anticipated record, they would’ve wanted to hear what [was] going on. But nobody was fucking paying attention, so we could do what we wanted.”

And what they chose to do I think elevated them from one of my favorite groups to one of the ideals of what I think artists can aspire to. Check Your Head era Beasties Boys were completely doing their own thing. As with the samples on Paul’s Boutique, their genre-mixing music here shows a broad (but impeccable) range of tastes, and an ability to channel influences into something new. They honor the hip hop and funk that came before them by not just mimicking it. They are cool but absolutely unpretentious, their boasts tongue-in-cheek, yet contradictorily accurate. They have an infectious sense of dumb humor and prankishness that enhances, rather than cancels out, moments of sincerity.

If I’m not mistaken, there are no references to “girlies” or similar, as on the previous albums; the record documents them in the midst of growing as people. As MCA says at the beginning of “Stand Together”:

I don’t see things quite the same as I used to
As I live my life, I’ve got just me to be true to

In the middle of recording the album he took many spontaneous trips around the world, mostly for snowboarding. (Think of his line in “So What’cha Want”: “I’m tired of driving, it’s due time that I walkabout.”) During a trek in the Himalayas he met some Tibetans in exile and became fascinated with their non-violent philosophy, setting him on a path to becoming Buddhist and organizing the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. So the album ends on “Namasté,” where he reads “some thoughts that he’d written down” over music. Six years after “Fight For Your Right To Party” he’s talking about “dark is not the opposite of light, it’s the absence of light,” and you can’t mock him, because it’s so clearly not a front. It’s the real guy, the real journey, expressed honestly through this art that would already be good without that openness, because it’s so outwardly fun and different and cool.

That’s one of my favorite things – art that can be strange and new and personal and still be entertaining enough to be widely popular and bring joy to people all around the world. I like some alienating stuff on the fringes too, and not everything needs to be for everybody, but you might as well share some of the good shit with the masses. It’s healthy for the world. The world needs some of the good shit.

I think pretty much all of this can apply to movies, and in the coming weeks maybe we’ll see how much it applies to the movies released in the summer of 1992.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2022 at 11:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

37 Responses to “Prelude: 1992 – Weird Summer (featuring Check Your Head)”

  1. Super excited for this year’s summer series! And it starts off with Vern writing about one of my all-time favorite albums? Yes, please and thank you!

    Just a few days ago, I ordered a 30th anniversary 4-or-5 LP vinyl version of Check Your Head (plus remixes, B-sides, etc). It’s not coming until June and I’m practically counting the days.

  2. Very excited for this series. Partly for the Death Becomes Her review. I saw it at a drive in that summer.

  3. Wow… That last pic solved an ages old mystery

    My first year of school I had a roommate John who was for all intensive purposes: a pot-head Guido

    But over the course of the first semester, he underwent this strange transformation. He began wearing flannel shirts meant for people three times his size. He ditched his white baseball cap and began wearing a unfolded knit watch-cap. He put a giant Miles Davis poster on the wall, even though I had never witnessed him listening to anything beyond Cypress Hill and House of Pain. I frankly could never understand what he was going for. A giant lumberjack beatnik? But upon looking at that last picture, it has finally dawned on me

    The fourth Beastie Boy

  4. Yesssss, a new series!

    I turned 10 years old in 1992 and don’t remember much about it. According to the German school system it must’ve meant I finished elementary school (Don’t know about your place of the world, but here it’s four years, starting at age 6). I didn’t care much about movies yet, but was slowly driven towards them, because around that time “Family video stores” became a thing. Which meant when you wanted to rent a movie in the 80s, you had to wait outside, because kids weren’t allowed in them. But by the start of the 90s, they had the great idea to just put all the movies with an 18 rating into their seperate room for adults only and be able to let everybody in. Kids could even have their own membership card and rent age appropriate movies by themself! I mostly used it back then to rent Nintendo games, but obviously I started to check out the video covers too.

    Musicwise I wasn’t really interested in anything yet either, but for christmas, my sister and me got our first CD player. Techno music started at that time to creep into the mainstream, but it still took a few more years until the German top 100 were dominated by tracks with 150bpm and above. 1992 was the first Mayday, which was originally a small-ish rave party that worked as a fundraiser for a radio station, but within a few years became the biggest indoor rave in the world (and is still happening)!

    Anyway, can’t wait to be taken on another review journey. These things are always fun.

  5. I believe this is the summer I visited my granduncle in Spain bought a TORTUGA NINJAS Splinter keyring and was very upset when I left it on the beach. But good news, we found it!

    28 I was.

    (Actually 5)

  6. Really not looking forward to the re-opening of the ALIEN(3) wars ….

  7. To quote the Stray Cats, “me neither”.

  8. By the way, Vern, feel free to write more about music albums once in a while. Nobody here expects you to review new releases every week, but whenever you think “Hey, now would be a good moment to write a few words about one of my favourite records”, go ahead.

  9. I love the summer retrospectives! I hope this means you’ll be reviewing Strictly Ballroom.

  10. I genuinely can’t wait to hear about Sister Act. I love that movie and it’s soundtrack. Emile Ardolino had a real light touch. Watched Dirty Dancing for the first time ever last year (I’m 43) and was hugely surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

  11. The Winchester

    May 12th, 2022 at 1:22 pm

    Very exciting times! I remember being super psyched for summer 92 because of Lethal Weapon 3/Alien3/Batman Returns, but the weekend before it came out I, being a film savvy 8th grader, happened to see The Player twice in theaters! That changed my life. (Looking through my stubs, I realized I actually saw it this day 30 years ago, and i am freaking out a little)

    Love the summer love, and especially for the weird outliers. (Split Second came out May 1st! Deep Cover is around now too! Why do i remember these things and not what my wife tells me 5 minutes ago?!?)

    And this review got me psyched to revisit Check Your Head! Ive always loved Paul and I’ll Communication but need to heed this more respect.

  12. Bryan – well, it didn’t come out that summer in the U.S., but maybe I can try to watch it before that Elvis movie comes out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.

  13. Fincher went through hell on Alien 3. It’s a wonder It’s even watchable. He said he’s never bothered watching the alternate cut. Just think it brings up bad memories. Anyway. Excited for this series like I said. I was 11 going on 12 so I saw a lot of them that summer.

  14. Thank you, Vern,

    I await this series all year long. It is the high point of criticism/analysis for me.

    Please turn the summers into a book!

  15. I worked for a chain of liquor stores for a couple years that was owned by a guy named Jimmy James. He had a gold plated office that would have rivaled Individual 1, and his wife was named Muffy.

    This was the Beastie Boys album that changed my outlook on their music (and music in general, etc.) I love the musical interlude idea (need to summon the fire for a Tell’s It again sometime) and I can’t wait for the summer of 92 which for me started it’s own unannounced cosmic retrospective when I found myself downtown again for the first time, randomly flipping through songs until I was playing a certain Sublime song on April 29th, 2022

  16. “They have an infectious sense of dumb humor and prankishness that enhances, rather than cancels out, moments of sincerity.”

    This is hands down the most astute observation of The Beastie Boys that I can imagine, thank you for this!

    Man, I miss them. I was born in 1980 and during my Freshman year in high school EVERY house party I went to had Ill Communication playing in full at some point.

    Jesus, remember the anticipation for Hello, Nasty and it somehow exceeding our expectations? What an incredible legacy.

    R.I.P. MCA.

    (Vern, curious as to your thoughts on that Spike Jonze “documentary” from the end of last year. It sure gave me all kinds of the feels)

  17. Franchise Fred

    May 12th, 2022 at 9:05 pm

    In my nostalgia I keep finding myself drawn back to 1992 in general. While ‘91, ‘93, ‘94 et al were much more significant and memorable, in terms of art and life, there’s something about ‘92. Maybe it’s that I was so in between. 10th grads, 15 years old. I’ve become a teenager but can’t quite drive and be independent yet. It’s weird, man, abs maybe the movies reflected that too.

    Anyway, Cool World alone will make this series worth it.

  18. Ah, 1992, one of my favourites when it comes to years. In life, but also in movies. Got engaged, landed a steady job, bought a house, a car…and fought in the first ALIEN 3 war!

  19. Ray – Yeah, that documentary/live book event thing was really good. Very humble, funny, lots of good stories about friendship. And yeah, very emotional of course. I love hearing all those MCA stories and realizing he was so much cooler than we ever knew.

    Fred – I definitely have to talk about COOL WORLD but I don’t think I will re-review it. I watched it 4 years ago, I’ve done my penance.

  20. How about some fresh perspectives on Steve Forbert’s THE AMERICAN IN ME, Rancid’s RANCID,PIL’s THAT WHAT IS NOT, James’ SEVEN, Madness’ DIVINE MADNESS, Bad Religion’s GENERATOR, The Church’s PRIEST=AURA, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s HONEY’S DEAD, Lyle Lovett’s JOSHUA JUDGES RUTH, Tom Waits’ NIGHT ON EARTH, The Cure’s WISH, Michelle Shocked’s ARKANSAS TRAVELER, Nick Cave’s HENRY’S DREAM, Melissa Etheridge’s NEVER ENOUGH, Los Lobos’ KIKO, PJ Harvey’s DRY, House of Pain’s HOUSE OF PAIN, Mötorhead’s MARCH ÖR DIE, Ramones’ MONDO BIZARRO and Lucinda Williams’ SWEET OLD WORLD, who all came out in ’92?

  21. As always seems to be the case, I am excited about this but that is tinged with a sadness that the vagaries of trans-Atlantic releasing schedules back then and my memory mean that this won’t completely be my summer of 1992. Most notably no NAKED LUNCH, which was a late 1991 release in the US, but would surely have brought a lot to the weirdness table.

    And no LAST OF THE MOHICANS or BAD LIEUTENANT, as they were late ’92 releases. I still believe there’s a great Vern review of MOHICANS out there waiting for us all, and the existing review of BAD LIEUTENANT just made me laugh out loud a lot. Recommended:

    That said, I guess we will get us some David Lynch, and one of John Lithgow’s great mega performances (revisited), and, talking of mega acting, HONEYMOON IN VEGAS (please!).

    But if I’m gonna do any special pleading, it’d be for a review of SNEAKERS, which although it was released the weekend after Labor Day, I would argue definitely shows weirdness leeching into the mainstream, in a movie with Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier, no less, while tying it back to ’60s radicalism and post-Watergate paranoia. In a comedy!

  22. And Vern, if I may, as a friend, no need to review it unless you really feel it, but if you’ve never seen STRICTLY BALLROOM, watch it for yourself. I doubt the Elvis movie will be better.

  23. Musically the summer of 1992 for me was Lollapalooza – realizing that Luscious Jackson were an amazing band, surfing the acre wide mosh pit at Molson Park in Barrie, Ontario and surviving while Ice Cube tore through ‘The Wrong N**** to Fuck Wit’ and confirming that I hated Pearl Jam.

    And nothing better represents that crazy year film wise than the fact that the film that opened the Cannes Film Festival was BASIC INSTINCT and the film that closed it was FAR AND AWAY, and that MAN BITES DOG had its world premiere at the festival.

    Personally – I turned 22 in May, graduated University and took the summer off – with promises that I would go back to school in the fall or find work. Of course I bull shitted my way through the summer and headed to Europe to back pack for 6 months at the start of the fall school year.

    Que Sera Sera.

    Looking forward to this series of reviews Vern! Will we get a TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALKS WITH ME review?

  24. Well, sign me up!

    My own personal wish list for a Vern Retrospective (92 edition)

    1. BASIC INSTINCT = Michael Douglas gets naked
    2. SHINING THROUGH = Michael Douglas does not
    3. SINGLE WHITE FEMALE = Bridget Fonda AND Jennifer Jason Leigh get naked (bless their hearts)
    4. THE WATERDANCE = Wesley Snipes, Eric Stoltz and William Forsyth as paraplegics. And Helen Hunt gets naked
    (bless her heart)
    5. WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP= The Gospel According to Wesley in 4 words: LISTEN TO THE WOMAN
    6. PASSENGER 57 = The Gospel According to Wesley in 4 words: ALWAYS BET ON BLACK
    7. TRESPASS = Who says you can’t have Ice Cube with your Ice-T?
    8. ONE FALSE MOVE = And….it’s Game Over Man! Game Over!
    9. THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE = Rebecca De Mornay is =RISKY BUSINESS
    10.STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT = Just how bad is it???
    11. MEDICINE MAN = The Hunt For Amazon Flora
    12. PATRIOT GAMES = Jack Ryan Ver 2.0
    13. THE BODYGUARD = Dances With Whitney

  25. BuzzFeedAldrin

    May 13th, 2022 at 6:48 am

    I was 12 in 1992 and while the movie I was most excited for was obviously Batman Returns (the first and last time I spent my own money on the large soda and popcorn just so I could get the promo poster the theater was offering) the one that affected me the most was Encino Man which remains one of my favorite movies to this day. Fuck a guilty pleasure.

    I have a weird relationship to the Beastie Boys. The first time I heard them was when my camp counselor in NYC would play License to Ill on the bus rides to and from day camp. Seven year old Buzz thought it was hilarious. Then, like you said, they kind of faded from the popular consciousness. As the “alternative” era came about I was living in NJ where, for whatever reason, grunge and alternative bands were huge with the popular kids at my middle and high school. The jocks in particular latched onto the Beasties. I had a friend who was jock-adjacent and when driving around in his car I had most of Check Your Head and Ill Communication drilled into my brain. By then I was into punk and goth and REAL hip-hop like Common and Wu-Tang and didn’t have time for major-label, Mtv-played, white rap. I respect what they did now but I still can’t get jiggy with a lot of the Beasties stuff for whatever reason? Guilt by association, I suppose?

  26. I seem to be younger than everyone here, so the main thing I remember from 1992 is the Batman Return breakfast cereal.

    I am envious of a weirdo, though. Someone with the confidence– or complete lack of social awareness?– to be fully and truly themselves. Alas, I am not one of those people. I hide my weirdness. Like Michael Keaton’s Batman.

  27. The Winchester

    May 13th, 2022 at 2:08 pm

    I should also mention that summer of 92 contained what was most definitely my Woodstock- the cinematic pairing of titans that is Universal Soldier!

    Saw that 4 times! Last time, we we’re the only guys in the theater. Best flick of the summer, even when you consider Rapid Fire and Diggstown are in that mix

  28. Franchise Fred

    May 13th, 2022 at 6:53 pm

    I thought I remembered Cool World here recently. Must’ve been summer flings. Yeah you did the lord’s work.

  29. 1992, and I remember climbing into the treehouse my friend’s parents built for his younger brother. A double date, me and my friend and two girls, dancing horribly to “So Watcha Want” over and over in between clove cigarettes. Worth it.

  30. COOL WORLD has more genuine merit than ALIEN 3.

    IT’S KICKING OFF!!!!

  31. There have been some interesting updates in the world of COOL recently by the way.

    How Did This Get Made: Cool World Writer Interview

    In this edition of How Did This Get Made, we offer a look at the making of an infamous '90s bomb with our Cool World writer interview.

  32. I’ve always been fascinated by Alien 3 and am young enough that when i first bought it on DVD it included the longer ‘assembly cut’. It’s very much superior to what was released in theatres. Though still flawed of course. I wonder if you might have time to offer your thoughts on the longer cut Vern? Appreciate that you’re going to have a lot of films to watch over the next few months though!

  33. I agree that the producer’s cut is a huge improvement, and I’m sure I’ll have something to say about that, but I’m planning to (for the last time?) watch the theatrical cut. For historical accuracy. I’m excited to get to that one – should be interesting.

  34. Franchise Fred

    May 18th, 2022 at 4:49 pm

    This may be a conversation for after the series ends, but does anyone think 92 and 98 may be the two Weird Summers of the ‘90s? They’re the summers that don’t seem to have much of a personality to me, although ‘98 probably has more significant films. And that may be a function of where I was in life during those years altho not quite. While 92 was an in between year, 98 was my first summer in LA, but the movies were letdowns.

    Vern did a great 98 series so I wonder if there are parallels or that’s only in my head.

  35. Very excited for this series!

    And:does any record ever made sound quite like Check Your Head? Or even exist in the same genre? Somehow even Ill Communication isn’t quite the same thing….

  36. You were a teen in 1992? I would’ve thought you remembered the death of JFK.

  37. Random stuff: I recently bought CHECK YOUR HEAD, based on this post. I’ve been a Beastie Boys appreciator, but wouldn’t call myself a fan, who would listen to their whole discography on repeat or buy all their CDs. In fact, before that I only had their Best Of, THE MIX-UP, a rare-ish British Maxi CD of ALIVE because I wanted the Bentley Rhythm Ace remix and PAUL’S BOUTIQUE.

    I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to it before through the modern miracle of streaming, but obviously physical media makes it so much easier to actually focus on it for some reason and hell yeah, it’s a damn great album! Still sounds incredibly unique and far out, despite decades of Nu Metal and other genre crossovers. Having slept on it for so long (although a surprising amount of songs from it are on the Best Of) makes me feel a little bit bad, but hey, better late than never.

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