0077779893829. Pre-Owned: Good condition. CD. Check Your Head brought the Beastie Boys crashing back into the charts and into public consciousness but that was only partially due to the album itself -- much of its initial success was due to the cult audience that Paul s Boutique cultivated in the years since its initial flop release a group of fans whose minds were so thoroughly blown by that record they couldn t wait to see what came next and this helped the record debut in the Top Ten upon its April 1992 release. This audience perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly was a collegiate Gen-X audience raised on Licensed to Ill and ready for the Beastie Boys to guide them through college. As it happened the Beasties had repositioned themselves as a lo-fi alt-rock groove band. They had not abandoned rap but it was no longer the foundation of their music it was simply the most prominent in a thick pop-culture gumbo where old school rap sat comfortably with soul-jazz hardcore punk white-trash metal arena rock Bob Dylan bossa nova spacy pop and hard dirty funk. What they did abandon was the psychedelic samples of Paul s Boutique turning toward primitive grooves they played themselves augmented by keyboardist Money Mark and co-producer Mario Caldato Jr.. This all means that music was the message and the rhymes which had been pushed toward the forefront on both Licensed to Ill and Paul s Boutique have been considerably de-emphasized (only four songs -- Jimmy James Pass the Mic Finger Lickin Good and So What cha Want -- could hold their own lyrically among their previous work). This is not a detriment because the focus is not on the words it s on the music mood and even the newfound neo-hippie political consciousness. And Check Your Head is certainly a record that s greater than the sum of its parts -- individually nearly all the tracks are good (the instrumentals sound good on their subsequent soul-jazz collection The in Sound From Way Out) but it s the context and variety of styles that give Check Your Head its identity. It s how the old school raps give way to fuzz-toned rockers furious punk and cheerfully gritty jazzy jams. As much as Paul s Boutique this is a whirlwind tour through the Beasties pop-culture obsessions but instead of spinning into Technicolor fantasies it s earth-bound D.I.Y. that makes it all seem equally accessible -- which is a big reason why it turned out to be an alt-rock touchstone of the 90s something that both set trends and predicted them. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine Rovi