Happy 10th Anniversary to the Beastie Boys’ eighth & final studio album Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, originally released April 27, 2011.
I’ve written before about how few groups get to end their career on their own terms. The Beastie Boys, one of the most beloved bands in modern music history, is one of those groups. When Adam “MCA” Yauch, Adam “Ad-Rock” Horowitz, and Michael “Mike D” Diamond began the recording process for what they eventually envisioned would be a two-part album, they had no idea that they would only get to put out the first installment, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.
“It was unintentionally our last album,” Ad-Rock wrote in Beastie Boys Book (2018), an expansive memoir/tome chronicling the Beasties’ career. “The band didn’t break up. We didn’t go our own creative ways. No solo project fucked things up to cause animosity. This was our last record because Adam got cancer and died.”
The Beastie Boys were never able to tour to support Hot Sauce Committee Part Two when they released it 10 years ago, and only ever performed a single song from it (“Too Many Rappers” with Nas) live. They’re even absent from most of the visual representations of the album. The video for “Too Many Rappers” is straightforward, but in “Make Some Noise,” the group is played by Jack Black, Will Ferrell, and John C. Reily. Meanwhile, the video for “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win” is populated entirely by action figures.
Hence, in some ways Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is a throwback to an era that the Beastie Boys revere. It’s an album in which the music really has to speak for itself. And the Beastie Boys succeed, as the long player showed that nearly a quarter of a century after releasing Licensed To Ill (1986), the group still had a lot in the tank. Which makes it all the sadder that it was their final statement. It ends up being a fitting capstone to the group’s career, honoring all parts of their legacy.
Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is a step up from To The 5 Boroughs (2004), their previous rap-based album. Like Ill Communication (1994), thematically it’s built around reverence to old school hip-hop. There aren’t really any “message” tracks or deeper meanings to the tracks, as it’s mostly just the three emcees having fun. But even though it doesn’t come across as a “grand artistic declaration,” it was incredibly ambitious in its execution.
The release of Hot Sauce Committee Part Two logically leads to the question: What happened to Part 1? There is no clear answer. The Beasties have said that the first incarnation of Hot Sauce Committee was slated to drop in Fall 2009. They put out the singles “Lee Majors Come Again” and “Too Many Rappers,” and sent out a tracklist for the album through their newsletter. At some point in the creative process, the group announced that since they had recorded so much material, Hot Sauce Committee would be split into two volumes.
Not long before Hot Sauce Committee Part One was to be released, MCA was diagnosed with cancer of the parotid gland and began treatment. Understandably, the group ceased all planned promotion and touring. But behind the scenes, they apparently began tooling with the album, re-recording existing tracks and messing around with the tracklist for Part One.
But in the Fall of 2010, the group officially announced that Part One was now delayed indefinitely and that Part Two would be released that spring. However, Part Two would be comprised of the same 16 songs originally intended for Part One in essentially the same order of the tracklist that they first released back in 2009. Yes, it’s confusing.
As for Part One, which I guess was originally intended to be Part Two, its status remains somewhat of a mystery. In Beastie Boys Book, Ad-Rock maintains that the group completed recording it, but left the hard drive on a boxcar somewhere outside Missoula, Montana. This explanation sounds…dubious, as does his assertion that the group was researching 1920s transportation as it related to the album when they misplaced said hard drive.
Nevertheless, from this convoluted mess emerged a pretty damn good project. Musically, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is built around an ingenious idea. It started with the Beasties “sampling themselves,” as in playing riffs and then sampling sections that worked to creating their backing tracks. That approach alone didn’t make it unique, as artists like The Roots & De La Soul had done it before and have done it since.
However, the Beasties took it an extra step by working to create music that would sound like it was taken from extremely obscure records from the ‘60s or ’70s, which entailed creating “unpremeditated audio,” as Ad-Rock puts it in Beastie Boys Book. Achieving this technique wasn’t simple.
“When you sample a piece of music, you don’t just sample the beat or guitar part or vocal thing you want,” Ad-Rock writes. “There are always random, unintentional, and mostly unheard sounds that come with it … There’s almost always some tiny obscure, off-chance sound that’s buried in that drumbeat or guitar line you’ve sampled.”
All of this involved a meticulous recording and mixing process. They’d add “ghost sounds,” including bits of piano or bass that would’ve come in right before the loop. They’d even add fake crackle, making the tracks sound as they had been taken right off records found at “imaginary yard sales, bookstores, and record shops.”
The Beasties took it even another step further, creating bands, song titles, albums, and record labels that all of these samples “came” from, and included them in Hot Sauce Committee’s liner notes. They’d hoped to create an unsolvable maze for industrious crate-diggers, who would furiously scour the Earth looking for records that didn’t exist. They even created a gallery of fake album covers, which are all on display in Beastie Boys Book, and they came up with entirely too convincing and eclectic of names: “Isosceles Dilemma” by Root Cellar on Buabhall Records and “Stone Love Lady” by Rail on Octavious Records.
Unfortunately, as Ad-Rock laments, no one appeared to notice. At the time of the book’s publishing, he wrote that he had yet to be approached by a single befuddled beat-hound, confounded by their inability to find “I’m Suped (Got It Like That)” by Pump.
The truth is, by 2011, most people were buying music on iTunes, so it’s completely possible that not enough people had physical copies of Hot Sauce Committee Part Two to read the liner notes. While I purchased a CD, and consider myself a somewhat low-level crate-digger, I confess that I didn’t spend too much time pouring over the album’s sample credits. The idea may have been a few years ahead of its time. It’s certainly something that few artists beyond the Beastie Boys would attempt.
On the album’s lyrical end, the Beasties are pretty much themselves. Or the post-Paul Boutique’s version of themselves. They continue to celebrate hip-hop’s late ’70s and early ’80s period in their deliveries and references in their rhymes. It’s also apparent that they were having a lot of fun recording their raps in the studio.
The album shares the most similarities with Check Your Head (1992) and Ill Communication 1994), but sonically and on the lyrical end. And like much of those two albums, the trio’s raps are often layered with distortion, making them seem generated from a boombox or fuzzy amp. This fits in with Part Two’s pastiche.
The album leads off with “Make Some Noise,” which functioned as a second first single. The song is built around itchy guitars and keyboards, as well as a stark drum track. It’s also the first song by the Beasties to directly invoke their Def Jam years in quite some time (MCA chants “Party for your motherfuckin’ right to fight!” on the chorus). In Beastie Boys Book, Ad-Rock said he envisioned it as a “show closer” and lamented never having the chance to perform it in front of an audience.
Despite its title, there’s nothing particularly disco about “Nonstop Disco Powerpack.” Instead, the three members channel the Treacherous 3 and the Cold Crush Brothers, performing routines over a sparse drum track and a faint, echoing bassline. “OK” is the group’s tribute to the New Wave music that they listened to in their youth, while the hard-charging guitars on “Say It” emit a “So What’cha Want” vibe.
With its strange percussion patterns and laser-like keyboards, “Here’s a Little Something For Ya” is packed with energy, and the group cuts loose with reckless abandon. Ad-Rock namechecks both John Salley and Andre Leon Talley, while MCA raps, “The odds are stacked, for those who lack / Been a lucky motherfucker when it comes to that.”
“Too Many Rappers,” their aforementioned collaboration with Nas, works much, much better than I ever would have thought it could. The “New Reactionaries Version” that appears on the album is different than the video version. Six months after they initially recorded the song, Yauch completely re-did the beat and recorded a new lead-off verse. It was the right decision, as the remixed version of the track is superior to the original.
The song is a blast, with the four emcees trading eight-bar verses. Nas sounds relaxed yet energetic rhyming over warped keyboards, the “Superfuzz” bass and Yauch’s John Bonham-esque drums. “I’m broader than Broadway, I was the project hallway,” Nas boasts. “Dual tape recorder, lacing oratorials all day / I’m just getting started on this beat, this is foreplay / And when this song’s finished, y’all can sing along with this.”
The Beasties took some artistic chances with their single “Don’t Play No Game I Can’t Win,” a team-up with singer Santigold. The song is an attempt to experiment with the Reggae/Dub sound, but in a bit more of an accessible way than their collaboration with Lee “Scratch” Perry on Hello Nasty (1998).
“Don’t Play No Game…” is also one of the few times, post-Paul’s Boutique, that the Beasties worked with an outside producer on one of their projects. Santigold had requested Switch, who produced material for her debut album, to help with the track, and the group complied. The result is another breezily entertaining track, with the crew and Santi grooving over strains of horn and skanking guitars.
“Long Burn the Fire” is one of Hot Sauce Committee’s most musically interesting songs, a juxtaposition of low-down New Orleans funk and tongue-in-cheek lyrics. Committing to the “sampling yourself” bit beyond all reasonable expectations, the group apparently recorded an entire fake song titled “Shallow Water” based around a weird vocal sample that they conceived, then lifted portions of it to use for “Long Burn…” It results in an eerie, echoing concoction.
“Long Burn…” features some of the album’s most off-the-wall lyrics. MCA states that “my style is iller than the goblins in Troll 2” and Mike D asserts that he’s the “Jewish Brad Pitt.” Meanwhile, Ad-Rock boasts that he’s “a proctologist, I move asses / Got so much heat that I fog your mom’s glasses / Proof is in the pudding and the pudding's in my pants / You heard me rapping, now watch me dance.”
“Funky Donkey” is an amusing yet brief track featuring steel drums and a watery bassline. The three emcees each breezily kick couplets and pass the mic, with MCA declaring that suckers need to “stop sweating me about the weather / Go shave a sheep and knit yourself a sweater.” The track ends with a thunderous percussion breakdown that rocks as hard as many an old school break.
“Tadlock’s Glasses” is the most “out there” track on Hot Sauce Committee. It apparently takes its name from a set of golden sunglasses owned by the group’s bus driver while they were on their first tour; Tadlock asserted that they were a gift from Elvis Presley. The song is a completely bizarre endeavor, as the beat sounds like it was lifted from a broken 8-Bit arcade game (Even though it’s “credited” to “Sun Creations” by “Rasheed Smith”). The lyrics border on gibberish and are vaguely food related. I assume we’ll never know if MCA telling someone that they’ve got a bagel in their pants is a good or a bad thing, but “Got a six-finger ring that says ‘excuse our dust’” is unquestionably a great closing line for a song.
The Beasties occasionally honor some of the other influences beyond old school hip-hop. “Lee Majors Come Again” is a punk-rock jam, harkening back to their roots as a hardcore band. “Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament” is Hot Sauce Committee’s sole instrumental track, a creeping, murky bassline-heavy creation, accompanied by scratches of guitar. It shares some of the similar dub-influenced aesthetic of “Don’t Play No Game…,” but functions as a moody meditation.
Sadly, Yauch died in May 2012, a little over a year after the release of Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. He didn’t appear publicly after announcing his cancer diagnosis and kept his battle with the disease largely private. When the Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in April 2012, Yauch didn’t attend the ceremony, with a rotating lineup of Black Thought, Kid Rock, and Gym Classes Heroes’ Travie taking his place on stage with Ad-Rock and Mike D.
Neither Ad-Rock nor Mike D have done much in the way of creating more music separate from the Beasties in the decade that’s followed. And really, the group was the unique alchemy between all three of them. Anything else they would release would seem like a blatant cash grab. Though they have said they’d put out Hot Sauce Committee Part 1 if they could find it.
Instead, the remaining Beasties opted to put together the aforementioned memoir and later filmed a documentary directed by longtime collaborator Spike Jonze. In part to support the film, the group released Beastie Boys Music, a compilation filled with their greatest hit singles of their recording career. Since the future for the group is no longer an option, they might as well fully honor the past.
In his will, Yauch forbade Beastie Boys music to be licensed for commercial purposes. Hence, you won’t be hearing “Sabotage” or “Fight For You Right” popping up in commercials for Budweiser or Ford any time soon. That means that the best way for future listeners to be introduced to the Beastie Boys’ music is by listening to their actual albums.
So, if some enterprising 14-year-old out there is perusing Spotify, Tidal, or whatever streaming service that they choose, and stumbles across Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, it would be a perfectly respectable way to begin their education on the Beastie Boys’ greatness. Though the trio never got to take a proper final musical bow, the final statement is very good on its own terms.
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