The last thing anyone can call the Beastie Boys is sellouts. Here they are with "To the Five Boroughs," six years after their last album and 18 after "License To Ill," and they're still doing the same old thing they've always done -- God bless 'em.
Sure, they may have conscientiously dropped all the horny teenage sex rhymes of their '80s work and picked up social and political messages along the way.
But their flow has remained the same, alternating between Ad-Rock's average-guy voice, Mike D's high whine and MCA's deep growl.
The stress still falls hard on the last syllable of every line. They still like to reference Star Trek and obscure Jewish comedians.
And their basic idiom has remained unchanged across the decades: rapping about "servin' MCs on a platter," describing how "ill" their flow is and, amusingly, boasting about their rhymes being "fresh."
Some critics have described "To the 5 Boroughs" as a return to form. Technically that's true, but it's misleading.
The importance of the Beastie Boys' music has never been just the form but also the function. In 1986, they were bringing New York rap from the underground to white teen America.
By now, of course, that goal has been accomplished, leaving the Beasties without cultural relevance.
Their new release makes it abundantly clear how they would like to become relevant again -- through their social message, not their musical style.
With "To the Five Boroughs," the three 30-somethings seem to admit, wisely, that they will never be seen as the teenage rebels they once were.
Instead they use their allotted MTV publicity blitz to get out an album with some well-intentioned, political lyrics.
Lead single and album opener "Ch-Check It Out" may be essentially a party track, but they follow it with "Right Right Now Now," a call to arms that nicely twists the chorus of their biggest hit: "We're gonna party for the right to fight."
It's too bad that the meat of the song's message comes off as Michael Moore lite: "Columbine bowlin', childhood stolen / We need a bit more gun controllin.'"
The Beasties wisely limit the overt political content to just three other tracks.
The best, and most damning, is "It Takes Time To Build," which advises President Bush, "You got to chill" and advocates "a little shift over to the left."
It's on the tracks that tackle more traditional Beastie Boy themes -- mainly the subject of how well they rap -- that the trio shines.
They still come up with hilarious, borderline-stupid lines including "Like Ernest Shackleton said to Ord Lees / I'll have the pemmican with my tea" and make boasts like "My style's impregnable like the Hoover Dam" or "I got more rhymes than Carl Sagan's got turtlenecks." You either eat that stuff up, or you don't. I do.
Maybe the most surreal moment lyrically comes when MCA breaks down one of his rhymes on "Crawlspace" so explicitly that even Grandma could understand: "My rhymes are whales and yours are rodents / This means huge compared to very small."
The Boys' beats are still done in-house by their guru Mixmaster Mike, not farmed out to the Neptunes, Timbaland or the producer du jour.
As it always has, that leads here to mixed results.
The production on the album runs the gamut from pretty good (tracks like "Right Right Now Now" and "That's It That's All") to pretty terrible ("The Brouhaha").
Musically, the Beastie Boys have respectfully refused to change, and that means their commercial success will inevitably continue to decline until they are discovered by a new generation. It also means they're not challenging listeners in ways they might be capable of, which is too bad.
But with "To the Five Boroughs" they've crafted a fine reminder that they can still do their thing, that their flow is still ill, even if it's not fresh.
