Dedicated to Mario Caldato Jr., the co-producer of the Beastie Boys’ “Check Your Head”, this track is at once one of their most enduring and one of the most difficult to classify. It sounds like a live groove – the album was notable for the Beasties reclaiming the instruments they had left behind in moving from punk to hip-hop – but at the same time it’s clearly scratching and heaving and groaning, a machined momentum that Bjork would echo three years later on “Army Of Me” (though never as funkily as here, where “Money Mark” Nishita’s keyboard pulses through the song).
It all makes for a bone-crunching groove, far more earthy and organic than the Dust Brothers’ lively funk stylings on “Paul’s Boutique” but no less catchy for it. If there’s an underappreciated album in their oeuvre it’s “Check Your Head” – sandwiched between the brilliant “Boutique” and the multiplatinum “Ill Communication”, it might well be better than either. You can’t front on that.