The Beastie Boys’ journey from juvenilia to maturity can be mapped through food. On their ten million-selling 1986 gonzo-rap debut Licensed To Ill, they were namechecking White Castle and Fatburger. Within three years, follow-up Paul’s Boutique, an album whose appeal was more selective, concluded with a twelve-minute suite named after the Provençal fish stew bouillabaisse. And, by the time of their sixth studio album in 2004, they’d outed themselves as full-on foodies and bon vivants. To The 5 Boroughs is a record with a truly international palate. It references tikka, boulangeries, caprese salads, schnitzel, falafel, escargots, ghee, pemmican (a Native American long-life meat product also used by Antarctic explorers), Steak-umm (a brand of Philly-style frozen meat slices), assorted non-American cheeses (Munster, Provolone, Gorgonzola), as well as closer-to-home kosher dishes (gefilte fish, matzah, challah and bagels). You can do the same with booze: Licensed To Ill‘s trashy Brass Monkey pre-mixed cocktail has been replaced by fine wines. The question of whether a mature, sophisticated Beastie Boys is what anyone ordered is one which can only be answered according to individual taste. But it’s where – on the face of it, at least – they’d arrived in the early 2000s.
Picture yourself in 2026 voluntarily dropping the needle onto a late period, post-Millennium Beastie Boys album as opposed to the easier kicks provided by any one of the more familiar, more hallowed earlier works such as Licensed To Ill, Paul’s Boutique, or Ill Communication. Feels weird, doesn’t it? Reluctant, much? The stylus weighs a ton when you try to lift it, right? Well, you’re in for several surprises. The first being that earnestness and spirituality are in mercifully short supply. Which is a miracle, all things considered. The context was unpromising: the album was widely flagged up as the Beastie Boys’ response to 9/11, and a tribute to New York City.
The world had hardly starved of musical responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. Immediately, there were superstar benefit concerts: the Paul McCartney-led Concert For New York City on 20 October, and the Michael Jackson-led United We Stand concert the following night. A week later, the Beastie Boys held their own smaller show, the pointedly-titled New Yorkers Against Violence, to raise money for relief efforts and campaign against kneejerk hatred (amid a febrile atmosphere in which the city’s mosques needed police protection).
Then came the music, from the boot-in-your-ass chauvinistic (Charlie Daniels ‘This Ain’t No Rag, It’s A Flag’, Toby Keith’s ‘Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue’, Darryl Worley’s ‘Have You Forgotten?’) to the avant-garde conceptual (William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops), to the unintentionally hilarious (Star Trek stuntman Dennis Madalone’s mocked and meme-ified ‘America, We Stand As One’, often listed as one of the worst music videos of all time: the anti-‘Sabotage’, if you will). Bruce Springsteen wrote a whole album about it (2002’s The Rising). Gerard Way formed a whole band about it. (He wrote My Chemical Romance’s first song, ‘Skylines And Turnstiles’, after watching the towers fall, and formed MCR in response.)
By 2004 the dust, literally, had settled. But we still hadn’t heard from arguably the most New York band of them all. Behind the scenes, they’d been hard at work. In the aftermath of Hello Nasty (1998), after a decade in LA, they’d moved back to NYC and began working, intermittently, on the record that would become To The 5 Boroughs. (For the first time since Licensed To Ill, absolutely none of it was recorded in California, and absolutely all of it was recorded in New York, at Adam Yauch’s own Oscilloscope Laboratories.) It is, in some ways, both a pre- and post-9/11 album: six whole years in the making, it was already halfway through its creation when the planes hit the towers. However, it was the New Yorkers Against Violence show which sharpened their sense of purpose and focused their minds on getting it finished.
There were no fashionable producers, no guest MCs and – intriguingly – no guitars. This one was going to be pure hip hop, and pure Beasties. To a fault, perhaps? The lead single and album opener ‘Ch-Check It Out’, based on a sample from Peggy Lee’s version of ‘Dock Of The Bay’, felt a little bit Beasties-by-numbers when it dropped on 3 May 2004, leaving you wondering whether they’d lost their mojo.
When To The 5 Boroughs itself followed on 15 June, such concerns initially seemed to be confirmed. Second track ‘Right Right Now Now’ was more of the same, but with an unusual level of lyrical seriousness. With George W. Bush having placed American boots on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq by invading both in the aftermath of 9/11, it calls for fewer foreign wars and greater gun control (a shift from 1986 single ‘The New Style’, on which MCA bragged “In case you’re unaware, I carry a gun”), criticises ethnicity questions on loan application forms (“I wrote down ‘Human’ inside the space… It ain’t the bank’s damn business how my lineage trace”), and takes down the Far Right (“Well I’m a funky-ass Jew and I’m on my way / And yes I got to say / Fuck the KKK”). Explaining their approach to songwriting around this time, the Beasties would speak of a ‘Three Islands’ approach. “We realised that certain songs were on different islands,” Yauch told Rolling Stone. “There was Goofy Island, then there was B-Boy Island, and then there was Serious Island.” And ‘Right Right Now Now’? “That’s on Serious Island. But it’s also on B-Boy Island. But sometimes it visits Goofy Island. It’s actually the only song on the album that visits all three islands.”
But the album really takes off with track 3, the tubthumping ‘The Hard Way’, after which they’re on an absolute roll, mixing heavyweight topics with lowbrow laughs in a way few other bands could carry off. The politically-minded Beasties returned on ‘It Takes Time To Build’, an impeach-the-president number which decries environmental destruction and issues the plea: “So let’s calibrate and check our specs / We need a little shift on over to the left.” As Mike D explained, “’Time To Build’ is on Serious Island, but it can also hang out on B-Boy Island.” ‘Rhyme The Rhyme Way’, with its subaquatic samples, was somewhere offshore of all the islands however. Then came ‘Triple Trouble’, the album’s second single, which kicks off with a ‘Rapper’s Delight’ cowbell sample and somehow survives Ad-Rock’s frequent forays into an awful Dick Van Dyke ‘English’ accent.
‘Hey Fuck You’ is the most fun the album has, a two-minutes-twenty general purpose diss track which showcases the Beasties’ always-evident love of hip hop history with a repeated sample of Big Daddy Kane’s legendary line, “So put a quarter in your ass, cos you played yourself” from Marley Marl’s ‘The Symphony’, and raises its own ROFLs with Yauch’s boast that “I’ve got more rhymes than Carl Sagan’s got turtlenecks”. Ad-Rock returned to the ‘Three Islands’ metaphor when describing it: “This song’s on Goofy Island but it’s chucking rocks over at B-Boy island. It’s building a catapult.” Even sillier is side-closer ‘Oh Word?’, a breakdance-friendly electro cut packed with references to dumb TV shows like Rocky & Bullwinkle and Three’s Company.
Side 2 opens with the dual nationality (Serious & Goofy) ‘That’s It That’s All’, which calls for the dethroning of Dubya, but also drops the couplet “Like George Whipple on NY1 / I got a hairy ass and that’s no fun”. (I had to Google Image Search him. I suggest you do too. It’s hilarious.) For all its weighty topics, 5 Boroughs is arguably at its best when it’s at its most throwaway.
The squelchy ‘All Lifestyles’ is a plea for inclusivity which inadvertently highlights Transatlantic differences in acceptable language. “All you spazzes and you freaks / Go and do your thing cos you’re unique”, offers Ad Rock, in the most well-meaning way. But their 2004 heart is in the right place, and not stuck in 1987 when the Daily Mirror alleged they’d mocked disabled kids in Montreux (an entirely fabricated story anyway – look it up). And its elongated outro, sampled from the 1970 self-empowerment musical The Me Nobody Knows, is perhaps the album’s most tempting source material rabbit hole to disappear down.
‘Shazam!’, a Kool And The Gang-sampling tune is funky as fuck, but there’s a WTC-shaped elephant in the room which, strangely, has yet to be addressed. After all, the Twin Towers loomed large at the top right of Matteo Pencoli’s illustration of the pre-9/11 skyline on the cover (inverted and rendered in beautiful pale silver on the 2026 vinyl box set, with the Brooklyn Bridge on the back). Where was the Beasties’ big statement on the atrocity and its aftermath?
Brace, brace. Here it comes. You had to wait until the twelfth track for ‘An Open Letter To NYC’. Sentimentality is kept to a minimum. “Dear New York I hope you’re doing well / I know a lot’s happened and you’ve been through Hell” is as direct as it gets, later concluding that the city’s doing fine: “Towers down, but you’re still in the game”. Built around a nervous, nagging, siren-mimicking keyboard line and a Dead Boys ‘Sonic Reducer’ sample, the majority of its verses comprise a tripartite memoir of the trio’s New York childhoods, reminiscing about hi-jinx and scrapes. As Mike D told LA Times, New York sustained the Beasties. “It is this hopeful place, this incarnation of total diversity, always changing. In that sense, it’s a source of endless inspiration.” And the chorus of ‘Open Letter’, celebrating New York’s diversity at a time when intolerance was reaching an angry peak: “Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten / From the Battery to the top of Manhattan / Asian, Middle-Eastern and Latin / Black, white, New York you make it happen…” It’s far from the ponderous epistle it might have been. Importantly, at no point does it feel like saying your prayers, or eating your greens. Almost as importantly, ‘Open Letter’ isn’t sequenced as the grand finale of To The 5 Boroughs. We’re back to the silly shit on ‘Crawlspace’, referencing Star Wars and their own ‘Sabotage’ vid. On the jubilant ‘The Brouhaha’ it’s Star Trek, and random bursts of French. There’s a further smattering of politics on closer ‘We Got The’, which calles out the Christian Coalition and shouts out to Gandhi, Garvey and King, then we’re done, reflecting with relief that Boroughs has been a bigger blast than anyone might have predicted.
The third disc of the new box set shows that the fun didn’t end there. Four versions of ‘Triple Trouble’ might be more than the world frankly needs, but the Big Beat-adjacent Graham Coxon remix turns the tables on Horovitz with a Cockney cabbie taking the piss out of the Beasties. ‘Brrr Stick ‘Em’ is the pick of the B-sides. Musically it’s this album’s ‘Intergalactic’, commensurate with the topic of transhumanism which provides most of its laughs, depicting a robot going rogue in an old folks’ home, randomly exclaiming “My uncle Freddy’s making horseradish” and issuing the threat “I put a whole potato salad right down your back”, while referencing Blade Runner, Newcleus and vintage arcade games along with extensive samples of a vinyl-only Six Million Dollar Man story called ‘Bionic Berserker’ (nobody could ever accuse the Beasties of skimping on the crate-digging).
In the intervening two decades, To The 5 Boroughs may have receded from view – at least, until this box set – but it sold surprisingly well at the time. Even though Eminem, in their extended absence, had emerged as the pre-eminent scatological white guy rapper and stolen their territory somewhat, there were still enough Beastie devotees around to make it their fourth Billboard No.1 (it also topped the charts in numerous other countries, and reached No.2 in the UK).
The Beastie Boys would release two further studio albums, 2007’s entirely instrumental The Mix-Up and 2011’s Hot Sauce Committee Part 2. In the gap between the two, Adam Yauch was diagnosed with cancer and, heartbreakingly, died in 2012 aged just 47. MCA’s untimely passing brought an end to the Beastie Boys’ career as an active unit: the group who once so ebulliently yelled “You can’t, you won’t and you don’t stop” could, would, and did. But To The 5 Boroughs still stands as a joyful reminder of a time when they still sounded – like the city to which it paid tribute – unstoppable.
