The Beauty Of The Beasties

The finished product turns out to be about 25% serious and 75% silly. There's a post-9/11 track called An Open Letter to NYC that's as close as the Beasties ever get to Springsteen-style solemnity. Three other songs are about overthrowing President Bush and the radical right. The problem with those is not politics but priorities. There's nothing wrong with having a point of view, but there's a lot wrong with the prosody of a line like "George W.'s got nothing on we/We got to take the power from he." In rap, rhyme still has to come before reason.

The good news is that on the 11 tracks devoted to exuberant stupidity, the Beastie Boys remain masters of the game. Over minimalist break beats and a few nice string samples, they shout out lines that merge grade school, grad school and old school. On Oh Word? Horovitz raps, "You gotta get up awful early to fool Mr. Furley/And that's word to Aunt Shirley/And you could stick your head in the toilet, give yourself a swirley." Yauch swiftly follows: "Like Ernest Shackleton said to Ord-Lees,/ 'I'll have dog pemmican with my tea.'" When the rhymes flow, the ideas buried within go down more smoothly, and on All Life Styles, their vision of hipster utopianism sounds both typically juvenile and wonderfully sweet: "Whether in the high rise where you live like Rhoda or in the shack and you live like Yoda/Once again it's on, like a brand new morn/Beatsie Beatsie Boys here to keep you all warm." When they're being idiots, the aging Beastie Boys are still quite brilliant.