30 years old today – Check Your Head by Beastie Boys
This album has such bittersweet memories for me, I listened to it constantly throughout the summer of ’92 on a tape recorded from someone at college. I was ridiculously poor and had recently split from my long term girlfriend at the end of the second year of Camberwell college.
I moved into a house share in East Dulwich where I met Mario Aguera and Lou Carroll and they helped save my sanity. I would troop about the streets of south London looking for a summer job in newsagent windows with Check Your Head on my Walkman until the batteries ran out.
It was a low point in my life for sure but this album helped me through it and things all came good from starting again in that house. Sometimes you have to rip it up and start again and what better soundtrack than this record? A perfect balance of sample-heavy rap tracks but with a new live band edge in the mix. They were so cool as well, playing basketball and skating in their own studio, running a label, putting out a magazine and clothing line. Ah, the 90’s…
Over the years I picked up all the singles but only grabbed the album on CD – weird. So What’cha Want is still one of the best rap tracks ever recorded but there are so many moments on this album. Big record for me and my homey, David Vallade who would later move into the same house share and then things really got going – “yeaaaah, you can’t front on that”