Beastie Boys
Stubb’s, Thursday, March 16
Some day, someone’s going to cobble together the world’s greatest hip-hop song and it’ll be based around a sampled loop of Ennio Morricone’s score for Chi L’Ha Vista Morire?, best known Stateside as Who Saw Her Die? Until then, however, we’ll have to make due with Brooklyn’s finest borrowing the Don Costa’s theme from Rough Night in Jericho for recent single “Right Right Now Now.” It’s not a perfect match, but it’s close, lifting off from a zesty and serpentine coil of spaghetti Western-izations and jamming in some of Mike D, Adrock, and MCA’s finest couplets. This unannounced, quasi-impromptu gig, coming on the heels of their new Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That! concert film proved that, yeah, they may rhyme every other word with “gray hair,” but that doesn’t mean they don’t still have skills to spare. Heavy on the old-school – opener “Brass Monkey” set the tone for the besotted, gleeful crowd – their stage performance varied wildly from exhilaratingly energertic (MCA) to just plain listless (Adrock). Nevertheless, the rattle and thrum of “Root Down,” call-and-response of “Sure Shot,” and the sheer teenage glory of “Egg Man” – not to mention Mix Master Mike’s glorious turntable skills highlighting “Finger Lickin’ Good” – were like a dose of Red Bull wrapped in a linguistics course. Who else could make a crowd in Austin, Texas, give a shout out to Minnesota’s finest, Rod Carew? Mad hits notwithstanding, no one, that’s who.This article appears in March 17 • 2006.