Three Musketeers
Ch-Check It Out - Beastie Boys (Blast from the Past Tuesday)
Today my worst fear came true. I was all set for a forty-five minute drive, queued up a great playlist and put my location in the map. Everything was perfect and I was ready for my solo drive, an activity I usually love. But today something was different. See, about five minutes in, I noticed a spider on my windshield. Okay, whatever. It’s probably outside, right? Nope. It was actively crawling around, closer and closer to my face. To the normal person, this would be pretty jarring, but I happen to have a pretty bad fear of spiders, so this was kind of my nightmare. I let out a little bit of a yell, and it stopped. There was the key! I started to hold out progressively higher operatic notes, and it was frozen in place. Fine for a little bit, but I realized this wasn’t sustainable for the length I had still to go. I stopped and it moved again… until “Ch-Check It Out” came on my playlist, and I turned it up loud so I could get lost in it instead of focusing on the creepy crawler right in my eye line. Suddenly, by the power of the almighty Beastie Boys, that spider nearly sprinted through this notch near my rearview mirror, never to be seen again.
That spider must have had awful taste, because “Ch-Check It Out” is one of my favorite songs at the moment. Last week I fell down a very enjoyable rabbit hole of Beastie Boys videos, and this one and “Three MC’s and One DJ” were the two biggest standouts to me. There’s something about their songs that just pop, a quality that makes me feel extra cool to have them turned up to eleven in the car. They’re relentless with their rhymes in a way that’s irresistibly repetitive, a steady pattern that makes listening to them oddly comforting. The energy behind this one is undeniable, their signature smooth type of coolness propelling this one right to the top. The stutter on the chorus is a great addition to set it apart, a small detail that makes it near impossible not to go along. I always love hearing bands that sound like they’re having fun, and I think the Beastie Boys are a prime example of that. They joke around a lot in their lyrics (and videos), but trust me when I say that their ability to weave in and around each other, then unite effortlessly at the end of a solo verse is dead serious. To me, Mike D, MCA, and Ad-Rock are the three musketeers, the holy grail of great friends who just happened to make some of the most awesome music of all time. “Ch-Check It Out” just proves that to be true… what a shame that the spider couldn’t see that!
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