Why is Beastie Boys’ Hot Sauce Committee (Pt. 2) on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
Still making some noise, still hilarious, still the Beastie Boys.
Some stats & info about Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee (Pt. 2)
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rap, Hip Hop, East Coast Rap, Alternative Rap
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Hot Sauce Committee (Pt. 2) released? 2011
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #757 out of 1,000
Beastie Boys’ Hot Sauce Committee (Pt. 2) on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does Beastie Boys’ Hot Sauce Committee (Pt. 2) mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
What does the “worst” Beastie Boys sound like, you ask? Well, I’d make a strong argument that it’s Hot Sauce Committee (Pt. 2). But it’s much more about how insanely great the Beasties’ other studio albums are versus the quality of Hot Sauce, which clearly as you’re seeing deserves a slot at about the one-quarter mark of rolling out the best 1,000 albums ever.
The great tracks on Hot Sauce hold up with all of the Beasties’ best stuff. But there are more… passable tracks too. Not bad, but ones that I can live without.
“Make Some Noise” is arguably the best song on Hot Sauce, with its dirty funky groove and the trio in high spirited top form.
It should also be noted that the music video for “Make Some Noise” is a masterpiece of the form, perfectly satirizing the Licensed to Ill era. And among the star packed music video cast, I came away being most impressed with Elijah Wood’s performance (I guess?) as Mike D.
The Beasties’ collaboration with Santigold on “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win” comes off really well, bringing a groovy, lounge-y, Latin music-flavored element to the mix.
“Ok” is back to basics, old school Beastie Boys rap styling and it knocks it out, with a nice electronic music flavor to keep things interesting.
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to Beastie Boys’ Hot Sauce Committee (Pt. 2)
The Beastie Boys Book is worth reading for all kind of reasons. It’s the story of the iconic hip hop trio, for starters, and it’s truly and often hilarious. It’s also a great story about growing up in New York City, and the wild mesh of music genres, styles, and cultures going on in the early 1980s. And more than anything it’s a love letter from the book’s authors, Beastie Boys alums Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad Rock” Horovitz, to Adam “MCA” Yauch, the Beastie Boy who passed away in 2012.
If any of this is interesting to you, I guarantee you will love the entire part about the making of Hot Sauce Committee (Pt. 2). I could not have been more impressed with the meticulous effort the guys made in creating their own samples for the album, for which they created wild (and, once again, hilarious!) fictional backstories for, part of which plays out on the album’s liner notes.