Pop Music Reviews : Beastie Boys at the Palladium--Rappers in a Schizophrenic Mood

The Beastie Boys’ first album “Licensed to Ill,” one of the half-dozen best in the history of hip-hop, opened up rap music to a suburban audience for the first time, and its cute, hard-core braggadocio ironically made possible both N.W.A. and rapping cartoon bears. The Beasties’ second album was the “Sgt. Pepper” of rap, endless in its invention. The new one, “Check Your Head,” is a dopey, half-organized mess, part rap, part punk-rock, part Mandrill-style funk jams . . . and is, not incidentally, a Top 20 hit.

At a steamy Palladium on Friday, packed so densely with Hollywood hipsters it was impossible to move, the Beastie Boys played a set as deeply schizophrenic as their current album, and what you thought of the show probably depended on the style of music the Beasties were doing at the moment.

The band started out with a few oldies from “Licensed,” then there was a short set of hard-core thrash--large slam pits formed dutifully for each hard-core song. Then came the jams from the new one, reminiscent of the scores to ‘70s blaxploitation movies. But somehow, no matter how many professional conga guys were around, no matter how ripe the organ sound, the Beasties never caught the cool soul groove in the way that the Brand New Heavies sometimes can.

And then the rotation started again, stripping off layers of the Beasties’ career the way archeologists scrape strata off Sumerian mounds, revealing them as alternately brilliant, awful, just OK . . . and a dozen times gutsier, one supposes, than the vast majority of bands that spend their lives plumbing just one style of rock ‘n’ roll.