Today in Hip-Hop — July 14: Beastie Boys Drop Hello Nasty (28 Years) and El-P Turns 51 - Custom Creative

July 14, 1998. Grand Royal Records puts the fifth Beastie Boys record on the shelf and it does 681,000 first-week copies — number one on the Billboard 200 in a summer stacked with DMX and Master P still setting the pace. Hello Nasty is 28 today. This is the record where the Beasties fully absorb Mix Master Mike, launch three MCs and one DJ into deep space on “Intergalactic,” and prove that a downtown NYC crew who started as a hardcore band could still be sample-flip lifers and walk into the Grammys a year later with two statues.

Hello Nasty Was a Pivot Record

Coming four years after Ill Communication — the longest gap between Beastie Boys albums to that point — the crew had spent most of the mid-90s building an empire around Grand Royal (the magazine, the label, the X-Large clothing offshoot) and touring behind the Free Tibet activism MCA had folded into the group’s public identity through the Milarepa Fund. When they finally regrouped in the studio, they pulled in DMC Championship–winning turntablist Mix Master Mike out of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, and Mike’s cuts became structural to the record — not accent color. Load-bearing.

“Intergalactic” was the lead single, and it went places: number one on the U.S. Rap chart, a video full of actual kaiju cosplay years before that was cross-culturally normal, and the 1999 Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. The follow-ups — “Body Movin’,” “Remote Control,” “Three MCs and One DJ” — kept the album on rotation for the whole summer of ’98 and well into ’99. Mario Caldato Jr. was still on the boards, but Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA took production credit alongside him plus Mix Master Mike, and the crate-digging went deeper than ever: Latin funk, dub, bossa nova, Krautrock, and Brazilian tropicalia samples all riding in the same 22-track ride.

It went triple platinum in the U.S. and took Best Alternative Music Album at the ’99 Grammys — a category the Beasties basically forced open, because no Rap Album Grammy could hold what they were actually doing.

Pay Respects in the Catalog

If you came in through “Intergalactic” and worked backward to the vinyl, we made a tribute tee for you: the Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill T-Shirt — the 1986 cover printed the way the record sleeve wanted. And if the Paul’s Boutique era hit different (the album that basically invented sample-collage rap in 1989), the Paul’s Boutique tee is sitting right next to it.

Also Today in Hip-Hop

El-P (Jaime Meline) turns 51. Brooklyn’s own — Company Flow with Bigg Jus and Mr. Len, founder of Definitive Jux, the producer behind Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, and now half of Run the Jewels with Killer Mike. If you want the underground curriculum, our Aesop Rock 50th birthday piece and the Cold Vein 25th anniversary post both live in El-P’s production world. The Run the Jewels tee is the modern half of his story.
Two summer-of-’98 records were still moving units next to Hello Nasty. Master P’s MP Da Last Don had dropped a month earlier (June 2), and DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot was still in the top ten from May — three completely different visions of what platinum rap could sound like in the same week. The Beasties splitting the difference between hardcore, cosmic funk, and turntablism was a statement about the whole map, not just their corner of it.
Yesterday’s July 13 chronicle covered Run-DMC crashing Live Aid in 1985 — catch up if you missed it.