Album · Beastie Boys
Check Your Head by Beastie Boys
Check Your Head is an album by Beastie Boys, released in 1992. 3 songs from it have charted on rock radio countdowns, with 91 countdown appearances in total. The biggest is “So What'cha Want”, on 72 lists with a best position of #34.
Check Your Head, the third Beastie Boys album, arrived on April 21, 1992, via Grand Royal and Capitol, three years after Paul's Boutique, and it found the three smart-mouthed rappers doing something nobody saw coming: picking up instruments. Adam Horovitz played guitar, Adam Yauch played bass and Mike D sat behind the drums, and they jammed out the record at G-Son Studios in Atwater Village in 1991 with Mario Caldato Jr. producing, the third different producer on their third album.
The result is a gloriously messy stew of hip-hop, jazz-funk, rap rock and alternative rock, less stitched together from samples than their earlier records and much more like a band sweating it out in a room. The rhymes sound fuzzed and far away, the grooves are loose and greasy, and the guitars crash in without warning. "So What'cha Want" is the swaggering centerpiece, all fuzzed-out vocals and head-nod bass, and "Pass The Mic" struts just as hard. "Professor Booty" goes deeper into the funk.
It has had a long afterlife: a 2009 reissue added 16 B-sides and rarities plus a commentary track, and the album got its own chapter in the 2007 book Check the Technique, where the three of them and Caldato broke it down track by track.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs from Check Your Head on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | So What'cha Want | 72 | #34 | – | 1992–2026 | |
| 2 | Pass The Mic | 18 | #371 | – | 1999–2023 | |
| 3 | Professor Booty | 1 | #1132 | – | 2002 |
Only songs that appear on at least one countdown are listed. Release data from MusicBrainz.