''For people who are into music rather than politics, it's really not an issue anymore,'' says Adam Yauch, a/k/a MCA, lounging in his publicist's office, clearly bored after a day of press interviews. Yauch is one of the trio of nice upper-middle-class Jewish young men who make up the infamous rap group the Beastie Boys, and he's talking about the ''White Negro'' question that has dogged the group ever since as teenagers in Manhattan they made the smart decision to abandon their instruments and take up rapping, turning a hard-core punk group with few prospects into a multimillion-selling hip-hop act.
With the release of ''Check Your Head'' (Capitol) - the group's third album and the eagerly awaited follow-up to the hectic funk montage of 1989's ''Paul's Boutique'' - the Beastie Boys have returned to those roots. They now augment the usual sampled sounds with live instrumentation: Mike Diamond (Mike D) on drums, Adam Horovitz (King Ad-Rock) on guitar, and Yauch on bass (with Mark Ramos Nishita on keyboards). The densely funky progressive rock and rap of ''Check Your Head'' is a feast of sound with a vibe more Lollapalooza! than South-Central L. A.
Nonetheless, recently the Beastie Boys turned up in the Village Voice's letters page, in the unlikely company of collagen lip implants and Bo Derek's cornrows, and as an example of the ''bastardization and exploitation'' of African-American culture. Rather than ''exploiting'' black culture, the Beastie Boys are an example of what academic and writer Cornel West calls ''the Afro-Americanization of American youth.''
White kids sporting leather Africa medallions. Black youths wearing Doc Martens. Rappers fronting hard-core bands. We live in times where white youths, knowing their parents' culture is bankrupt, are increasingly turning to their black counterparts for advice on everything from fashion to politics. Public Enemy rapper Chuck D expresses surprise at the depth of knowledge that many white teenagers he meets have about figures like Malcolm X.
It's unlikely that frat party anthems like ''Fight for Your Right to Party'' and ''No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn'' - still the Beastie Boys' best-known singles - turned many white kids into Black Muslims, but they did introduce rap to hard rock's mass audience.
Thanks in part to the groundbreaking work done by the Beastie Boys, it's now possible to talk of a ''new whiteness'' developing in young America. Not Norman Mailer's old ''White Negro'' journeying to the heart of the ghetto in search of the exotic and erotic, but a new sensibility that is born not out of racial self-hatred, but of the belief that black culture has something to teach whites. As Janis Joplin once said: ''Being black for a while teaches me to be a better white.''
At Ice Cube's recent show at the Apollo, Mike D was amazed to see homeboys at the front of the audience executing a version of the punk dance the pogo. ''You've got people slamdancing to house music,'' says Diamond. ''You've got hard-core kids wearing homeboy clothes. And now this, the b-boy pogo. The next thing you know rap DJs will be cutting up the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.
''Attitude-wise, hard core and rap are remarkably similar,'' continues Diamond. ''The energy is the same. And you can express yourself without having had to study music for 15 years. I used to say that the only difference was that with punk rock you have funny haircuts, whereas with rap you have funny hats.''
The most remarkable thing about ''Check Your Head'' is the way the album brilliantly illustrates the dialogue between black and white music that is so much a part of today's pop scene. Exhibiting influences as diverse as '70s funk, acid rock, old-school rap, punk, and grunge metal, ''Check Your Head'' is a bold and innovative work replete with '90s multi-culti possibilities. It comes as no surprise to learn that the album was initially intended as an instrumental, since the emphasis is on the music and not the raps. The Beastie Boys have never been the most gifted rappers; a little of their whiny voices goes a long way. The group has sidestepped this problem by heavily distorting many of the vocals. On ''Whatcha Want,'' when Mike D raps ''I think I'm losing my mind this time / I think I'm losing my mind,'' he sounds like he's speaking through a malfunctioning megaphone.
In marked contrast to ''Licensed to Ill'' - the Beastie Boys' quadruple-platinum debut effort - ''Check Your Head'' is not at all bratty. Gone are the boisterous high jinks and teenage fantasies of misbehavior that made their early incarnation such a hoot. In the last six years, the Beastie Boys have matured; call them the Beastie Men. On ''Namaste,'' listening to Yauch recite a druggy poem with lines like ''A butterfly floats on the breeze of a sunlit sky / As I feel this reality gently fade away'' over musical backing reminiscent of the Doors, it's difficult to remember that this is the group who once supposedly drilled a hole between two hotel rooms one above the other (they'd asked for adjoining rooms) and climbed up and down on a rope between the rooms, that sealed and filled up a shower in an L. A. hotel room for an orgy, and that told a visiting British journalist that the steam emanating from New York gutters was the result of ''alligator farts.''
But what ''Check Your Head'' lacks in humor, it makes up for in beat-heavy musical freshness. Recorded at the band's own studio in L. A. - built after they fled New York's Def Jam records, using money earned from ''Licensed to Ill'' - ''Check Your Head'' boasts a uniquely opaque and ramshackle sound (''fat'' is Mike D's preferred adjective) far removed from the perfection that comes out of most contemporary studios.
''Nowadays everybody wants the real hype digital equipment,'' explains Mike D, ''but we outfitted our studio with all this really cheap but great sounding secondhand equipment, like clavinets, old drum kits, fuzz basses and wah-wah pedals.''
The album is culled from a series of lengthy jam sessions that took place over a year and produced 100 hours of audio tape.''We wanted to make it like a break-beats record,'' explains Mike D. ''The same way as when you sample you take the best bit of a song, we wanted each song to contain the best bits from our jam sessions.''
Refuting those who say sampling de-skills musicians, Diamond says that sampling actually spurred the band to take up live instruments again: ''When you sample the type of music we do, you come to respect the incredible musicianship that went into the original. And you want to be able to play like that.''
To those who see hip-hop as a medium whose purity needs to be defended, the musical schizophrenia of ''Check Your Head'' will be taken as more evidence that the Beastie Boys are no longer a legitimate rap group. To those who, like Adam Yauch, are more interested in music than politics, ''Check Your Head'' will be recognized as an instant rock and rap classic.
BEASTIE BITE
Yo Yauch what's up? Mike D. what's up?
Come on Yauch let's tear it up
I could catch a groove like a flash in the dark
Grab ahold of your attention like a thief in the park
'Cause I can flip a
rhyme off the tip of my tongue
Switching up the rhythm like the rhymes a piece of chewing gum
Now I might
chew but I don't bite
My ideas are mine when I begin to write
In my sleep I'll be thinkin' 'bout beats and
Gettin' on the mic and busting some treats and
Sporting the crazy funky threads that you never even seen before
What I'm
lacking from macking
I can find at the thrift store
I won't scuff nor
scuffle
just grin as I walk by
Take the time to rhyme for a girl I hear talk fly
Down some papaya down with the revolution
Always wear my goggles 'cause there's so much
pollution I can do the freak,
the Patty Duke and the spank
Gotta free the funky fish from the funky fish tanks
I'll sell my house, sell my car and I'll sell all my stuff
''I'm going back
to New York City I do believe I've had enough''
- From 'Finger Lickin' Good'