Beastie Boys: The Skills to Pay the Bills (1992)

Like their sonically adventurous new album, Check Your Head, Skills to Pay the Bills, is a gangly, loose-limbed potpourri of styles and techniques, ranging from slickly produced clips (most derived from their previous, underappreciated Paul's Boutique) to home movies past and recent. The two brand-new clips, ''Pass the Mic'' and ''So What'cha Want,'' basically consist of Beasties Adrock, Mike D, and MCA getting in the face of a fish-eye lens and declaiming their rhymes; they've got enough young-loud-and-snotty (but good-hearted) charisma to put themselves across with minimal fuss and budget. Fleshing things out are some deliberately grainy live numbers, Super-8 snippets of the teenage Beasties, and a dopey (in just about every sense of the word) homegrown ''dream sequence'' starring Mike D that would be the tape's only dud if it weren't so endearingly dumb. A