Beastie Boys - Licensed to Ill
On November 15, 1986, "Licensed to Ill", the debut album of the band "Beastie Boys", was released.
The story of the "Beastie Boys" begins far from the world of turntables and drum machines, in the heart of New York's vibrant and gritty hardcore punk scene of the early 1980s. In 1979, New York high school students Michael Diamond, known as Mike D, formed the avant-garde punk band The Young Aborigines with guitarist John Berry, bassist Jeremy Shatan and drummer Kate Schellenbach. When Shatan left town in the summer of 1981, their friend and fan Adam Yauch, who later adopted the moniker MCA, joined the band as bassist. Shortly thereafter, the quartet changed its name to the "Beastie Boys", with the word Beastie serving as an acronym for "Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Inner Excellence", and in November 1982, the group released the fast and loud hardcore punk mini-album "Polly Wog Stew," recorded on a shoestring budget of one hundred and seventy dollars at 171A Studios in Manhattan and making them familiar figures at clubs like CBGB and Max's Kansas City.
The band's musical and historical turning point occurred in 1983. Berry left the band, and was replaced by the young and charismatic guitarist Adam Horovitz, known as Ad-Rock, who came from the local punk band "The Young and the Useless" and brought with him explosive comedic energy and a strong affection for the hip-hop culture growing in the New York boroughs. From an inside joke based on phone pranks that the band members performed for a New York ice cream chain called Carvel, the three, together with Schellenbach, recorded the humorous single "Cookie Puss", which for the first time combined electronic beats and rap. To their complete surprise, the song became an underground club hit across Manhattan and another track from the same EP, "Beastie Revolution", was used in a British Airways advertisement, which was forced to pay the young band forty thousand dollars in damages for copyright infringement, an amount that allowed the members to rent a shared apartment and focus on music.
During that time, the band met Rick Rubin, a film student at New York University and a hardcore punk, metal, and hip-hop fan who was running his new independent record label, Def Jam Recordings, out of his Weinstein Hall dorm room with entrepreneur and promoter Russell Simmons. Rubin began DJing for the band at shows under the name DJ Double R, and soon convinced Diamond, Yauch, and Horovitz to lay down their instruments, part ways with Schellenbach, and become a wild rap trio that acted like heavy rock stars on stage. After the hard-hitting 1984 single "Rock Hard," which boldly sampled the riff from AC/DC's "Back in Black," caught the attention of the industry, and the breakout single "Hold It Now, Hit It" swept the street radio stations, Simmons sent the trio in 1985 to support Madonna on her glittering "The Virgin Tour." The encounter between three brash, beer-spewing, on-stage boys and a crowd of young pop fans ended in massive boos every night, but gave the band massive national exposure and unbreakable stage confidence.
Armed with this audacity, the three, along with Rubin and brilliant sound engineer Steve Ett, entered Chung King House of Metal Studios in Chinatown, New York, to record their debut full-length album. Rubin and the band's vision was completely revolutionary. Instead of settling for routine disco and funk samples, they built an unprecedented sonic collage that combined the giant drumming of "Led Zeppelin", riffs from "Black Sabbath" and "AC/DC", the formidable Roland TR-808 drum machine, and triple vocals in which the three rappers complete each other's sentences with screams and perfect coordination. The original name chosen for the album was "Don't Be a Faggot", but Columbia Records, which distributed Def Jam albums, adamantly refused to release it under the provocative name. The band changed the album's title to "Licensed to Ill", a witty pun on "Licensed to Kill", a 1965 British spoof of the James Bond films.
The album opens with a head-on collision that changes the rules of the game from the first second with "Rhymin & Stealin". The song leaps out of the mighty drum rhythm of John Bonham from the band "Led Zeppelin" from the song "When the Levee Breaks", over which Tony Iommi's heavy and dense riff from "Black Sabbath"'s "Sweet Leaf" is laid. Over this musical wall, the three burst out with wild lyrics of drunken pirates, creating an uncompromising statement of intent that makes it clear that hip-hop is no longer the preserve of dance clubs alone. It is immediately followed by "The New Style", in which the trio displays vocal virtuosity and sharp transitions between unaccompanied acapella and a crushing beat that has become one of the album's hallmarks.
The momentum continues with "She's Crafty", which uses Jimmy Page's electrifying riff from Led Zeppelin's "The Ocean" as the basis for an entertaining tale of a nighttime encounter gone wrong, followed by "Posse in Effect" and "Slow Ride", which is based on a sample of the War classic "Low Rider". On the sixth track, "Girls", the trio replaces the heavy guitars with a minimalist, sweet and deliberately annoying xylophone melody, over which Horovitz recites a chauvinistic and extreme text about the division of roles in the home, a song that the band itself disavowed in the following decades and apologized for its lyrics.
The first side ended with the huge hit that launched the band to worldwide fame, "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)". Ironically, the song was written by Yauch and band friend Tom Cushman as a complete parody mocking the hollow party rock anthems of bands like "Twisted Sister" and "Mötley Crüe". Recognizing the enormous commercial potential, Rubin added a lead guitar riff to the song and pushed it as a single despite the band's opposition. The wild music video directed by Ric Menello and Adam Dubin, in which the trio crash a nerd party and throw cream cakes in the faces of the attendees, was embraced with great enthusiasm by MTV and the audience that did not understand the satire, turning the song into a global youth anthem that reached number seven on the American Billboard chart.
The second side of the record opens with one of the all-time pinnacles of hard-rock rap, "No Sleep till Brooklyn", whose name is a direct homage to the legendary live album "No Sleep 'til Hammersmith" by the band "Motörhead". While the song was being recorded at Chung King Studios, the thrash metal band "Slayer" was in the next room, who were working with Rubin on their masterpiece album "Reign in Blood" at the time. Rubin approached the band's guitarist Kerry King and offered him a few hundred dollars in cash to record a riff and guitar solo for the song, and King went into the studio, plugged in the amp and in a sweeping take gave the song its authentic metal stamp, and even appeared in the official music video wearing a gorilla suit during the solo.
Immediately following comes "Paul Revere", a masterpiece of cinematic hip-hop fiction that unfolds a mythological and imagined version of a Western about how the three band members met. The song's mesmerizing and unique beat was born when Yauch heard the hip-hop duo "Run-DMC" drum machine outside the recording room, recorded the drum pattern onto magnetic tape and reversed the reel to play backwards, creating an unforgettable, squeaky groove. The brilliant sequence continues with "Hold It Now, Hit It", which celebrates New York's classic scratch and sample culture, and with the addictive "Brass Monkey", built around the bouncy saxophone sample of the punk and soul band "The Wild Magnolias" from the song "Funky (Give It Up)" and made the cheap alcohol cocktail of New York's boroughs a household name.
The two tracks that seal the album, "Slow and Low", originally written by the members of "Run-DMC" and given to the trio, and "Time to Get Ill", which samples Led Zeppelin's "Custard Pie" with a dizzying tempo alongside Creedence Clearwater Revival and Kool & the Gang, complete forty-four minutes of explosive energy, sharp street humor, and a musical connection like no other.
No less iconic than the music itself is the album's fold-out cover, created by British artist World B. Omes, the pen name of David Gambale, with art director Stephen Byram. The front cover features the tail of a Boeing 727 jetliner bearing the band's logo and the fictional license plate number 3MTA3, which when read in reverse in a mirror reveals the crude inscription Eat Me, and when the record is opened, the front of the plane is revealed to be crashing into a mountainside in the shape of a cigarette butt or smoking joint lying on the rock.
Upon its release in November 1986, "Licensed to Ill" caused an unprecedented cultural and commercial earthquake. In March 1987, the album became the first hip-hop album in history to reach number one on the US Billboard 200, where it remained for seven consecutive weeks. It became the best-selling debut album of the 1980s on Columbia Records, achieving Diamond status with sales of over ten million copies in the United States alone, and finally shattering the racial and musical divide between the suburban white rock audience and the urban hip-hop culture. Despite the bitter financial rift that later arose between the band and Rubin and Def Jam, which led the trio to leave for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves on the masterpiece album "Paul's Boutique", "Licensed to Ill" remains the founding cornerstone that paved the way for the rise of rap-rock, nu-metal and the modern crossover.
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