Look Back At the Beastie Boys Part 1: ‘Licensed to Ill’

In November 1986, I wandered into a mall record store with every intention of buying nothing. I browsed, and nothing caught my eye, except the Violent Femmes first album, but it was too expensive. Nothing stood out in the rap section, which at that time was tiny, so I left. As I stepped back out into the mall, a display in the window caught my eye. It looked a little something like this:

Now, with all due respect to Ben Shapiro, I had been a fan of rap/hip hop since I heard “Sucker M.C.’s” by Run-DMC in the seventh grade, and my early cassette tape collection included such artists as Whodini, The Fat Boys, and LL Cool J. While I heard “Fight for Your Right (To Party)” on the radio, I honestly didn’t consider it hip hop music. I also didn’t know that the Beastie’s had been around as a hardcore punk outfit for a little while. But there’s one thing I did know when I saw that poster in the window of Camelot Music at Cumberland Mall, and that my friends is this: The Beastie Boys were obviously the coolest guys that had ever lived. I hurried back inside the store and snapped up a copy of their Def Jam debut, “Licensed to Ill.” 

Thus began a strange career for Adam Horovitz, Adam Yauch, and Michael Diamond, and my stranger fascination with it. For better or worse, their music influenced the rock-rap subgenre, but it’s unfair to categorize them with the bands they inspired. From Even when they venture into the hardcore punk of their youth, The Beastie Boys are a hip hop group. If Rap is a style of delivering lyrics, then hip hop is an attitude. The Beastie Boys, along with Run DMC and Public Enemy (among others), created music informed by Rock and other genres, but is definitively hip hop.  (more…)