The One Time I Wrote For Rolling Stone...
Profiling Beastie Boys' Licensed To ill for a '100 Most Influential Albums' survey.
It was because I was the person who’d most recently written a book about the Beastie Boys that I assume Rolling Stone asked me to assess Licensed To Ill for their ‘100 Influential Albums’ issue. Either that or I was just really cheap. Whatever, here’s what I had to say way back in 2002…
Take three nice Jewish boys from New York’s better boroughs, get them to pretend they’re horny, drunken hooligans, ally them with a producer with a thing for metal samples, then have them record a hip-hop album. Yep, Licensed To Ill really should have been laughable. But while it’s often very funny, the Beastie Boys’ debut is classic instead of comic, influential rather than asinine.
What made Licensed’s success eve more unlikely were the Beasties’ origins. Founded in 1981, the band only switched from hardcore punk to hip-hop after Mike Diamond (aka Mike D) and Adams Yauch (aka MCA) and Horovitz (aka King Adrock) signed to Russell Simmons’ Def Jam label in 1984. The transformation from punk kids to rap pioneers came about after Simmons arranged for his charges to work with Rick Rubin.
Quite the metal freak, Rubin suggested the boys bolster their sound with Led Zeppelin-esque beats and guitars. It was, after all, a trick that he’d used to great effect on Run DMC’s Raising Hell where the rappers traded licks with Knack and samples. While it comprises cuts from Zeppelin’s ‘When The Levee Breaks’ and The Clash’s
‘I Fought The War’, it’s not so much the sound that makes Licensed To Ill so special. Nor is it the novelty of white boys performing hip-hop. No, from the opening lines of ‘Rhymin’ And Stealin’’, it’s the songwriting that makes the record mind-blowing.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to As Luck Would Have It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.