Shane’s Rock Challenge: BEASTIE BOYS – 1986 – Licensed To Ill

Shane | 13 May 2014 | Reply

Shane’s Rock Challenge: BEASTIE BOYS – 1986 – Licensed To Ill
9/10

I’m not much of a fan of rap at the best of times, but I do like innovation, and Beastie Boys delivered an amazing album with their debut, sampling Led Zeppelin and creating the world’s first true rap/rock/metal crossover.

From the Bonham-pounding drum loop of Rhymin’ & Stealin’, the bouncy She’s Crafty and Girls, through to the immense groove of Slow And Low and Time To Get Ill, Licensed To Ill throbs with frat boy humour, punk attitude and true creativity.

It’s interesting to note that much of the album was a sarcastic swipe at the hair metal generation, ridiculing their wanton, self-indulgent ways – only for The Beastie Boys to find after a year or so of touring that they had become what they were taking the piss out of: out of control rock stars. Upon realising this they made a conscious decision to remove themselves from that environment, and future albums would be more focussed on the rap rather than the rock.

The cherries on this particular cake for us old school rockheads are the two big anthems: (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party) and No Sleep Til Brooklyn. The former was ridiculing frat-boy rock, but so subtly that the college kids and headbangers it pointed it’s finger at barely even realised and embraced the song as the kind of one dimensional party anthem the Beastie Boys hated. The latter took its title from Motorhead’s famous No Sleep Til Hammersmith album and featured Slayer’s Kerry King shredding a righteous guitar solo.

Apparantly when shooting the Fight For Your Right video they had stuff-all budget and had to salvage past use-by cream from supermarket rubbish bins, making it rancid and smelling so vile that afterwards everyone wanted to throw up. That’s rock n’ roll, baby!

25 years after that video, in 2011, MCA (Adam Yauch) made a 29 minute mini-movie called Fight For Your Right (Revisited), which picks up as the 3-some leave the party depicted in the original video and features a cornucopia of stars (Elijah Wood, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Steve Buscemi, Ted Danson and many more) which is plenty funny and pretty surreal at the same time. Make sure you find time to check it out.

By Shane Pinnegar