Beastie Boys “Licensed to Ill” Album Review

Originally Published: 2021

Score: 8/10

So by the mid-1980s, hip hop was evolving out of totally novel territory (well, mostly novel anyway. The singles were already showing us what this genre was capable of, but the albums hadn’t quite caught up), and beginning to yield what was recognized as hip hop’s first classic material. The first classic studio album in hip hop history is usually considered to be Run DMC’s debut album. With this album, Rev Run, DMC, and Jam-Master Jay gave birth to the blueprint of what literally every hip hop album would sound like forever. And I’m not just talking about hardcore rap either. The entire aesthetic of hip hop’s future was minted on here. Fly, rugged looking attire, in favor of weird costumes co-opted from the punk scene, or three-piece suits. Beats that did away with disco loops and brought in raw sounding 808s, aggressive scratches, and urgent samples. Raps that didn’t try to sound smooth and melodic, and covered broader subjects than daily activities and being cool. Prior to Run DMC, nobody had for the duration of an entire album made a rap album that sounded like the environs where the genre was birthed. Finally, hip hop was cultivating an identity of its own, and was becoming a gradually more seriously accepted genre as a result.

Two of the chief traits of the rise of golden age hip hop was hip hop cultivating its own sound, and rappers beginning to approach the medium with more skill and with a wider range of meatier subject matter. After Run DMC minted the blueprint for hip hop’s future growth, they themselves began to expand on that platform, as well as the introduction of cats like LL Cool J and Doug E. Fresh who would continue to push the sound forward, up until 1987, when Eric B. & Rakim would unleash “Paid in Full” to the world, and with it launch what is commonly accepted as the golden age of hip hop. Emcees were beginning to pack their lyrics with far heavier subject matter, saying it with a lot more conviction, and beats began to be way more elaborate and doper.

Given all of this, and album such as “Licensed to Ill” should have completely failed. Released in 1986, on the precipice of the uprising of the golden age of rap lyricism and the birth of boom bap, three middle class white Jews released a super stripped down album that sported Led Zeppelin samples all over the place, and a knock-off brand rendition of Run-D.M.C.’s rap style fused with some of the exuberance of the 80s DIY punk scene. The 808s all over this album are loud, raw, and straight to the point. The samples are minimalistic, bare, and completely obvious. The lyricism is completely fucking moronic. There’s not one second on here where the rapping is by any considerable metric good. The flows can be fun, but the rhymes sound like they’re making them up on the fly, and not in the good way. The subject matter is the stupidest shit the 1980s had to offer. Drinking warm beer, having tons of sex, committing crimes, random screaming, and going to parties is pretty much all this album is about. On paper, this sounds like it was Vanilla Ice before there was Vanilla Ice, and possibly worse, considering the flows all over this are pretty much nonexistent, and are completely derivative of Run-D.M.C.

And yet, this is far and away one of the most sampled rap albums in the history of the genre. It is an exalted classic of the genre, old heads of all backgrounds clutch to this as strongly as they clutch to Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, and Run-DMC. It is the third best-selling rap album of all time, and is the best-selling rap album of the 1980s. J. Dilla was chopping up samples from this left and right on his deathbed as he made his masterpiece, “Donuts”. This album accidentally invented crunk music. This album is more than just hype or due for a critical revision. Its DNA is as ingrained in the hip hop culture as any album by LL Cool J, Run-DMC, Public Enemy, etc, and in some cases, might even be more so than some of the more obvious artists in the early canon of hip hop.

So how the fuck did these guys do it? White privilege might be able to explain the 11 million copies sold back when hip hop was still being lumped into the r&b and dance categories and was rarely going Platinum, but a record isn’t going to be sampled on one of the most acclaimed rap albums of 2018 (“Astroworld”, Travis Scott), 32 years after it was first released, due to anything other than the album being dope enough to endure that long. There’s not a soul alive paying tribute to Kid Rock or Vanilla Ice anymore, if ever. But how did, as Rolling Stone put it, three idiots make a masterpiece?

Well, it taps into a root of hip hop that is possibly more fundamental than the most conscious of lyricism, the jazziest of drum loops, or the fieriest of flows. The album is absolute rocket fuel at a party. Hip hop was birthed at a party folks. The fundamental, base level, core principle of hip hop is that the shit has to hit on good speakers. This was how you rocked a sound system in the 70s, how you tore up a block party, how you maxed out a car’s speakers, and is the earliest and most enduring barometer of how good hip hop is measured. Since day 1, if a rap record didn’t hit you right in the chest with a dope drum break, fiery scratches, a beautiful sample, and/or hard ass drum programming, nobody gives a fuck about it. Punk music, where the Beastie Boys got their start, is very similar in this regard. It’s a genre that exists to viscerally shock the listener, prioritizes noise, intensity, feeling, and volume over any sort of technical mastery, and has a strong DIY foundation. So the Beasties pretty much channeled their punk ethos into a hip hop framework, studied the craft for a few years, and got to the absolute rudimentary essence of hip hop and milked it for all it was worth. The lyrics didn’t have to say much of anything if they were catchy enough and were said with enough conviction to get you hyped, and this was doubly as effective if the production absolutely knocked. These beats are really crude, minimalistic, old school stuff, but they absolutely rip to this day. Pulverizing kick drums, ice cold hi hats, raw, bleated snares, and chunky scratches are all over this thing. When the record bothers to employ a sample, it’s either an out-of-context, borderline atonal, but cranked up-to-10, sampled instrument, or a super loud break from a Led Zeppelin record. Occasionally, you get some crude 80s synths, and the guitarist from Slayer shows up for a solo on one song. But in mining such a simple, rudimentary aspect of hip hop’s backbone, and absolutely maximizing its creative potential, the Beasties made far and away one of the most quintessential rap records ever.

We’re 20 years past when the best-selling rap album of all time, “The Marshall Mathers LP”, by fellow white antagonist of the rap game, Eminem, and Em is barely able to hold onto any sort of cultural relevance. It’s shocking at how much the game is actively trying to wash the guy out. Yet, the Beastie Boys have somehow completely evaded the “aged like milk”, “culture vulture”, “they were never that good” comparisons that Eminem is ensnared in, 34 years later, in the midst of the most obnoxious incarnation of woke Twitter yet, and only two weeks out from their documentary hitting streaming sites. If Em could have a record half as fundamental to hip hop as this album, he’d be lucky. This album is truly everything people give that guy props for, and has infinitely more cultural currency in the rap game than any of his work, and I say this as an Eminem fan. Somehow, despite its gross, juvenile humor, its total lack of subtlety or finesse, its honest to god lack of any sort of real focus, and its mediocre rap performance, this album has honestly only aged better over time. The ripping hi hats and pounding 808 kicks gave birth to crunk, the back half of “The New Style” literally being the backbone to numerous Three 6 Mafia tracks, and by extension, serves as some of the earliest inspirations for trap music. Really, these guys’ lyrical approach to the sound of the voice and dopiness of the lyrics carrying the track is what paved the way for a lot of modern trap to flourish. People like Travis Scott, Playboi Carti, and Lil Uzi Vert, who have made careers about saying absolutely nothing in incredibly cool ways owe so much to this album, with Travis actually going as far as to sample this record. Artists as revered as The Pharcyde to as buck ass wild as the Tear da Club Up Thugs have flipped samples from this album, and it endures as an absolute monument in the rap game. This is quite possibly the crystallized perfection of 80s era party rap. Ridiculous subject matter, hilarious rapping, a great sense of humor, and beats that are straightforward yet hard as nails. It’s a masterpiece because it doesn’t attempt to be one at all, but just fires off on all cylinders of belligerent turn up music from the top down. It, as well as 2 Live Crew’s work, is the original turn up music for rap, and in an era where turn up music is the premium export of the genre, it’s no surprise that this record has continued to inspire artists up to this day.

I can’t say I always appreciated the Beasties. I thought they were annoying as hell when I first heard them, at like age 11 or 12. But as time has gone on, I find this record to be really endearing and ludicrously fun to listen to. If the Boys did this literally one more time, they’d have fallen off a cliff. Between the timing and novelty of this record, this was something you could pull off absolutely once and then never again. Thankfully, the guys grew up a lot on their followup, which is a legitimate masterpiece. But this is still without hesitation a classic, and is one of the dopiest, most enjoyable albums I’ve ever heard.