Licensed To Ill

It's easier to enjoy the Beastie Boys when all they're fighting for is the simple right to party, rather than for Tibetan freedom. Whilst the latter may be a worthy objective, the former is much more achievable. In fact, they nailed it here, on their debut LP. It may not be very sophisticated, but this is a big, fun, bombastic party in album form. 3.5/5.

lyrically interesting, with a good flow its odd you dont hear them much anymore

Very similar to Run DMC. Some good songs and it's nice to have something different but gets very samey.

Solid

Have genuinely never listened to this record. So, here we go... Man, that drum sound is H-U-G-E! Guitar tone is pretty killer too. I love how the Beastie Boys (and rap from this era, in general) always seems like such a team effort. Especially with the Beastie Boys. They always know when to underscore a punch line by screaming the lyric in unison. All that said, I just don't really care. I wasn't there and I feel like you had to be there. Or, at least, you really aren't in a position to "get there" when you're a 39-year-old dude from Grosse Pointe.

Fun! Not really my kinda music, don't get most of the references and don't gel with this style of hip hop, but I appreciate that there are some true classics/bangers in this album. Not a huge fan of the shouty-ness of it all. With the exception of one or two songs (fight for your right, hold it now hit it), I probably won't listen to it again but that's got more to do with my personal preference. Can see why this is on the list given it's "cultural" significance and pioneering style.

Beastie boys are like a cooler micheal scott got drunk and decided to rap Best song: no sleep till brooklyn Worst song: brass monkey ffs Honorable mention : low and slow

I have mixed feelings about Beastie Boys, because I find them both enjoyable and annoying at the same time. What I enjoy the most is the production value. The vocals can sometimes get irritating, but it's part of what separates them from the rest. The combination of energetic vocals, rock samples, and punk ethos all blend together in a perfect way that only the Beastie Boys could accomplish. Strangely, I found myself enjoying the deep cuts more than the hit singles. Not sure if that's due to hearing them so much, but they are some of the weaker tracks for me. Overall, it's mostly enjoyable, but a little goes a long way.

ill🤒est

I still struggle with this one. If this is the “proper” Beastie Boys, then I am obviously not the fan I thought I was.

Still wouldn't say I am a BB convert, my natural aversion to hip hop prevents me, but I enjoyed this FAR more than I thought I was going to. Can see how it has been so influential.

Very samey sound to all of the songs. Some diddly lyrics. Good in small doses.

Hot beats and casual misogyny. It's enjoyable but there is definite cringe

Quite listenable, I like it. And I recognized some samples and songs, which was also nice

My first rap album. As a pre teen white kid from rural UK this was a non confrontational way to get into hip-hop/rap whatever we called it back then. I don't think I knew it was unusual for 3 white kids to produce this as it shouldn't be but certainly made them stand out at the time. I only got the here the radio hits back in the day and took me to me students years a decade or so after to enjoy the full album. Not a favourite but a fond memory nether the less. 3/5

Great to hear the classics in context on this one. Suffers from the usual BB drawbacks (vocals on top of each other in the mix especially) but the production and guitar here still make for an entertaining LP

Still good fun!

Didn't like it. not really my thing.

Like this more and more, the samples are truly amazing, and the lyrics are so honest. Young adults wanting what they really want.

So different

I dig the humour that runs through the Beastie Boys' music, and there's plenty on display on this album, but the one-trick-pony nasal obnoxious delivery of these white boys does a number on my ears after an album worth. Glad to have ridden the train all the way but I won't be visiting this place again. (Though I may occasionally visit Fight for Your Right, as it's a perfect meld of their various styles).

Schon besonders aber halt beastie und nicht Beauty

I mostly know later Beastie stuff, so some of this sounded pretty raw. The rhyming schemes are great but lyrics are dated. You can see the budding genius though.

I grew up listening to the beastie boys so it’s nostalgic for me, but other than the hits this album is pretty underwhelming.

Not my thing, all seemed repetitive beats and similar rhymes, couple of songs i thought where clever like the girls song

I'm conflicted about this. Songs like Fight for Your Right and Brass Monkey are iconic and entertaining, but all of the rest sounds...the same. Same beats. Same flow. Plus two of the three Boys sound like Rick and Morty characters, which is not a good thing.

Some good classic tracks like fight for your right, many songs sound like the beat was made by a primary school child in music class through. Bit like a low rate white version of NWA

The trios ability to play off of each other’s rhyming and whatnot was awesome to finally sit down and listen to carefully over the length of the album rather than just listening to the more popular songs and seeing how it all works cohesively.

While this contains a significant number of Beastie Boys greatest, I found it challenging to get through—much as I did when it came out. Unlike many artists who seem to lose their spark as they age, Beastie Boys actually improved over the arc of their career.

The rock aspect and production are great but the lyrical content and structure feels juvenile.

So hard to rate. Some songs are classics, and some are absolute shite, but still somehow classics (e.g: Girls). And the black cultural appropriation is embarrassing (he says 'Aks' instead of 'Ask'). But then Fight For Your Right is such a classic, fuses punk with a more hip-hop style. Overall, as a whole album, pretty bang average, in fact not even that great. And yet because it has some classic tracks it has to get at least a 3.

There is do denying that this is an incredibly fun record. However, this much beastie boys in one sitting can get very grating, very fast. best enjoyed in smaller doses, for me.

You like men and we like beers... Yeah... Okay, 2-3 hits, kick it, you gotta fight for your right to hit the Kuhglocke. Am Stück ist es mir zu anstrengend, für zwei, drei Lieder 90s-feelig gern.

Listened to it in bed, decent, but wouldnt buy

prefer their later stuff

Some filler but still a cracking album in parts - no sleep Til Brooklyn rocks

Whew. I mean, it was a classic album alright. Similar to lauper, but obviously more streamlined and connected, the flow was great and the style was cool. A few parts felt cheap but. .. seems like the point. I mean, you wouldn't call hollywood undead stupid right? Cause thats part of the point. So .... i mean it gets a 3 for sure. wasn't amazing, wasn't super good, but wasn't bad. obviously the lyrical content is another thing. I won't go into that mess.

Fun listen, a bit more interesting than the other albums so far.

Tämä ei ollut ihan niin sekava pläjäys kuin aiemmin arvosteltu Beastie Boysin Ill Communication. Tällä levyllä oli myös muutama tuttu hittibiisi, mutta ei tämä siltikään noussut enemmän kuin kolmen tähden arvoiseksi. Huuto- ja lällättelyräppiä ei oikein jaksa määräänsä enempää, varsinkaan kädenlämpöisiä biisejä.

Not a bad debut, some duffers on here (looking at you Brass Monkey and Girls) but overall decent.

Bon son pour Peter des gueules ! Un peu de mal avec la voix !

Preferred 5ive's version

nlc

6

No está mal, pero no es mi rollo.

Lovely!

"Hold It Now, Hit It" Released: April 15, 1986 "Paul Revere" Released: August 13, 1986 "The New Style" Released: November 6, 1986 "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)" Released: December 1986[4] "Brass Monkey" Released: January 5, 1987 "No Sleep till Brooklyn" Released: March 1, 1987 "Girls" Released: May 6, 1987

false

Hip-hop. Un poco rollo.

Very powerful, but not my cup of tea. It is an icon though

Jeg skjønner ikke helt om det er tull og jeg er uansett ikke med på spøken.

Not bad, but not a style I particularly care for outside of its comedic use (e.g. The Lonely Island).

Pretty cool album. 6/10 1. Rhymin' & Stealin' 2. Fight For Your Right 3. The New Style

Fun, party hip-hop. Hasn't aged particularly well.

Have heard that this album is so well liked by so many different types of people. I don't really see the greatness in this, but do find some of it catchy and a lot of it amuses me. I think these guys have a good sense of humor and it comes through in the music. The samplings of different things in songs are like Easter Eggs that make it more fun to listen to.

Its fine, i can tell why this was popular. I used to love the beastie boys but no songs from this album. Lots of energy. Didnt age super well

this album is hilarious. fight for your right, brass monkey, slow and low, no sleep till brooklyn, rhymin and stealin

Algum tem algumas músicas que tu nem percebe a transição.

I know it's all supposed to be lighthearted and silly rap, but it doesn't do much for me. It all feels juvenile but... at this point in my life I am not the target demographic for this. Even in middle school I didn't care about Beastie Boys though. I'm sure the legacy of this is probably 4-5 stars but for me it's only 3*.

Good album, really picks up steam in the 2nd half

My favorite part was how they mentioned White Castle in like half their songs

not gonna revisit it

Tasapaksumpaa kamaa kuin muut kuuntelemani Beastie Boysin levyt. Omituinen sekoilu on ehkä hieman vähäisempää, mutta myös parhaat biisit eivät ole ihan samalla tasolla kuin myöhemmässä tuotannossa. Ihan hyvä levy, mutta ei tätä tarvi varmaan uudestaan kuunteluun ottaa.

A lot of their hits but most songs sounded the same to me

No es lo mío

Ikke min kop te. Lidt for diskant, og enslydende

classic but prefer later work.

I'm glad this wasn't my introduction-in-a-record to the group, thanks to Ill Communication getting generated first. Reading about the album's context helps me understand the relative simplicity of the debut, but without the color grading of nostalgia, the flows, rhyme schemes, and most of all the screaming are a bit... harsh. Funny enough, the humor, which usually rubs me the wrong way, doesn't come across badly here. I understand why this is a classic and think I get the hype for the Beastie Boys more generally, but when they start to play around with form more the difference is night and day. See: the samples in the closing track. Brilliant breaths of fresh air, a bit too late.

1986. Key Songs: No Sleep till Brooklyn, Fight For Your Right, Girls

old school rap (probably one of the foundation), not my genre (even the modern ones) but i recognize why people would like this wait wait wait I actually ended up saving 3 songs, i like them a lot. I dunno why Slow Ride's intro sounds so familiar im sure ive heard it somewhere

I did not enjoy this. It sounds like wannabe punk rockers imo

Two songs in... bro these lyrics are so ahh. If I played guitar, I'd be Jimmy Page? The girlies I like are underage? Like what??? The beats are interesting for the first minute and a half, but that's all you get; there's hardly any variation or anything interesting added. I can't tell if they want to be rockers or gAnGsTaS... I wish they would choose. The hits on the album I've found are just when they actually try to do something interesting; all the other songs, they're just doing the bare minimum. Favs: Rhymin & Stealin, Fight For Your Right, Brass Monkey.

not for me

I always find beastie boys a tough listen. The hits are certified bangers, but I can’t get away from the sound of every song feeling like a sample put on repeat for 5 minutes while white guys yell annoyingly in my face.

- very fun very silly - genuinely sounds like it was made ironically - MUCH more fun when i’m listening with my mama - not bad but idk if i would ever listen on my own volition

It's just not for me. I get why they're important but meh

meh

Certainly a unique sound, but for sure not for me. If I was dating someone and they told me Beastie Boys was their favourite band it would be a huge red flag.

Anerkjenner dette som en viktig plate. Men gud hvor tidens tann har herjet med den. Det høres bare parodisk ut i dag.

Kinda never really feeling it with BB, this is one of those albums that kinda in the- just because it existed and surprised white people, does not make it great -box. Like there is nothing really interesting about really any of the lyrics most of them are annoying i would say. They ya ok they decided they were going to be the first white boy MCs and talk about white castle, drinking and girls. Like kinda who cares.

MOLTO SPERIMENTALE PER IL TEMPO, PUR RIMANENDO MERDA AL MIO ORECCHIO. ROCK E HIP HOP GASA. NESSUNA CANZONE MI E' PIACIUTA. DO 2 PERCHE' MI PIACE LA VARIETA' DI SUONI PRESENTE. 2/5

Loud without being hype. They're better when they lean into the rock stuff, the guitar goes hard One of them sounds like Morty from Rick & Morty.

Enough of that.

Didn't realize White Castle was something to rap about! Not 1, not 2 but 3 call outs in 3 different songs.

C-, 32% The funniest thing about Licensed to Ill is that the Beastie Boys spend forty-four minutes behaving like the exact kind of men I would cross a bar to avoid, and every few minutes they accidentally make an argument for why I should have crossed faster. This is the famous joke, of course. They were taking the piss. Three Jewish ex-hardcore kids from New York, barely removed from playing actual punk, exaggerating dumbfuck rock-star masculinity until it became cartoon theater, spraying beer through the boundary between rap and metal while Rick Rubin stood behind the glass figuring out how few sounds a record could contain before it legally became percussion. I understand the joke. I even laugh at the joke. The problem is that sometimes a parody of three obnoxious little shits yelling about beer, girls, petty crime and their dicks becomes three obnoxious little shits yelling about beer, girls, petty crime and their dicks, and at that point the distinction between satire and the thing satirized is mostly useful to the person trying to explain why I should continue enjoying myself. Licensed to Ill is historically fascinating, intermittently fucking great, sonically meaner and stranger than its reputation as frat-boy scripture suggests, and frequently so juvenile that I feel like I should be grading confiscated notebook paper. The opening of “Rhymin & Stealin” is the strongest argument the record ever makes for itself because Jesus fucking Christ, Rick Rubin understood blunt-force juxtaposition. John Bonham’s drums from “When the Levee Breaks,” already among the most obscenely huge drum sounds committed to tape, arrive underneath a chunk of Black Sabbath until the entire thing feels less sampled than stolen with a crowbar, which suits a song where the Beasties are literally bragging about theft. This is not subtle production, thank God. Rubin’s genius at this stage consisted partly of realizing that hip-hop did not require filling every frequency. You could leave enormous dead spaces around a beat and make the emptiness itself threatening. The kick lands, the snare cracks, the guitar hangs there like industrial equipment, and the voices bounce between Mike D, MCA and Ad-Rock with that nasal, abrasive, playground-bully attack they had not yet learned to vary much. The track sounds like somebody drove a stolen Camaro through a drum machine showroom. It is ridiculous and fantastic. More importantly, it makes the album’s entire cultural collision physical. Hard rock is not being politely incorporated into hip-hop. Its corpse is being dragged behind the car. That collision mattered in 1986 in ways now obscured by the fact that rap and rock spent the next four decades fucking, fighting, producing children and eventually creating enough terrible rap-rock to make both genres consider contraception. Licensed to Ill appeared when Run-DMC had already kicked the door open commercially, “Walk This Way” had made the genre-crossing metaphor so literal Steven Tyler might as well have been holding a permit, LL Cool J was establishing what Def Jam minimalism could do with one enormous beat and a young man convinced the microphone existed specifically to document his superiority, and Rubin was developing a production aesthetic based on removing everything until whatever remained could kick you in the sternum. The Beasties were not inventing rap-rock from primordial soup. They were positioned at a moment when punk kids, downtown scenes, hip-hop, metal, clubs and MTV were rubbing against one another, sometimes creatively, sometimes opportunistically, sometimes because the record business suddenly realized white teenagers would buy rap if somebody put enough guitars and beer in the video. All of that ugliness is inside this record. So is the excitement. Pretending otherwise sanitizes the interesting part. Because these three do sound excited. That saves their asses repeatedly. Their rapping on Licensed to Ill is not especially graceful, and compared with what hip-hop was already becoming it can seem almost aggressively rudimentary. Rakim was about to make this stuff look like cave painting. The Beasties attack rhythm less like virtuoso MCs than like kids discovering they can use syllables as dodgeballs. They interrupt each other. They bark endings. They hammer rhymes because subtle internal architecture has not yet become the point. Their voices are distinct mostly through timbre and attitude, Mike D with that sneering nasal punch, MCA already carrying a little more weight in his voice, Ad-Rock sounding permanently like somebody just told him the liquor store closes in five minutes. The trade-offs create momentum through social chemistry rather than technical sophistication. You hear friends cracking each other up. You hear them stepping on each other. You hear the residual hardcore instinct that says if everybody yells simultaneously enough, perhaps arrangement will emerge through force of personality. Sometimes it does. “Paul Revere” is where the primitive materials become legitimately hypnotic. That reversed Roland beat is so wonderfully wrong-footed that the song feels like it is backing into you. The pulse seems simple until you try to settle into it and discover that its physical logic has been inverted, this sucking, backward thump with tiny electronic details hanging around it, leaving ridiculous amounts of open air for the voices. There is barely a fucking song there in conventional terms. Beat, story, three voices, attitude. Good. The sparseness gives their juvenile mythmaking somewhere to expand. The Beasties turn themselves into Western outlaws through a story that has exactly the relationship to plausible human behavior you would expect from three idiots making each other laugh, and suddenly their dumbness becomes productive because they understand that rap boasts are not sworn testimony. They are cartoons of the self. You can ride into town, threaten everybody, have a shootout, become a legend, whatever, because the beat has already informed us that normal physical law has been suspended. “Paul Revere” is genuinely clever about stupidity. The record is at its best when stupidity has form. This distinction is vital because “Girls” also contains stupidity and makes me want to put my head through a vending machine. Yes, yes, the misogyny is exaggerated, yes, the Beasties later repudiated this shit, yes, Adam Yauch eventually became so embarrassed by their early attitudes that “Sure Shot” contains an explicit apology for the disrespect toward women, and good for him, genuinely. None of that causes the song in front of me to stop sucking. The little mock-Chinoiserie melody prances around like a wind-up toy from hell while they chant about women doing laundry, washing dishes, cleaning rooms and generally existing as domestic appliances with tits. The joke is supposed to be how impossibly crude the persona is. Wonderful. I have now received the joke. The joke has twelve more repetitions remaining. This is the comedic equivalent of somebody putting a lampshade on his head and expecting applause each time he rotates. Satire needs either escalation, perspective or invention. “Girls” mostly has persistence. And it is not offensive enough to become interesting. That is almost worse. I am not sitting here clutching pearls because some twenty-year-old boys in 1986 said sexist shit. If misogyny alone disqualified records, large portions of twentieth-century popular music would have to be fired into the sun and streaming services would become considerably easier to navigate. The problem is artistic. “Girls” reduces women to a joke and then cannot think of a good enough joke. If you are going to be a sexist little goblin on record, at least bring me something grotesque, revealing, psychologically deranged, something that exposes the male creature in its natural habitat pawing at its own stupidity. Instead I get chores. Fucking chores! Three men construct an entire misogynist fantasy world and their erotic imagination takes them to laundry. This is not Caligula. This is a Sears appliance department with erections. That failure keeps infecting the album because the Beasties’ relationship to obnoxious masculinity is much more interesting historically than it is moment to moment. They were punk kids parodying metal assholes, except they also liked metal. They were mocking frat culture, except frat boys loved them because the songs were extraordinarily efficient at being frat culture. They were making cartoons of sexist drunkenness, except touring the cartoon apparently encouraged them to become some version of it. People love treating this as proof that the satire was “misunderstood,” but if everyone at the party hears “Fight for Your Right” and immediately knows exactly how to use it while the supposedly satirical layer remains undetectable without interviews, perhaps the audience did not entirely invent the problem. Satire does not have to hand out explanatory pamphlets, but there is a point where your parody of a beer commercial becomes a very good beer commercial. And “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” is a very good beer commercial. I hate that riff because it works. It has all the intellectual sophistication of somebody kicking open a basement door with a twelve-pack balanced on his head, and it works. The guitar is enormous, the snare is absurdly blunt, the vocal phrasing turns each complaint against parents and school into a slogan so immediately shoutable that millions of people who could not locate irony with a GPS were destined to bellow it while spilling Budweiser on each other. The chorus is engineered like demolition equipment. There is no interpretive labor required. You hear it once, your body knows what to yell. This is pop craft even if the pop craft is wearing a backwards cap and trying to set something on fire. I cannot deny that. I also never need to hear the fucking thing again. The irritation is partly overexposure, sure, but overexposure only kills songs already carrying a vulnerability. “Fight for Your Right” does not have enough internal strangeness to regenerate after familiarity. Its whole trick is immediacy. Once immediacy has been pulverized by decades of movies, sporting events, frat parties, commercials, karaoke and every dipshit who has ever screamed the chorus without realizing the Beastie Boys themselves came to despise what the song became, there is not much underneath except the joke, the riff and the terrifying realization that satire can lose a custody battle with its audience. Compare “Paul Revere,” whose beat remains weird. I can still enter that sound. “Fight for Your Right” arrives pre-chewed by culture. “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” fares better because it is louder, stupider and more musically excessive in ways that give the joke more meat. Kerry King comes in with a guitar solo that sounds like Slayer briefly received the wrong studio address and decided to kill whoever was inside anyway. That solo is hilarious because it understands the scale required. If you are parodying arena-metal grandeur, do not play tasteful guitar. Have Kerry fucking King show up and shred like Satan is double-parked. The song’s title riffs on Motörhead’s No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, the Beasties shout through road-life clichés, and the whole thing barrels forward with enough actual love for hard rock that the parody becomes affectionate contamination. This is the album’s central contradiction at its most enjoyable: they are laughing at rock stupidity while being genuinely thrilled by rock stupidity. There is no clean critical distance. Good. Clean distance would make this thing unbearable. That is also why the record sounds better when they are bragging about being criminals than when they are bragging about getting laid. Crime gives their cartooning an imaginative frame. Sex exposes how little imagination they currently possess about women. “She’s Crafty” has that loop from Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean” doing most of the heavy lifting, and what tremendous lifting it is. Bonham and that riff carry a density the Beasties can bounce against without needing to provide one themselves. The story is stupid, the woman is a manipulative thief, and once again women principally exist as plot mechanisms in the continuing saga of Three Guys Who Cannot Believe Pussy Has Administrative Complications. But the track moves. Rubin’s production lets the sample remain recognizable enough that the pleasure partly comes from desecration. Rock’s sacred canon gets converted into playground equipment. Led Zeppelin fans had spent years treating those records like Tablets from the Mountain and here come three little bastards cutting pieces off them to rap over. That cultural impudence delights me even when the actual rap is making me want to sterilize the room. Sampling itself gives Licensed to Ill a historical dirtiness that later copyright regimes would make increasingly expensive. These songs belong to that window when hip-hop could treat recorded culture as raw material with a freedom that lawyers were already preparing to strangle. Zeppelin, Sabbath, AC/DC, James Brown, Kool & the Gang, Trouble Funk, all sorts of fragments and references get absorbed into beats and jokes. The record rummages through rock with none of rock criticism’s reverence. That is radical in a way the album’s adolescent content is not. The Beasties take sounds white rock culture had enshrined and reduce them to rhythmic objects. A guitar riff does not need to carry the spiritual essence of The Guitar Hero. It can be four bars you cut up because it sounds fucking good underneath a kick drum. This attitude has aged better than almost anything they are saying. Rick Rubin deserves enormous blame and credit for the record’s physical effectiveness. He produces the Beasties like objects thrown down a stairwell. The drums are dry and huge. Guitar enters as impact rather than atmosphere. Bass is frequently more felt as structural pressure than melodic personality. There is almost no decorative softness anywhere. The record has the interior design of a holding cell. This suits voices that never shut the fuck up. If Rubin had surrounded them with busy arrangements, the result would be neurological terrorism. Instead he gives the idiots space. The emptiness exaggerates every shouted rhyme. Listen to how often a beat stops, thins, or leaves the voices exposed. The record understands anticipation better than its performers understand women. “Brass Monkey” survives mostly because the groove is nasty enough to drag the joke behind it. The sample from Wild Sugar’s “Bring It Here” gives it that rubbery horn-and-bass strut, and the Beasties chant about a drink as though they have discovered both alcohol and chemistry in the same afternoon. This is one of the places where their obnoxiousness becomes almost endearing because the song has no pretension to insight whatsoever. Brass Monkey exists. They drink it. They yell about drinking it. Civilization advances another millimeter toward the grave. Fine. I can enjoy idiocy when idiocy knows its dimensions. The record’s weakest moments are not dumb because dumbness is bad, they are dumb while demanding that dumbness itself be the entertainment. “Brass Monkey” at least has a groove whose hips have received the necessary permits. The album’s drinking mythology is funny to hear from adulthood because teenage and twenty-something pop culture treats alcohol with the reverence suburban kids reserve for discovering a secret portal. Holy shit, you can become intoxicated! You mean several beers might make people behave differently? Call the newspapers. Actual intoxication is much less mythic. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Sometimes you make a friend in a bathroom. Sometimes somebody tells you the same story four times. Sometimes you spend twenty minutes looking for a phone that is in your hand. Sometimes you discover the profound spiritual truth that your stomach has limits. The Beasties on Licensed to Ill are still at the stage where booze itself is an event, and after a while their fixation has the anthropological charm of watching chimpanzees discover fermented fruit. Yet I would rather hear them yell about drinking than about sexual conquest because at least their relationship with alcohol sounds reciprocal. Women on this album barely get to exist independently enough to dislike them. They appear as girls to fuck, girls who refuse them, girls who clean, girls who manipulate, girls whose main dramatic function is confirming that the Beasties possess dicks. The album’s erotic imagination is so heterosexual it bends back around into being almost sexless. There is plenty of sexual language and almost no sexuality. Nobody seems overwhelmed by another body. Nobody seems frightened by desire. Nobody loses dignity in the interesting way. Sex is principally evidence entered into the case of Why I Am Awesome. I am a horny woman. You have to work incredibly hard to make me bored by people talking about fucking, and these three achieve it through pure administrative efficiency. The irony is that their voices together possess more intimacy than anything they say about women. The actual love affair on Licensed to Ill is between the Beastie Boys. Listen to how they hand lines around. Listen to the pleasure in synchronization, the constant reinforcement, one voice completing another’s rhythm, three identities becoming one obnoxious organism. That is where the album has warmth. These guys fucking adore being around each other, and you can hear it before you know anything about what the group would later become. Their friendship supplies a social energy absent from their sexual boasting. They sound happiest not when describing girls but when constructing some stupid shared fantasy and yelling it into existence together. That chemistry is what makes “The New Style” work beyond the famous “mmm, drop” break that would itself become sampled into oblivion. The beat is stark, the voices treat the track like a room they can rearrange by shouting, and their boasts have the wonderful meaninglessness of early rap braggadocio pushed through white downtown smartass humor. They are simultaneously participating in hip-hop conventions and making their own bratty little mutations of them. This is where discussing appropriation becomes unavoidable but also requires more precision than “white boys stole rap,” because the Beasties were not parachuting in from a corporate boardroom with a memo labeled URBAN YOUTH TREND. They were embedded in New York scenes, working with Russell Simmons and Rubin, touring with Madonna and Run-DMC, recording on Def Jam, learning directly within an emerging culture whose commercial infrastructure was still being built in real time. They were also three white guys whose whiteness made it spectacularly easier for huge sections of America to consume rap once their faces were attached to it. Both things happened. History can manage two facts without needing a referee. And the sales mattered. Licensed to Ill becoming the first rap LP to top the Billboard album chart was not some spiritually neutral achievement. It revealed the enormous commercial hunger available once rap could be sold to white suburban boys as rebellion with familiar rock signifiers attached. The Beasties could walk onto MTV carrying beer, guitars and the recognizable visual grammar of delinquent white masculinity, and suddenly audiences who might have treated Black rap performers as threatening could interpret the same swagger as comedy. That is not the Beasties personally inventing racism. It is America performing one of its oldest fucking tricks, deciding cultural behavior becomes charming once the right skin tone is doing it. The group themselves would spend years outgrowing, interrogating and complicating this position. Licensed to Ill is the album before the complication. That is simultaneously what makes it historically fascinating and artistically exhausting. I know what they become, and knowing it makes this record stranger, not better. They will make Paul’s Boutique, one of the great sample-collage hallucinations. They will become more musically adventurous, more rhythmically supple, less dependent on one persona. MCA will become a Buddhist and feminist activist, which is one of the more spectacular “character development” arcs available in American pop culture. But none of that retroactively sneaks into these grooves. I cannot give twenty-two-year-old assholes credit because their future selves eventually learned something. You do not grade a first marriage on the wisdom acquired during the divorce. “Slow and Low,” inherited from Run-DMC, exposes another limitation because you can hear how much the Beasties depend on attitude to make borrowed material theirs. The beat has force, the chant structure gives them somewhere to stomp, but the record is already running low on new dimensions of the same persona. Loud. Horny. Drunk. Criminal. Loud again. The sequencing starts to feel like being trapped at a party where three guys are individually entertaining for seven minutes and collectively impossible by midnight. I can admire their energy and still want them to go smoke outside. There is something almost impressive about how aggressively Licensed to Ill refuses vulnerability. No softness. No fear that is not converted instantly into bravado. No genuine romantic desire. No embarrassment the persona cannot metabolize into another joke. No interiority besides appetite. This is appropriate to the caricature, but caricature at album length starts becoming dietary. I need another nutrient. Even the violence is Looney Tunes violence. Guns, stealing, fighting, tough-guy threats, all delivered with the emotional consequence of Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff and holding up a sign before impact. When the cartoon is good, I laugh. When it is not, I am staring at paint drying on an anvil. The record's saving grace is that the production keeps producing anvils worth staring at. There are tiny decisions all through Licensed to Ill that explain why it hit so hard despite how quickly parts of its worldview became embarrassing. The use of silence. The refusal to bury the vocals. The way rock samples are allowed to remain crude and recognizable. The drum machines do not imitate live drummers, they become architecture. There is no anxiety about whether the record sounds “authentically” hip-hop or authentically rock. Authenticity is for people selling belts. Rubin and the Beasties make the collision sound stupidly inevitable. Of course Bonham can be a hip-hop drummer if you have a sampler. He is dead and cannot complain. That irreverence is the part I want to keep. Not the frat anthem. Not “Girls.” Not the adolescent belief that shouting sexual entitlement becomes funny automatically if everybody involved knows they are assholes. The joy is in vandalizing genre boundaries, in hearing punk kids learn what a beat can do, in hearing hip-hop treat rock history not as a lineage requiring respect but as a warehouse full of shit you can steal. This record’s politics of sound are vastly more interesting than its politics of people. And I keep coming back to that because the music itself repeatedly threatens to become smarter than the Beasties performing it. “Paul Revere” has a structural weirdness they barely acknowledge. “Rhymin & Stealin” has this monstrous cross-cultural sample architecture underneath rhymes about pirates and criminals. “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” captures a genre collision more complicated than the joke announces. The beats are constructing a future while the lyrics are drawing dicks on a desk. Maybe that is Licensed to Ill in one image: somebody has broken into the most advanced audio laboratory available in 1986, discovered radically new possibilities for sampling, genre, rhythm, commercial youth culture and the relationship between hip-hop and rock, and used the equipment to make the machine say BOOBS. There is charm in that. There is also a fucking limit. I cannot hate the album because every time my contempt settles comfortably into its chair, some beat comes through and kicks the chair over. The opening of “Rhymin & Stealin” remains disgusting in exactly the right way. “Paul Revere” remains a little rhythmic miracle. Kerry King turning up in “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” still makes me grin because subtlety had already left the building and he decided to torch the parking lot. The three voices bouncing around each other occasionally produce that unique pleasure of hearing friendship become rhythm. But there is too much dead space between those jolts where all I am left with is the persona, and the persona is a twenty-year-old guy at a party who has decided volume constitutes a second personality. History turned him into an icon. His future self apologized. His beats changed music. His stupid fucking party is still going on in somebody’s basement. I am going upstairs.

Not bad, but not my jam.

It's so old school hip-hop. It's rhymin' and jivin'

un par de samples de travis. el álbum no me pareció recordable

Rappy and snappy. Contains the following classics: "Fight For Your Right" and "Brass Monkey".

They really hate women and want their girlfriends to be their mommies

Um grupo clássico que nunca me chamou muito atenção.. é legal a mescla de hip hop de batidas clássicas e básicas com o rock, o jeito de rimar até bem engraçado que lembra uma forma de “se apresentar” pra quem tá ouvindo, mas pra mim é um tipo de música que envelheceu mal.

Energetic and all but not my style Did not listen again, maybe will listen again

Minä ajattelin aluksi että jes, beastily boissei. Mutta kun oli aikansa kuunnellut niin väsähti

Juuh elikkäs. Beastie Boys on näköjään sopivissa annoksissa ihan hauskaa, mutta holy fuck rupes mielenkiinto loppumaan kokonaista levyä kuunnellessa. En oo koskaan oikein noiden poikien flowsta välittäny, jos sitä semmoseks voi sanoa. Rasittavan in your face ja melko äkkiä tulee selväksi miltä kyseiset kaverit kuulostaa. Biitit on isolta osin ihan hyvää retroa, vaikka vähän aikansa tuotosta hyvässä ja pahassa.

5/10 Hmmm no my cup of tea

fair i didnt really fw it

From the Vault #29 (January 8, 2026) Once again, I am returning with a pre-written review. This strategy has been working pretty well thus far. Hopefully it'll help me in the long run. Anyways, this is the first of Beastie Boys' included albums - one of the few hip-hop artists that I have some degree of familiarity with. I've only listened to "Intergalactic" from their main discography, but I'm familiar with Mike D's work from The Latch Brothers project, specifically the music they composed and remixed for Jet Set Radio Future. Everyone likes Naganuma's contributions to the JSRF soundtrack, but I honestly think the Latch Brothers outshone his contributions. The grimy sound fits with the aesthetic of the game far better than Naganuma's futuristic big beats. Their original output is pretty good. I like "Koto Stomp" and the killer "Ill Victory Beat", though their three remixes are their opuses. The dense, atmospheric, electronic sound of "The Answer" is engrossing and oh-so-cool. I always set it as my garage theme whenever I'm replaying JSRF. "Rockin' the Mic" is one of the few hip-hop tracks that I like. The lyrics are surprisingly quite clever. "The Scrappy" kicks so much ass. It's hard not to get into the air-headed, jocular energy of that song. It's also pretty memorable for how well it fits with the area that it plays in. The dank instrumental is perfectly paired with the grimy underbelly of the sewer level. Sorry, sorry. The JSR soundtracks marked the beginning of my music-listening journey. I had to write a essay about them at some point. I was disappointed by this album, truth be told. It bears a striking semblance to Run DMC's debut album at points, which may or may not be a correlation drawn from having listened to that album yesterday. If I were to properly compare both albums, Run DMC had better vocals, but lacklustre instrumentals and a tempo which was agonisingly slow. By comparison, this album has more refined instrumentals with a snappier pacing, but inferior vocals and a tracklist which is too long and too dense. I'm not exactly sure what irks me about the vocals here given my aforementioned appreciation for The Latch Brothers, but something about 'em just rubs me the wrong way. They come across as pretty disingenuous and hollow. The second side of this album also features much weaker material than the first, which left me entirely disinterested by the time the album reached its conclusion. Overall, this album isn't egregiously bad, though there's a lot to be improved. Book time. A significant pivot from the band's initial punk influence. Sold very well. That's about it. Wikipedia reveals that this was the first rap album to top the charts and was one of the fastest-selling debut albums for Beastie Boys' label (Columbia Records). Critically revered and generally considered to be one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time. Yup, this album has a solid rap sheet. I cosign this inclusion.

3eme et dernier album proposé par le générateur. Je n'avais pas apprécié les 2 précédents (notés 2/5 - plus variés que les autres albums du même style mais toujours très répétitifs). Pareil pour ce troisième album : quelques samples sympas, mais les morceaux sont toujours très répétitifs. Je n'y reviendrais pas. =>2/5

White boys yelling gets really old. i hate the back and forth call outs it gets real annoying. The rock-rap fusion for the beats are fun. I dont think this stands the test of time compared to other rap albums of the era. I am just not a fan

Never felt that these guys were all that good.

outrageously outdated sounding; sorry, it's very hard for me to enjoy this. they have fun energy but, at least for today's standards, the flows, bars and cadences are extremely corny.

generous 2. some great/unique production. definetly wont be coming back to this

This album has a couple marks against it, perhaps unfairly. First, the mid 80s rap sound that's akin to the Run DMC sound isn't my fave. Second, I had a roommate in college that used "The New Style" as an alarm at an ear-piercing volume to wake up (or after a bar night, sometimes not) behind a locked door, and I grew to hate that song. So, I get that this album deserves to be on the list. It's innovative and fun for its time. It sold huge amounts. But this album for me is just their early growing up period; they didn't get interesting to listen to until their next album. It's an album that, while not dismal, I don't find all that great. And now I'm craving sliders after all the mentions of White Castle.

Fucking annoying!

Så sjukt corny men bra samtidigt. Inget jag kommer lyssna mkt mer på

Meh

The production is infectious, but I quickly fatigued of the repetitive shouting and sexist, outdated lyrics

I just do not like this at all. It’s not enjoyable to listen to in any way. To me it’s just a bunch of yelling.

Unfortunately it's the Beastie Boys at their Beastie Boysiest. I might be a little more generous to this if the list hadn't given me all 3 of their albums in the last couple months but it would have taken a lot to pull this above a 2. They really buried the hits in the middle of the album. Fight For Your Right isn't exactly a masterpiece but at least it's worth listening to. Jesus Christ you've introduced yourselves like 80 times already you don't have to "my name's Mike D and I'm here to say" multiple times per track

this isn’t outright bad but it is worse than the other two Beastie Boys albums on the music list and I am irritated that we got what is basically the same album three times instead of leaving those slots open for the album list’s many, many, many, many blind spots

hmmm

A classic sound, some classic songs, but the overwhelming takeaway is that these guys sound like colossal assholes. And that’s okay- artists are allowed to be young and dumb, finding their way. They would go on to make really incredible, mature and innovative music starting with their very next record. Rubin’s production has some high points (When the Levee Breaks + Sweet Leaf= yes please) but the Beastie’s inelegance often makes it sound flat.

No es mi estilo, no lo he terminado de escuchar al completo:(

Musical equivalent to that loud group of twats at school, with shit haircuts. I will admit "Fight for your Right" was pretty great, but the rest was just awful..

This is music for retarded adolescent boys.

Juu ei kiitos.

Kinda fun but a bit one note.

Overall, not a bad album, although it's not really my thing. It's fine having the songs in the background, but the only one that I kind of enjoyed, and that I also knew already, was Fight For Your Right, and that was pretty decent.

didn't like it very much, but there are some ok songs

Eh, they get better.

No me gusto tanto , para mi gusto se hizo aburrido

1.5

It’s shit isn’t it

lots of shouting

4/10

one of the most influential hiphop albums but does it live up to that? --NO!

Review - it's the classic album but it's not aged so well. Influential at it's time but their later work is much better Score - 5/10 Need to listen? YES

for their time they might be good and modern but now they feel outdated

I love Beastie Boys, but I never connected with this. Maybe if I had been just a little older and experienced it in real time? With the exception of the ubiquitous singles, I only heard it in full after Check Your Head and Ill Communication, and visiting it in that order made it sound like a goof. (Coming to Paul's Boutique even later made Licensed to Ill feel even more like a footnote in a storied career.) Their charisma is obvious, but the rhymes are dumb and seem to single-mindedly exist to get babes and have a good time. That's not out of keeping with the other stuff in the early days of the genre, but its place in the modern musical canon is fueled by nostalgia (and probably a touch of racism, since this made rap music safe for the first time for an awful lot of white people).

Alcune idee molto interessanti, ma nel complesso mi è risultato un po' ripetitivo e a tratti disturbante nelle voci e nel mixaggio.

Not my favorite genre, but very good album overall

Hurt my head

Full of shit like me

Although plagued by unnecessary shouting, lyrics that sound like they were written by fourteen year old boys and outdated themes, some of the songs were fine.

Mid as shit

Not my cup of tea

wasn’t my vibe today but in general just not rly my speed

When we reviewed the Beastie Boys’ second album, ‘Paul’s Boutique’, I was surprised how much funky, jazzy, soulful, interesting, complexly arranged sampling was being done and how the songs overall showed more restraint, maturity and general appeal than I expected based on my knowledge of the BB. As it turns out almost all of the songs I was indirectly complaining about with that review are on this album. ‘Licensed to Ill’ has moments of smart lyricism, but the overall impression is that it’s tacky, overwrought, and childish.

I was prepared for this to hurt my ears but it wasn't so bad. Two things can be true: they were cool and also I don't really care for it too much.

Não é o meu estilo

First listen: By about halfway through track three I was thinking Oh Man This Is Not My Thing and they're *all* gonna be like this. But once that was established, I could appreciate the good vibes that were in here - and more importantly, that it does feel like a very historically important listen for this genre. Second Listen (had some time over the weekend to give it another go): I did end up getting into it! It's not the kind of thing I'd seek out more of, but it is hard to argue with the sheer vitality and energy of this. And I was maybe initially bringing a bit too much of a 2026 political viewpoint to something made by 3 20-year-old Jewish kids in the 80s. Who, looking into them, all seemed like pretty decent guys? Perhaps the stuff they were bragging about having done on this record wasn't entirely accurate. Favourite tracks: well No! Sleep! Till Brooklyn!! Obviously is just a banger. I also really liked Paul Revere. The parts where it just feels like some friends goofing around endeared me the most.

a little too white pa mi gusto, aunque sea a propósito o eso dicen vea xd

A great band...before they become truly great.

Cool, nostalgic, annoying, limited appeal when all is said and done. Several songs sound like they were made by Lonely Island to spoof the Beastie Boys.

Apart from the few popular songs, the rest seem a bit cringe to me - like improv rap battle boom-clap tracks.

Slow Ride... Shoebill sampled this 😮 So much fun! 😆 Paul Revere... This must have inspired Hamilton the musical 🙃 By the end this album gave me a bit of a headache though 😅 I don't see myself revisiting any of this😥, but it was a fun experience. I had lots of fun🤍

Man I hate it. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when it comes to the Beastie Boys. On this album - the production sounds like shit, the lyrics are dumb, the flow is amateurish even by 80s standards.....and the voices. They sound like a flock of geese being strangled all at the same time. And why are they always shouting? It's just horrible. I'll be honest - I listened to a few songs all the way through and gave the others a cursory 30-45 seconds before skipping. I just couldn't do much more. Sorry. This is terrible. One extra star because I thought "Rhymin' and Stealin'" was actually kind of funny. TWO STARS TWO STARS

Eh. Meh.

Another one? Did their shout singing and loud crash backing tracks really evolve that much from album to album?

How did we get all three Beastie Boys albums already?

it took half a minute to figure out how to actually navigate this site and i'm still not sure if my personal list is separate from the group i'm in. this is necessary context because i need to establish that the first album i was given to listen to before i maybe figured out the web site was Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, and moving from that directly to Licensed to Ill was like enjoying a long, picturesque drive down a scenic coastline, then reading the end of that coastal road and turning back onto the main urban grid, immediately hitting a long red light and seeing worse-than-average congestion ahead for the entire length of the drive back home. i can recognize the contemporary importance of an album but beastie boys ain't for me, kin. it made me smile a couple times i guess but my white boy quotient is far too low for me to enjoy it.

algunas canciones tenían buen ritmo pero la letra dejaba mucho de desear.

I mean No Sleep Till Brooklyn is a classic the rest is w/e. TMNT ass band. Not my vibe.

I gave myself an edit window via settings to move this down to 2 so I could give public enemy a 3

Too much noise and Rick Rubin's production is all over the place, even though he's a great producer

Hip hop, eh…

Some of the sampling was interesting, otherwise this was not for me.

I know this has some great songs on it, but as an album there was a lot of crap. It's a 2 for me.

Album #147 Beastie Boys: Licensed To Ill I suppose I just found out where every white kid got their flow from. Normally, when listening to a formative album from a genre, I find it interesting to note all of the influences that it has had on music to come; from Licensed To Ill, the most obvious disciples of the sound that I recognize are white comedy rappers like The Lonely Island, Smosh, and The Warp Zone. The only avenue that this sound has been able to survive in is through YouTube sketch songs and video game raps. 90s rap in general is too over the top for me, though Beastie Boys at least seem to be (hopefully) playing up the absurdity for comedic effect. Some of the lines on here are quite funny, albeit very of their time, notably a line about being like Jimmy Page because he likes his girls underage, as well as the dozens of lines about White Castle and KFC. I think it’s the kind of album I’m not supposed to analyze and just enjoy, but even then, the schtick gets pretty old quite fast; there are only so many times I can be caught off guard when the rest of the band says the last word of a sentence. The strongest point of the album is definitely the middle, with a spell of classic songs; honestly, quite unusual for an album to have a weak beginning and end. Though I didn’t completely hate it, it is really more of a novelty album and not one I’d be quick to return to. Best Songs: No Sleep Till Brooklyn, Brass Monkey, The New Style Worst Song: Slow And Low Score out of 10: 5.5

I like beastie boys generally but they have better albums than this

Has some classic party songs but otherwise I felt heavily annoyed by this album. Maybe it just wasn’t my day but I felt like the beats sucked, especially the drums which was most of what every beat was, and the rapping was over the top and about nothing. I grew up with my dad’s CD of Check Your Head which is an album I still love but this falls so short of that

Everything in this album its repetitive, maybe its because I was born in a different era but this album its like it was made for a 90's kids show

Liked some parts of the music. Did not like the singers/rappers at all. It felt like they were just screaming the whole time.

Je comprend l'histoire important pour rap Pas pour moi trop lent vraiment super lent 😱

mainly shouty shite.

4/10, чисто крутые хип-хоп ребята в бэгги джинсах с примесью рока

It sounds like this was a whole lot of fun to make, I remember friends going crackers over the Beastie Boys when this came out and I feel the same about is now as I did then: ambivalent. I assume this was the first mix between Rock and Rap? Probably good fund to spot where all the samples are from, if you can be bothered. I can't. The odd track I might smile wryly at but the whole album drags on.

Never understood the appeal

I immediately recognized the drums opening the first track, and my thought was "this is going to be interesting". The songs themselves are mostly repetetive, though they have great potential to stick in, it isn't my particular style.

Knew a few songs, like Brass Monkey and No Sleep Till Brooklyn. A little too yelly for me.

Funny storytelling but generally quite crap musically

There were a couple of good tracks on here (No Sleep... , She's Crafty), but over-all, I didn't care for this. From a historical preservation standpoint, this may deserve at least a 3, from for a personal how much did I like it / will I play it again standpoint, the answer is, "Nope! I won't be playing this again."

ale gowno xd

Not my style

hmm

verstehe nicht was so krass an dem album sein soll. kulturelle relevanz okay aber iwie fand ich nur paul revere stark. der rest hat mir nicht gefallen

Liked it back in the day, now I find it a bit screamy and juvenile

4/10

Un estilo totalmente diferente a lo que suelo escuchar, creí que nada me iba a gustar y sorprendentemente me gustaron varias canciones. En definitiva, no es mi estilo, pero tiene lo suyo. Me recordó al rap que cantan Michael Scott y Dwight en The office.

Not really my vibe tbh. I liked the first one more

S'OK, not really my thing - a bit slow for my tastes. Can't believe it's nearly 40 years old!

2,4/5

No es el estilo que más me gusta, pero tiene buenos temas.

ill drink a big fat beer (beer) then ill go to the potty (potty)

I'm just not into the Beastie Boys, sorry

Não faz meu estilo.

I only listened to a few of the songs, but I could not get into it :(

This, like RUN DMC sounded quite corny now and I don’t think this has aged that well. I found it hard to hear how this is so influential, it just feels quite repetitive.

Just not my thing at all. Music for playing loud in suburban America in a bedroom to annoy Mom. Can't really relate to it sonically or lyrically. Music for kids and adults who wish they were still children.

Didn’t like it, not my style

Go, white boys, go! 2/5

J’ai vraiment pas trouvé ça bien

I feel like I am both too young and too old to enjoy this. Too young to have any nostalgic feelings for this era of music and too old (read not a child) to enjoy it at face value. There are some cool samples and some good beats but it’s all ruined by some kids shouting at me the entire time. I actually don’t get it at all, it’s just annoying. Maybe it’s supposed to be ironic or something but that doesn’t stop it being hard to listen to.

Not my taste. Listened to a couple known "classics" (Brooklyn and Party), and called that enough.

There is some crap in the album (girls?), and only one or two very good songs. So, let's say its average. 5/10

Too much going on for me

Don't like them except for a couple of songs here and there. The voice is annoying, grating and their melodies boring. They sound like annoyed kids not able to decide which genre of music they want to play

Feels a little bit too silly most of the time. Some moments that perk my interest but lyrically doesn't do it for me.

I love love love Beastie Boys, but besides Brass Monkey, Fight For Your Right and No Sleep Till Brooklyn the rest of the songs just aren't good and not enjoyable. Especially knowing what great work they would do later.

I couldn’t listen to much of this. I liked the underlying music but the scream singing is very different from what I enjoy.

This makes me distrust Rick Ruben

Wouldn't listen to again. Just sounds like boys screaming. Brass Monkey was a familiar tune. Girls has a catchy tone. Probably the best song of the album.

Whack

En écoutant, j'ai vraiment eu une sensation étrange entre le j'aime et le j'aime pas. Certains sons sont dures à écouter et ont mal vieilli et pourtant d'autres sont cools, funs et modernes. Il y a des chansons vraiment trop particulière, c'est parfois étrange à écouter. Je ne pense pas réécouter tout l'album mais j'ai mis certaines chansons dans ma playlist. Note : 2 À réécouter : Non

not a huge fan.

can't lie i thought i was going to like this a lot more, but this thing drags on. it starts off super strong; "rhyming and stealing" as an intro works so well, high energy and fun. "she's crafty" is a cool beat, not sure about the lyrics, but the song overall works. "slow ride" is probably my favorite beat on the album, but the vocals are a little annoying, with some of the intonations they use on the call and response bit. "girls" is just hilarious, couldn't help but smile listening to it. "fight for your right" is a classic revolutionary hip hop song, and that guitar riff is fucking bad ass, the solo is dope too. after that it just goes downhill to me. "no sleep til brooklyn" has a cool ACDC sample on the refrain but other than that it doesn't do much for me. and that's pretty much the last song i can tolerate; from here it's just a no go for me unfortunately. so despite a strong first half or middle section, this was really difficult to go through. i think it's partly because the instrumentation doesn't really diversify much, all the beats kind of start to meld together. and the yelling vocal does get a little tiring after a while.

Heard Before? Well I haven't been living in a pit my whole life. Notes: - the beat switches on "The New Style" are still somehow exciting. - no shortage of inspired samples throughout the album. - "Paul Revere" made me laugh. - that said, Beastie Boys improved in every conceivable way after this. only "To the 5 Boroughs" is weaker. - the beats are as punchy and distinctive as ever BUT - of course, it needs to be said that no one should be writing incel anthems, even as satire. someone is always going to take it seriously and run with it. Verdict: For better and (mostly) worse, the ground zero of white rap. Listen Again? I don't think so. But I still enjoy later Beastie Boys.

Mid album

Not my cup of tea. Whiny yelling over sampled famous rock songs.

Likes: ridiculousness; high energy Dislikes: big fratboy energy; no sense of dynamics or chill; samples are so on-the-nose that it takes away from the song - if I want to hear Zeppelin, I’ll listen to Zeppelin Overall, disappointed by this one. Thought I’d really dig it as one of the first albums to combine punk and hiphop, but I just didn’t care for it. It’s a little to juvenile to warm up to if you’re hearing it for the first time in your 30s

A few ok songs. The Led Zeppelin sample was cool. It's just not great. Strangely enough I occasionally hear Tekashi 69 in some of the raw vocals, these guys definitely influenced his style. 1.5 outta 5

i dont even like the Beastie Boys (besides a few select songs)

I just don't like rap. And this was worse as it felt like being shouted at 2

Fine.

Boring repetitive

So much of this album is very outdated, with the corny, one-note flows, identical in just about every song in the album, couple with some weird lyrics (Think he said something about preferring underage girls in The New Style? Ick). On the bright side, the singles are great. Fight For Your Right and No Sleep Till Brooklyn both have such a rousing energy. Feels like in those two they actually get the rap/rock fusion correct, unlike the rest of the album. Those two songs do make me want to explore the rest of the Beastie Boys discography, I'm hoping they get it right on later releases. Favourite Song: No Sleep Till Brooklyn Worst Song: Girls

Some instrumental melodies were good but they were mostly just hootin and hollerin and I’m not a middle school boy so…

A few classic tracks, fun, fight for your right to party, but feels very high school teen angst, found myself wanting more hip-hop that spoke of struggle and social justice so then I put on a KRS one album

Wonderful album cover art.. but not a fan of the album.. too punky and edgy.. not my style

Feels blasphemous to say this all sounds like the same song. The only exceptions are the songs with guitars in the background. Everything else was kind of filler

Na mě asi moc ukřičené, ale doprovod se mi líbí.

its, alot of yelling. i only knew about brass money and no sleep til brooklyn going into this album. ive always been a huge fan of brass monkey but this is like 15 brass monkies in a row and it gets very annoying after a while. was pretty irritated while listening to it. half the songs i couldnt tell the different between. they might as well been all one song lol. that being said! Fight For Your Right - that one is so fun man. the guitar is super cool. probably the best song on the album aside from Brass Monkey. Im sick of their voices though :( 4/10

Obviously, Fight for Your Right is incredible. I liked the sample in Slow Ride. Girls was a unique song so added that too. Everything else I would never listen to again. It has too much energy which works for me if the music comes with a catchy melody but in this case it just sounded like annoying frat boys yelling for 45 minutes.

I liked the beats and the music and the singing was good but not my favorite. But still nice

A bit to punk for me

HIP HOP TÊTE DE SHNOCK!!!!!!!

Dette var slitsomt å høre på til tider! Noen av sangene her er virkelig grusomme (Girls, blant annet). You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Party er en ordentlig banger da. Rhymin and Stealing og. Og stjal Eminem dette albumcoveret for Kamikaze?? 🤔 2/5

Interesting to hear tracks that I recognise but most of the album felt like a school band shouting. Like the innovation given it was mid 80s and some of the production is cool. Unlikely to listen to again.

fighting for my right to kill dogs

I don't know... I am entertained for a little, and then it starts to become very repetitive. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have the other Beastie Boys album to donate this to, and that one was so much more dynamic, interesting, and attention keeping. This one was a little boring. However, the three huge hits were all GREAT, however was probably because of the heavy guitars, not the actual songs. Either the Beastie Boys or their producer must be big Led Zeppelin fans!

Not a fan. I was surprised that they had 2 alblums in the top 1001. I was even more surprised they came up so soon together.

Rap with metal backing tracks was a bit different back them so marks for innovation but still a bit same old.

Not a memorable listen for me after a few songs. I don't have a nostalgic connection to the Beastie Boys and this was my first time listening to them. Was fun for the first few tracks but very samey after that. Would not go back for the listen again though I did think it was fun for a once off!

Ei napannut, kuulosti joltain parodialevyltä.

It's fine. Listened a bit to Beastie Boys in the past and they have some songs i really like. However, this album didnt really hit me. Some fun songs but pretty repetitive? Very mood based album? Didnt really hit me this time.

Not for me

Huh. I thought I liked their stuff, but this one just doesn't work for me.

Kova on uho, mutta kun ei ne ossoo lauloo. Samalla ärsyttävällä äänellä ja nuotilla kaikki biisit.

nicht ganz gehört, war nicht in dem mood für das album, ab einem anderen tag bestimmt besser

Beastie Boys always sounds a little bit annoying to me. I don't think there was a single song that I really enjoyed. It still was listenable, so avoiding the 1/5.

me molesto un poco, las letras tampoco me gustaron, meh

Worse than expected. Guy can't get over how good his rhymes are and all the girls he gets as a result. Ridiculous lyrics and the songs all sound the same.

not my usual taste. good for what it is

I liked this album in 6th grade and I'm disappointed to say this album sounds pretty immature after you hit puberty. I have an appreciation for its place in rap/rock history, but it's just way too fratty and gross. The lyrics are not just sexist, they're downright rapey at times. I consider myself a Beastie Boys apologist, but this record is a bridge too far.

I love the singles 'fight for your right' and 'no sleep till Brooklyn'. Before that, it was clear how easily the Beastie Boys parodies come. Prefer their later albums.

Combining rock and hip hop works well in places but can't sustain a while album. Ends up a bit like a novelty act.

Not for me but can see why they are popular

Me gustan más sus samples que sus canciones, pero están bien para una canción.

beastie boys are the musical representation of how i feel about being biracial (the whiteness is the most annoying thing). the switch up in new style reminded me of three six mafia for a split second. i can’t decide if this album was a bit or not??? i can’t believe one of these guys married kathleen hanna wtf? i’m on slow and low and im begging for this album to be over already best tracks: the new style and no sleep till brooklyn

I think it's safe to assume on my part, on my second Beastie Boys 1001 listen, that I'm just not really a fan of what they do and likely never will be. This was way too confrontational and "in your face" for me vocally for large spells, and whilst the rap-rock fusion and lyricism occasionally yielded some compelling ideas and cool links/through lines to other artists in mainstream rock culture, it didn't provide enough reward to offset the fatiguing nature of the listening experience.

2/10

Mistura de metálica e rap mas não sei se no bom sentido. Tem sem dúvida boas músicas mas tem muitos berros e pouco melódico para mim.

A 2.8 All the hit songs were the ones I’m familiar with. It’s probably a 3 but when would I go “it’s time to listen to Licensed to Ill”

this genuinely sounded like a high-school diss track for most of the songs? incredibly samey-samey rhythm pattern and just naff lyrics all round, very cringe, not a fan

a couple excellent songs mired by an overall mediocre albun

Anstrengend zu hören. Die stimme ist sehr gewöhnungsbedürftig. Girls ist irgendwie weird aber unterhaltsam. Fight for your right ist halt ein ziemlicher banger. No sleep till brooklyn auch ganz gut.

There was a bit of nostalgia here listening to Fight For Your Right and No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn, and Slow And Low was OK, but beyond that I struggled to get anything from this. Taken at face value, it's shouty, tedious frat-boy hip-hop. If you take it as a satire, it remains shouty, tedious, frat-boy hip-hop but you don't have to take it so seriously. However, back in the day, I don't remember it being labelled as satirical (a group of English comedians released a song called No Sleep 'Til Bedtime to cash in a bit), and it seemed to be championed by the people that maybe it was poking fun at! Either way, apart from a few songs, not for me. A low 2.

I was familiar with some of these tracks ("Girls", "Fight For Your Right", "No Sleep Till Brooklyn", "Brass Monkey") via general cultural osmosis, and based on those wasn't looking forward to the rest of the album. There were definitely moments here I enjoyed - "Rhymin' and Stealin'" was fun, partly because you can't go wrong with John Bonham's thunderous drums. But for the most part the album was what I expected - the soundtrack of the beer-soaked frat boys that I hated in college. Simple rhymes about beer and hos and how awesome they were, nothing too complicated that you couldn't slur along to after a few brewskis. None for me, thanks.

Not really my piece of cake

Good for what it was. 80’s hip-hop not my cup of tea (for now)

1 stern

ngl this felt pretty corny, repetitive, and basic.

Sure

Fun

Old school rap. The way rap should have stayed. Not the rap crap they have today. Some good songs.(Rap)

Wasn’t expecting to dislike this one as much as I did. I enjoyed Paul’s Boutique and Ill Communication, but this one feels far more amateur than those, which I guess makes sense.

Not one of their best. Couple of good tracks, lot of slop. Terrible lyrics and often pretty uninventive musically.

There are better BB's albums.

I get the Beastie Boys are somewhat iconic but this sounds like pretty basic stuff. Simple, childish lyricism paired with with simple, childish beats. Purposely immature and bratty. Theres fun to be had but little to no depth. Great album cover.

I've known this album for ages, and I know it's technically complex, massively influential, and has some good grooves, but it's really just not for me, and that's okay. And this is a good chance early on to note (mostly for myself) that my star ratings on this project will indicate how much I personally enjoy an album, not how objectively "good" I think it is.

I've never been able to get into the Beastie Boys. I find their voices annoying, and they always seem to use the same basic rhyme scheme with the exact same flow in every song. I definitely feel there is much better early hip hop out there. 2/5

Yikes

I really like the later Beastie Boys. This is annoying at best. Sometimes the songs feel like they couple be a new one by The Lonely Island, which isn‘t a good thing.

My first listen to a Beastie Boys album, and much as expected from the radio play singles. I think that this material as a set would be great in a live, possibly festival setting but back to back songs on an album were just a bit too much BB for me.

Way too many “White Castle”, “girlies” and “my names Mike D”. I actually came in to this record with a positive impression of the Beastie Boys and enjoyed the hit songs. But man, this was so brutal to listen to. Some of the sampling and beats were cool, but I couldn’t stand the lyrics and rap-singing. I just don’t get it.

BRASS MONKEY THAT FUNKY MONKEY! Har hørt ein del på den. Overraska over alle sjørøvermytologien. Like stilen, unik, men dessverre ganske slitsom:) Beste sang: Brass Monkey

beastie boys is ok. brain candy. tickles the brain but not high art, imo. thats my hot take

Too noisy

Silly and fun, reminds me of my childhood. The it later albums are much better

Just don’t like the beastie boys very much

Not a good listen in the morning. Prefer Intergalactic, but this is prob an age thing.

i wanted to like this so bad but i hate it so much I'm sorry

The hits are good but that's about it. 44 minutes of these dudes is headache inducing. But I can acknowledge the dumb fun aspect of it

tI hink it's too much metal for me, but I liked getting to know another musical group I had never heard of before.

I remember when this came out well. I was in fifth grade, and "Fight for Your Right" was massive. And I, even at that tender age, thought it sucked. It wouldn't be till Check Your Head that I came around on the Beasties. Nearly 40 years later, I still kinda hate this album. I can take "Paul Revere" and some other moments here and there, but as far as I'm concerned, the Beasties don't exist pre-Paul's Boutique.

There’s something nostalgic about that 80s rap flow and beat. I grew up on hiphop but never got into the Beastie Boys as I used to think white rappers were all hype (yes, I’m white) and I wasn’t into the rock/rap/yelling mashup. And I’ll admit 80s rap has rough replay value as beat technology and flows advanced over the decades. But putting rock and rap together like this with a group of Jewish kids was obviously a multi-million dollar idea. Their bravado on the mic is unquestionable, their flows are tough and the samples spot on. Opening with Led Zeppelin’s drums from When the Levee Breaks was a great touch. With all that said, as an adult, rap doesn’t interest me anymore and the album can get noisy (I’m an old person yelling at the sky), and I’ll likely never listen again so I’m tempted to give this a 2.

Thought I'd like it a lot more but the shtick really does get annoying by the third song. Very little in terms of actual music and mostly just dudes yelling

Mixing rap with rock and heavy metal riffs, this fun and creative album was the first rap album to top the Billboard charts, marking hip-hop's crossover into the mainstream. I understand and appreciate its significance, but I find their voices and rapping a bit annoying. Still, there are some great anthems on this. Favorite tracks: Fight for your right

načelno za trojku al mi je pjesma "girls" tolko usrala doživljaj, brate...

„Licensed To Ill“ erschien 1986 und war das Debütalbum der Beastie Boys, aufgenommen unter anderem in den New Yorker Chung King House of Metal Studios. Das Trio aus den USA – Mike D, Ad-Rock und MCA – verband auf dem Album Hip-Hop mit Rock- und Metal-Elementen, was damals neuartig und stilprägend wirkte. Besonders bekannt wurden Songs wie „Fight for Your Right“, „No Sleep till Brooklyn“ und „Paul Revere“, die die jugendliche Rebellion, Humor und Energie der Band auf den Punkt brachten. Musikalisch setzten die Beastie Boys stark auf eingängige Beats, Samples und Gitarrenriffs, die die Grenze zwischen Rap und Rock aufbrachen. Produziert wurde das Album von Rick Rubin, der den aggressiven, rauen Sound mitprägte. Damit traf die Band den Nerv der Zeit und erreichte als erste Rap-Gruppe Platz 1 der US-Billboard-Charts. „Licensed To Ill“ ist ein Meilenstein des Hip-Hop, der die Tür für Crossover-Projekte weit aufstieß. Das Album wirkt aus heutiger Sicht roh, aber voller Energie und bleibt ein wichtiges Dokument der Musikgeschichte.

A couple good songs here and there but most of the flows sound pretty much the same. Every other song is about “Hey we’re the beastie boys and we know how to rap”. Same problem I had with Ill Communication. Maybe I just don’t understand the symbolism of it. Standout Songs: Rhymin and Stealin Slow Ride Fight For Your Right

eh, it’s okay fun but after a while it feels like the same thing

Yuck

Sekamelskaa

not my kinda thing sounds too much like rodrick's music in diary of a wimpy kid

These guys think they are sooooo cool. I hate their lyrics so hard.

Zeppelin beat to start is cool. Two hat store rap albums in a row is rough. I joke about hat store rap but I really have no concept of how important B-Boy culture was. I think it’s a bit like the hippie movement, where you kind of had to be there in the moment to understand it as revolutionary before it became kitsch and silly. There really is an irony to the Boys rapping over Zep riffs that Jimmy Page lifted from black bluesmen. I’m FLuke Wilson and Im hear to say, i be taking chicks every day. Yeah im not shy or meek, Got a new girl every week. Don’t believe me? Just Trudt Me! After the gym my socks are musty! Got a nice girl and she is BUSTY. Teachers hating cuz they’re old and CRUSTY. Holy shit this is easy. I can’t lie though. This is fun. The interplay with these guys is undeniable. Rick Rubin curated some great beats. It’s Hat Store rap that knows it’s silly so it’s able to be really playful. A core memory Of mine is the crazy hop all of my senior prom did when Girls came on. This album is stacked on the back half.

Same thing I mentioned about my previous Beastie Boys. I see, respect, and understand the impact and influence, and I should on paper love their music. In practice, I just don't care for it, and that's okay. That doesn't take away from how important they were

unfortunately I do not have any of the apparent nostalgia that most listeners have when relistening to this album. How ever learning about how this was part of the beginning of Rick Rubin’s legendary producing and general music making wisdom definitely made it a more interesting listen. Hasn’t aged well, but what has. +++ fight for your right, no sleep till brooklyn - - - girls, she’s crafty (crazy immature misogyny)

Madrfakr, edini album od Beastie Boys, k ga ne maram in zanalašč nikoli ne poslušam. I guess today's the day. Ok, začetek je itak kul, k je sample od Led Zeppelin zadej. In se že sprašujem, če sm preveč trmasta v moji nastrojenosti prot Licensed To Ill? Ne, sj vem točn kva vse me mot pr temu albumu, najbl "Girls", k so ga pa itak že sami denouncal oziroma se opravičl za whatever the fuck je ta komad. Kokrkol, ta obdobje hip hopa, k so še loh samplal je imenovan the Golden Age z razlogom. Prva dva komada, "Rhymin & Stealin" in "The New Style" sta odlična. In dalje so mi isto vsi komadi všeč. Pač totalno že vidš oz. slišš v prvem albumu njihov stil. Uf, "Girls" je. Bljak. Pač, ker butast komad. In sledi njihov breakout komad. K mi je - meh. Nisem ga že dolg slišala in veselim se ga spet ne dolg slišat. Ha, " No Sleep Till Brooklyn' mi je tud mal brezvezn. Kle so bli res še mulci. Pač, za večje uživanje ob poslušanju, je pr temu albumu priporočljivo ne preveč natančno poslušat večino besedil. Skoncentrirat se na musko in beate. In tko se prebijem skoz ta del albuma in zraven celo uživam. Sm biased, ker so mi ljubi, ampak sm tud trmasta k sam Satan. Še zmer mi ni tok kul ta album.