1001 Albums Summary

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.