Well here it is: the album that changed everything–for the better! The fiery shot of hip hop fired across the bow of rock’n’roll that succeeded (spectacularly!) by swiping its most monstrous riffs from rock’n’roll itself, and its brash, crass, and hilarious attitude from punk.
As I remember it, 1988’s Licensed to Ill did the impossible by converting predominantly white hardcore punks and rockers to an almost exclusively black musical genre (hip hop) OVERNIGHT. I recall attending a party being thrown by a couple of Johnny Thunders wannabes at a roach-infested crash pad in Philly, and lo and behold all every sneering personality crisis in attendance wanted to do was jump joyously around to Licensed to Ill until the morning hours.
Do you think it’s easy to instantaneously win hearts and minds? To turn cynical hive-minded hardcore kids (just like the Beasties when they started out) into the kinds of responsible world citizens who immediately rushed out to buy Public Enemy’s black-consciousness-expanding It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back after a single playing of “No Sleep till Brooklyn”? Licensed to Ill was the boldest blow for race mixing this side of P-Funk. Or Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka even. Or Public Enemy for that matter. True, even the most cursory glance at Kid Rock should be enough to tell you this remarkable phenomenon had its downside (God Save Us From Vanilla Ice!) but STILL.
But Licensed to Ill was more than just a remarkable blow for instant integration. The Beastie Boys muscled their way to the front of the bus on the basis of sheer bravado and a snotty sense of New Yawk humor not heard since the Dictators released the great Go Girl Crazy! Mike D., MCA, and Ad-Rock were that crazy kid down the block who lived to get high, liked to egg cop cars, and had that insane stash of Hustler magazines. And who thought everything was funny; hell, he even laughed while he was PUKING.
What made the Beastie Boys so great was they didn’t turn their backs on rock; they subsumed it in a whole slew of songs that juxtaposed their bragging and boasting against all manner of immortal rock samples like, just to take opener “Rhymin’ and Stealin’,” Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” Black Sabb’s “Sweet Leaf,” and the Clash’s “I Fought the Law.”
But they weren’t just copping their samples from your classic rock collection; this trio of snotty no-nothings were walking pop culture encyclopedias. It required pure demented genius to toss off references to Abe Vigoda, Picasso, and White Castle fries, to say nothing of dropping the Green Acres theme song into the middle of “Time to Get Ill” alongside 13 other samples from such unlikely companions as Schooly D, Kool and the Gang, and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. They were hyperactively bringing it all back home, from bad television to bad dietary choices, and home schooling the rest of us in WHAT WAS HIP in the process.
They were living life and living it the way you wanted to live yours: going into your locker to smash your glasses, falling for felons, doing the Smurf and the Jerry Lewis, smoking in the boy’s room, getting thrown out of White Castle, trashing talking the old man for being the rankest kind of hypocrite, and in general fighting for their right to party. Like Alice Cooper they sang about being too old to live by the rules but too young to break out, but unlike Alice they weren’t singing the teenage blues–they were busting a gut laughing.
They turned hedonism into a laff riot by means of outrageous hyperbole; when they weren’t smoking dust they were drinking Brass Monkey and when they weren’t drinking Brass Monkey they were guzzling Thunderbird wine. But there was something so pure about these boys; I remember thinking the first time somebody played Licensed for Ill that I hadn’t heard such naked joy in being young and wasted since Andy “Adny” Shernoff of the Dictators sang about doing his homework in the bar. It’s like they took all of the mad and chaotic energy expressed in the Dictators’ “Weekend” and EXPLODED it in the supernova of TEEN REBELLION that is Licensed to Ill.
Licensed to Ill is a spastic, nonstop ADD-afflicted paean to being young and hungry (let’s go to White Castle!) and horny and not giving a shit, and the mood is contagious. I may think their 1989 follow-up Paul’s Boutique is the better album, and I may listen to Paul’s Boutique more, but Licensed to Ill was more than just a Boeing 727 that delivered the goods, more than just the album that produced a seismic shift in music for that matter. It struck a cosmic blow for fun, and fun is always in short supply.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A+
