Licensed to Ill

It was... bad. This album had only 2 actually good songs for me, others were not good and I enjoyed only some seconds of cool samples or some riffs. Ill Communication was surely better. Still, I won't give this album a 1 because I did enjoy some parts of it but it was a disappointement.

The Good: We’ve been given green light to be sick!
The Bad: Turns out that this license has been revoked…
The Ugly: Trying to shake off our “ill” feelings…

Back in high school, my buddy and I started a hip hop thing, cause we be all cool like that…
I forget what we called ourselves, though I am sure that it my name had Double something in it, and his was Triple … Anyway, silly teenage stuff, trying to do body pops, and break dancing, and “browning”, at least, that is what my buddy called the foot shuffly dancing thing…
Anyway, he was the one who would buy hip-hop records, and I would be the one listening to it and trying to figure out if there was a future in it for this double something.

Now, you know I am no fan of rap, but there are exceptions to this rule, like Public Enemy and Eminem, yet the Beasty Boys, for me, have always been something that wanted to be more then it actually was.

This album proves how primitive hip-hop was back in the day, however, it was also filled with a more positive outlook on life, unlike that gangsta shit that followed soon…

Going to rank this straight down the middle as I had fun listening to this album for memories sake, but probably won’t be listening to this anytime soon again… 3*

Fast paced, high energy, wide variety. It's a record unlike any other.

Clasicazo. "The new style", "Slow ride", "Girls" y la legendaria "Fight for your right". Realamente no es perfecto para ser 5 estrellas, pero siempre hay que ayudar a subir la media si algo te gusta tanto.

No Sleep Till Brooklyn! 🤘

Hell yeah. So solid all the way through. Paul Revere with the backwards high-hat. What an absolutely gold record stem to stern.

In the context of hip hop of its time, this is catchy as hell and super goofy, a good time. 5*
Highlights: no sleep till brooklyn, fight for your right, brass monkey

This album sounds like a parody of every rap record ever. Great songs with guitar as the lead instrument!

And I thought they couldn’t get worse.

'Deliver Colonel Sanders down to Davey Jones' locker'; 'I got a girl in the Castle and one in the pagoda / You know I got rhymes like Abe Vigoda' (or is it Phyllis Diller?); 'Now your mom threw away your best porno mag (busted).' The Beasties spend a fair amount of time rapping about 'girlies with the def behinds,' and really girlies of all shapes and sizes, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this album remains sonically fresh and persists as a cultural touchstone that few other records approach. Behind the boasting, rhyming, and stealing is the inception of the hip hop avant-garde, persevered by Kool Keith, MF Doom, etc. Sampling is a form of cultural allusion, and when the lyrics are equally, hilariously allusive, you get something that is truly sui generis. And fun as hell.

This album still sounds somewhat fresh after 30 years. None of the tracks really hit all the things I would be looking for, but there's so much power and conviction that you just have to give in.

Not really my style. A little repetitive and shouty, which leads to exhaustion quickly. Still - not terrible.

this wasn't as bad as i expected it to be. i really didnt have the patience to deal with the shout rap on the day i got this album but this album is a lot of fun and managed to overcome my negative feelings for the most part. i also really enjoyed some of the samples on this album. i understand why people enjoy it but at the end of the day its not for me

I'll say now that I'm not into hip hop. A lot of shouting about guns and "da hood" and "n**gaz this and hoes that. I've obviously heard 'Fight for your Right' before (a banger) but that's about it. So is this album Hip hop?

The first 4 tracks are awesome. Then it drops in quality a tad for the next 2 until Fight for your Right and No Sleep pick up the quality until the end. In places it sounds like it's the cast of South Park. So its a novelty record? just with great lyrics and great tunes?

After 2 listens I still dont know if this is Hip Hop or Rock What I do know is its a great big piss take and I love it.

I am just not a fan of the Beastie Boys. This is the best of their albums for me, even if it is juvenile. But like the rest of their albums, after I get past the singles, I'm just not a huge fan of what's there.

That said, there's enough singles on here to get a one star bump from my other Beastie album ratings.

Some great tunes on here, and some that are dated/unfortunate. Definitely some songs that I have and will continue to return to. One I didn’t get into in the past but I enjoyed this time was Slow Ride. It’s still a 3 because I don’t see myself going back to it and listening in full, but there are plenty of songs that were already in the rotation and now one more. So it’s a strong 3, close to a 4 but there’s a few stinkers on here that keep it in the 3 range.

Absolute chaotic energy where the sum of its parts shouldn't work, but it all comes together and makes absolute magic, and it's not even a top 3 Beasties album...

Kick it over here baby pop, and let all the fly skimmies feel the beat.... drrrrrrooooopppppp!

Auch, wenn unpopular opinion, ich finde die haben zwar interessante Stimmen, aber der Flow und alle zusammen, klingt einfach wie gröhlen auf ner Party. Einige Lieder sind cool, aber ich finds einfach häufig nicht schön und anstrengend zu hören.
Songs der Playlist hinzugefügt: Keine

I feel like the Beastie Boys made this as a satire but people actually liked it and then they were sort of stuck. As satire, this is brilliant. As music I would want to listen to, maybe not so brilliant. The funny thing to me is that you can see a lot of artists that used this album as an inspiration for their own work not knowing that this was pretty much poking fun at the genre. Shaping the genre with a mostly-satirical album is actually pretty funny in itself. Maybe they recorded this with a 'if you think it's satire then that's what it is but if you actually like it then we're serious' kind of mentality. I think that's actually pretty likely. I like this better than Paul's Boutique but not as much as Ill Communication so that puts it squarely at 3/5

I’m at a 4.5 that will get bumped up to a 5.

This is the third Beastie Boys album we’ve gotten, but we’ve gotten them in a sort of weird, reversed order; going from Ill Communication, to Paul’s Boutique, and THEN to their debut album makes for a weird expectation. I’m giving this 5 with a bit of grace – this is the weakest of the 3 albums we’ve gotten so far, so I’d consider Paul’s Boutique a retroactive 5, if I could go back to give it that.

With that said, it’s still really fucking good. Rick Rubin’s production, while much emptier compared to the other two albums we’ve gotten (and nowhere near as rich and full in its sampling) is still pretty cool here. It’s no surprise that the biggest hits on this album are the ones that blend rock sensibilities with rap’s flow, and while it’s a formula pretty directly copied from Run-DMC (and we’ll get to Run-DMC later in this write-up, trust me), I think it’s a much more successful blend here than on Raising Hell, because it’s not as entrenched in percussion-based beats, allowing the rock instrumentals to shine, and letting the vocals flow more naturally, especially with their adlibs, group flow, and call-and-response style.

This album does suffer to me when the percussion overtakes the flow, and I think that’s a lesson most rappers have learned from; I’m not saying you can’t structure a great rap song around a percussive beat (quite literally, just look at Sticky from CHROMAKOPIA), but when it comes to 80s rap, I find it just stilts everything a bit, and forces really basic rhyme schemes that don’t play well with my tastes. It stilted Raising Hell for me (which admittedly, maybe I was a little harsh on), and it stilted this album a bit, though not as much. Run-DMC’s influence on the Beastie Boys is obvious here, but it’s more so obvious through Rick Rubin himself, who had a hand in producing both albums. Hell, “Slow and Low” is literally a demo of a Run-DMC track repurposed for the Beastie Boys. It fits them well enough, but they didn’t do enough to really make it their own.

With my mild bitching out of the way (which really boils down to personal taste), allow me to fucking gush over how much personality and charisma these guys showed in spite of some emptier beats – the Beastie Boys themselves make this fucking album, and they stamp their mark pretty instantly. Rhymin and Stealin is drenched in percussion heavy reverb that could’ve really sunk the album on a potentially bad first impression, but their vocal style and their lyricism come out of the gate to make that track work. This album is at its very best when the Beastie Boys get to show off that personality, and it’s most apparent on “The New Style”, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn”, and “Paul Revere”. Their charisma just oozes off of this album, so whenever Rick Rubin has them doing their best Run-DMC impression, that’s when the album suffers, because it’s not their musical voice, and everyone knows it. (I promise that I do actually like Run-DMC.)

It is still the weakest of the 3 Beastie Boys albums we’ve gotten so far, but those albums wouldn’t exist without this one, and there’s some great fucking tracks here. It’s a breezy 44 minutes, with great lyricism (for the most part), smooth flows, and some unique production for 1986 – the beat switch in The New Style got me really fucking good. Some of it’s emptier, but that’s all personal taste; Rick Rubin’s beats click more often than not, and like I said, the Beastie Boys are too damn charismatic and too damn good on this album to let a few bum beats kill their vibe. It’s a damn good rap album, and I have no problem bumping it up from a 4.5 to a 5.