Beastie Boys : Licensed to Ill
Genre: Rap	Dates: 1986

True story: as an ignorant 24-year-old teacher who shunned MTV on principle in '86, I scoffed at my students' enthusiastic urgings to "check out the Beastie Boys." I'd skimmed an article—looked like frat boy stuff to me (I was way into West Coast hardcore and Minneapolis punk at the time). Yuck. That same year, visiting a buddy in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at the record store he worked at, something huge-sounding on the store's sound system was very effectively kicking my butt: massive guitars and drums ("Is that a Led Zep riff?), wonderfully annoying, overlapping voices spitting hilarious lyrics, no time between songs to recover. "What the hell IS this?" I asked my buddy. Reply: "Dude. That's the Beastie Boys! Where you been?" Still know the lyrics by heart, friends. Despite the minstrel/blackface overtones, Mike D, MCA, and AdRock proved themselves the funniest rock and roll band since the Coasters, and scared a lot of blue-haired ladies in the process. Who would have predicted they'd still be putting out entertaining and intelligent music two decades later? (Reissue request: Sony needs to put out a 25th Anniversary Edition with a DVD collection of the equally uproarious videos that came with the singles!)

Playlist:
1. Rhymin And Stealin
2. New Style
3. She's Crafty
4. Posse In Effect
5. Slow Ride
6. Girls
7. Fight For Your Right
8. No Sleep Till Brooklyn
9. Paul Revere
10. Hold It Now, Hit It
11. Brass Monkey
12. Slow And Low
13. Time To Get Ill
14. Fight For Your Right
15. No Sleep Till Brooklyn
16. She's Crafty