Now Playing Tracks

  • Track Name

    The New Style

  • Album

    Licensed to Ill

  • Artist

    Beastie Boys

oneweekoneband:

Beastie Boys - The New Style

A couple of years ago I found myself in a bar in Berlin, and for the first time in many years listened to Licensed To Ill from the start to end, drinking cheap beer and patting a dog. I was amazed at how ‘right on’ the whole thing still sounded, and that I still knew every lyric by heart. There’s a lot not to like about it, however.

Record company intervention stopped the album from being called ‘Don’t Be A Fa**ot’ as the band wanted it to be known, which just may be the only time a major stepped in to the creative process to actually make something better. All the apologies and charity work in the world would still do little to make up for that one if it had somehow slipped through the record company censors. Still, there’s plenty of shit to be embarrassed about for the guys on that record, and for many years they would avoid the material altogether, and eventually re-write the lyrics to remove that stuff so they could play it again.

The song Girls may have just been like a schoolboy taunt, and its minimal production and comical overtones legitimized and made light of the misogyny at its heart. The backwards beat of Paul Revere still sounds modern, but again it’s marred by the same sort of lyrical damage. The New Style uses Rick Rubin’s trick of the one guitar chord making up the musical hook (he would do this later on Jay-Z’s 99 Problems and no one batted an eyelid) to a dramatic affect, that works even better than we he has Kerry King from Slayer playing a whole riff. Alongside Rhymin’ And Stealin’ with its Black Sabbath sample and Slow And Low, the best tracks by a long margin were often also the most overlooked.

To Tumblr, Love Pixel Union