The Beastie Boys has been one of the bands that have influenced me more during my life, with their mixtures of hip-hop and rock that have also influenced a lot of bands around the world.
To me, just listening to the name of the group it self bring memories from my early twenties, going to my local library only 200 yards from where I was living at the time. Is there where I got my hands on “Licensed to ill”, I borrowed the album for a week, and fell in love with it.
Songs like “No sleep till Brooklyn” or the awesome opening “Rhyming & Stealing”, and lets not forget the iconic “Fight for your right” are songs that every time I heard them they make my mind wonder to those days in Spain. The unusual mix of stiles made this album quite revealing for me, with tunes like “Girls“, an almost comical sound about something that boys will always go crazy about, err, girls of course, and “Brass Monkey“, a song about drinking and girls. The origins of “Brass Monkey” are a bit unclear to me, it was a drink produced in America between the 80’s and 90’s, also is a cocktail, 40% Vodka, 40% dark rum, 20% orange juice. It also could be the nick name for 40oz beer (About 1.13 litres).
Later albums from the Beastie Boys where also very good, with loads of good tracks, but none of them have influenced me as much as “Licensed to ill”.
One of the songs from the 1994 album “Ill communication” that I really like was “Sabotage”, and the video was a parody of the 1970’s crime drama TV series, like “Streets of San Francisco”, “Starsky and Hutch” or “SWAT”.
A later song that was really big and was from their 1998 album “Hello nasty” was “Intergalactic”, a really catchy tune. The video was a parody of Japanese Kaiju films like Godzilla.
With the death of Adam Yauch there will be no more Beastie Boys, actually, no more Beastie Boys on stage, but they will be in our hearts, in our media, and in our life, as much as always.
Beastie Boys forever.
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