“Cool shit”: Beastie Boys’ guide to 1970s classic rock
Hip-hop samples can be found anywhere and everywhere, from the bargain bins of charity shop vinyl to the dizzying heights of the pop charts. As a result, sampling blew open the minds of the Beastie Boys to virtually every avenue of the music landscape, including classic rock.
Classic rock was the enemy of the punk scene in which the Beastie Boys got their start in, during their teenage years in 1970s New York. Rock’s 1960s golden age was dead and gone, and all that groups like Deep Purple represented to this new generation of DIY punks was the big-budget, male-dominated hedonism of the mainstream rock charts.
There was nothing relatable in their output for three kids from Brooklyn, whereas the likes of Bad Brains, The Clash, or Run DMC seemed to be speaking directly to them. It was a lot easier for the Beastie Boys to connect to, in comparison to the tight-trousered stadium rock of a band like Led Zeppelin.
Yet, when the band’s hip-hop influences started to take over, the emerging realm of sampling taught them a valuable lesson about music and genre. After all, early hip-hop DJs tended to use whatever records they could get their hands on, and during the late 1970s and early 1980s, classic rock records were cheap and abundant, so a lot of those legendary mainstream rock outfits suddenly found themselves forming the backbone of hip-hop records.
Sampling was a revelation to the Beastie Boys, not just for their own personal sound but also in re-appraising the classic rock they had previously written off. “I used to hate bands like Led Zeppelin,” Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock, to you and I) told Paul Brannigan of Louder back in 1995.
“But when hip hop DJs started using those chunky riffs, we started checking out old metal shit again.”
“’70s metal was definitely the coolest,” he continued, citing some particular standouts. “AC/DC had some fly records, Sabbath had some cool shit. So had Kiss and Krokus.”
Meanwhile, Mike D plucked out both Venom and Motörhead as notable highlights. Maybe not the sort of groups you would expect the creators of Paul’s Boutique to have in their record collections, yet that landscape of classic rock and metal had an undeniable impact on their output.
One of their first successes, ‘Rhymin’ and Stealin’’, the opener of Licensed To Ill, was built around a sample taken from the Led Zeppelin classic ‘When The Levee Breaks’. Meanwhile, the aptly-named ‘Rock Hard’ borrowed from AC/DC’s ‘Highway To Hell’, although Malcolm Young refused to give the group clearance for the sample.
Not only did the Beastie Boys grow to appreciate the world of classic rock, but those mainstream sounds became a core part of the group’s output, as intrinsic to their DNA as their early beginnings in the New York punk scene, you might even argue.
Classic rock itself tends to have a far less diplomatic view of the hip-hop scene that thrust the Beastie Boys onto the airwaves, as signified by the aforementioned AC/DC’s refusal to grant clearance for sample rights on ‘Rock Hard’. Like it or not, though, there is some crossover between those two worlds, both in the debt that the Beasties owe to old-school rock and metal and the inspiration that AC/DC provided to their early Def Jam producer, Rick Rubin.
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