How Beastie Boys ditched rap music for punk rock
When the Beastie Boys started out, they were never looking to sell a million records overnight. Throughout their first handful of tracks off Licensed to Ill, most of the trio’s bars sounded like the same traditional wise-guy cracks you would hear from any high school bully circa 1986, albeit with a staunch New York accent attached. While the band wore sonic personas pretty close to their skin, they always wanted to explore something more than traditional rap.
Throughout the group’s musical journey, they would be toying with different soundscapes that made for some of the wildest studio experimentation the rap world had ever seen. Taking bits and pieces from songs they loved when they were kids, Paul’s Boutique could be considered one of the first “sampladelic” albums ever made, marrying together the sounds of discordant samples behind the beat to create a kaleidoscopic stereo image when listening on headphones.
Then again, the Beastie Boys were never meant to be strictly tied to the sounds of hip-hop. For all of the great rhymes that they had between them, albums like Ill Communication and Check Your Head would find them getting back in touch with the sounds of punk rock while still combining the different break beats from their hip-hop early years.
While many saw this as a bold new innovation for the band, it was a great example of them returning to their roots. Before they had even released their debut, they started playing the same kind of hardcore punk emanating out of Washington, DC, which led to them releasing hardcore EPs like Aglio E Olio.
When it came time to put songs together for Ill Communication, they ended up turning towards punk rock out of sheer frustration. As they were compiling tracks, they started to get agitated at their producer, Mario Caldato Jr, who would constantly fly off the handle when he thought that the group weren’t going in the right direction.
As Ad-Rock would explain in the Beastie Boys Book, “Mario was getting frustrated. That’s a really calm way of saying that he would blow a fuse and get pissed off at us and scream that we just needed to finish something, anything, a song. He would push awful instrumental tracks we made to have something moving toward completion.”
To get at their testy producer, the band thought it would be funny to make their next piece all about Caldato. Based on MCA’s snarling bass riff, they would lay down the basics for ‘Sabotage’, with Ad-Rock writing lyrics directly about how much they thought they were getting creatively screwed over.
Even though the track would become a major hit, it wouldn’t even be the most punk rock song on the record, as the group began including even more hardcore tracks onto the album, like the manic ‘Tough Guy’. While the Beastie Boys may have gone down in history as hip-hop legends, pieces like ‘Sabotage’ proved that hip-hop was only one genre on the musical spectrum that they mastered.
