Produced by Rick Rubin and Beastie Boys, Licensed To Ill was originally released November 15, 1986--making the B Boys the fifth artist to release a full length album on the original Def Jam label after LL Cool J, Slayer, Tashan and Oran "Juice" Jones.
Beastie Boys Ill Communication Full Album Zip
Originating in New York City in 1981, Beastie Boys was composed of Michael "Mike D" Diamond (vocals, drums), Adam "MCA" Yauch (vocals, bass), and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz (vocals, guitar), and was formed out of members of the experimental hardcore punk band the Young Aborigines, which featured Diamond as vocalist, Jeremy Shatan on bass guitar, John Berry on guitar, and Kate Schellenbach on drums. After Shatan left the ensemble in 1981, Yauch replaced him on bass, the band changed its name, and Berry was soon replaced by Horovitz. Upon achieving local success with the 1983 comedy hip-hop single "Cooky Puss," Beastie Boys made a full transition to hip hop, and after Schellenbach also left the band, the musicians toured with Madonna in 1985. A year later, Beastie Boys released their debut album Licensed to Ill, the first rap record to top the Billboard 200 chart. Their second album, 1989's Paul's Boutique, was composed almost entirely of samples and received critical acclaim, with 1992's Check Your Head and 1994's Ill Communication finding mainstream mainstream success. In succession, those albums were followed by 1998's Hello Nasty, 2004's To the 5 Boroughs, 2007's The Mix-Up, and 2011's Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.
Not George Clinton, not the P-Funk All-Stars, not even Parliament-Funkadelic -- this is an actual Funkadelic record, something that nobody'd seen since 1981. Call it semantics if you want -- with the core members who've passed since The Electric Spanking Of War Babies (Garry Shider, Tiki Fulwood, Eddie Hazel, Glen Goins, and Cordell "Boogie" Mosson, to name a few), skeptics might consider this an All-Stars kind of effort anyhow, even considering the number of performances brought out from the vaults and stitched posthumously into the tracks. But as the most overstuffed and stylistically experimental thing to come out of the P-Funk camp possibly ever, pinning it down to any one idea of what's previously been offered under the Funkadelic name is beside the point. It's not out of the question to expect an uneven effort from a three-plus-hour triple album with thirty-three tracks (one for each year Funkadelic was in storage). And maybe it's hard to cut through all that to separate the fine from the mediocre; there's not much further on either end of the scale, whether it's outright stinkers or mind-boggling brilliance. But it does successfully put forth the idea of a version of P-Funk that incorporates a lot of familiar trademarks -- beautifully dazed close harmonies, deathless roller-boogie bounce, a philosophical notion of funk that permeates everything, no matter how far away it strays from "One Nation Under A Groove" -- while remaining wide open to brand new ideas.
Of course that presence was all over g-funk, and P-Funk's repayment slides into that mode with comfortable familiarity -- they're not quite impersonating themselves, but they do feel refracted through the knowledge of what they represented in the '90s and subsequently play up their most hip-hop friendly traits. "Summer Swim," "Hard As Steel," "Funky Kind (Gonna Knock It Down)," and "Rock The Party" all lean on the meandering Minimoogs and handclap-garnished, woofer-throbbing low-end rhythms that begged to be sampled (but, somehow, never really were). But Clinton's willingness to collaborate with hip-hop artists gives us another angle: the lead cut and first single "If Anybody Gets Funked Up (It's Gonna Be You)," co-produced by East Coast legend Erick Sermon and featuring featuring Flint, Michigan's MC Breed, both of whom had their own acknowledged debts to the P-Funk. The bounce doesn't rise far above waist level, and the most transcendent moments are its slower ones -- like the gorgeous "New Spaceship," featuring guest vocals from none other than Uncle Charlie Wilson -- but this album's possibilities of a reinvigorated, contemporary-minded elder statesman George Clinton engaging fully with the two-way integration of hip-hop into his music only made his subsequent absence that much more frustrating.
That's tragic, given how right-place-right-time The Electric Spanking Of War Babies should've been -- a flirtation with New Wave that nailed every '80s corporate-government, mass-media manipulation shock doctrine fear while the decade was still in its Reagan-deregulated infancy. And it's still strong enough to make a decent endcap to a stretch of decade-spanning wire-to-wire career greatness. First there's the title track, an examination of the still-popular charges of Baby Boomer sellout syndrome, where a two-man operation (Hampton on guitar, Junie on everything else) bring up the formative experiences of nuclear fear, Vietnam, genetic science, and the Moon landing as media-mediated programming to mess up young minds."Oh, I," despite being originally slated for Parliament's Trombipulation, fits the vibe well, too; Shider-wailed lyrics about escaping into memories of a lost love over a staggering blend of cocktail-jazz sax/piano and from-the-gut Hampton guitar give the album its wistful heart. The two-part "Funk Gets Stronger" stays defiant in the face of encroaching cultural defunkification, loping Mudd Club twitchiness giving Sly his most enigmatically compelling vocal performance since There's A Riot Goin' On. Even the musically off moments have merit; hearing Funkadelic do extended pan-Carribean drum solos ("Brettino's Bounce") and Blondie-adjacent reggae ("Shockwaves") feels out of character, but the communication to other reaches of the diaspora ("the third world is on the one... sending out shockwaves throughout the world") is worth the effort. And maybe the smutty satire "Icka Prick" is a bizarre note to go out on, but tweaking prudes years before the PMRC were a glint in Tipper Gore's jaundiced eye is as good a legacy-cementer as anything.
The first album to be released under the P-Funk aegis was a drastic break from the late-'60s singles that the Parliaments released on labels like Revilot and Atco, and the title signified as much: Osmium is the densest element on the periodic table, a transition metal found in platinum ore named after the Greek root word for "smell." Considering how much of a transition their early-'70s stank-riddled, heavy metal sound represented -- the platinum would come later -- it's difficult to think of a more apropos title for the LP that would introduce the world to Parliament as we know it. Or at least somewhat know it: the last album released as Parliament until 1974's Up For The Down Stroke thanks to a label dispute with Revilot, Osmium feels like a short-term hitch in George Clinton's vision of a complementary two-band dichotomy. In other words, it's a lot more similar to a circa-'70 Funkadelic record than tandem Parliament/Funkadelic LPs would be in, say, 1975; the main distinction is that it's willfully, absurdly eclectic to the point where it's clear they're still getting their identity together.
You know that twangy yodel from De La's "Potholes In My Lawn"? That's from "Little Ole Country Boy," which features an honest-to-god steel guitar and a full-tilt wailing lament of a monologue from Fuzzy Haskins freaking out about being busted as a peeping tom after trying to find out if his girlfriend was cheating on him. "My Automobile" pulls Clinton and Haskins' doo-wop origins by the collar right into the thick of a down-home, uptempo rockabilly-blues shuffle (with a little bit of what sounds like a sitar for twangy flavor). And cuts like the booze-brewing, family-supporting bootlegger tale/"Cosmic Slop" quasi-prequel "Moonshine Heather" and dirty-drawers goof "Funky Woman" ("she hung them in the air/the air said 'this ain't fair'/ she hung them in the sun/the sun began to run") are in keeping with the kind of oddball heaviness Funkadelic were concurrently cranking out. There's still room for headier concerns -- the gospel lament of "Oh Lord, Why Lord/Prayer" is easily their most reverent and straightforward cry against racial injustice, and there's an unbeatable series of koans running through "Nothing Before Me But Thang" ("There's good, there's bad/ But a thang is a thang/ And there is nothing before you but thang"). And if there's more weight than usual in the closing one-two of spiritual-minded sincerity -- the Jesus-invoking environmentalism of "Livin' The Life" and the afterlife reflections of "The Silent Boatman" (the only P-Funk cut to feature bagpipes!) -- they're strong early indicators that Clinton and company had more to them than just party jams and psychedelic freakouts. (Later CD pressings, including the retitled First Thangs, tack on outtakes, rarities, and a few expanded versions of '71-'72 Invictus singles like "Breakdown" and "Red Hot Mama," that adds some excellent music but dilutes the original album's character a bit.)
After three consecutive knockouts, it's easy to think of Funkadelic's fourth album as a bit of a mess in all kinds of ways. Its double-LP breadth is weighed down by a transitional and exploratory sound that wouldn't fully gel until Cosmic Slop. And a liner-notes association with the Process Church Of The Final Judgement had queasy critics chiding them for potential Manson and occult connections, inferences that wound up getting read into what were actually more acute social-justice-oriented lyrics. But this really is a defiantly rebellious record in a lot of ways, from its literal cannibal-Liberty/funky dollar bill album art to the message in the music itself. The seventeen minutes of Album One Side One are enough to leave a lasting impression, even through the lighter moments to follow: "You Hit The Nail On The Head" shouts down complacent power-mongers under Bernie's most fiery keyboards to date ("Just because you win the fight don't make you right/ Just because you give don't make you good"), "If You Don't Like The Effects, Don't Produce The Cause" chides a fair-weather underground stuck in a protestor-as-consumer mode ("You say you don't like what you're country's about/ Ain't you deep, in your semi-first class seat"), and "Everybody Is Going To Make It This Time" plays out like the recouping effort of a revolution that fell to a circular firing squad ("There's not a doubt in my mind/ If hunger and anger place the blame/ There won't be a country left to change"). 2ff7e9595c
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