Review Summary: This album made the Beasty Boys break though. This also set the path for rappers.
Hip-Hop is such an important movement in music. It showed multiple people a new way of music. Leave it up to three white boys to be one of the founding fathers. I actually find it quite humorous because they actually do a great job coming up with very great rhymes. They also do a great job converting certain segments of songs into hip-hop. This ‘stick it to the man’ style of The Beastie Boys paved the way for the great rappers today.
I mentioned before that they convert different styles into rap. In the premiere song
Rhymin & Stealin they used the drum beat to When The Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin and the guitar riff to Sweat Leaf by Black Sabbath. I believe that this pulled the trigger that makes hip-hop and rock/metal successful as a mix. You see this a lot to day with the genre of Nu-Metal and
Anthrax with Public
Enemy. As for the song, the rhymes are pristine and the rhythm is nice and slow and ‘in your face’. Another example of this
She’s Crafty were they use the guitar riff from The Ocean by Led Zeppelin. The song is about a girl who steals from people that she sleeps with. In this song MCA, Ad-rock and Mike D are together like nobody’s business. The way that it is put together with the different styles of rapping for each person is very admirable. They have this feature in about every song and it turns out great every time.
The also are know for a punk-side. A great example of this is probably their most famous song
Fight For Your Right. There is a great powerful riff and it actually a guitar solo… GASP. Yep there is a guitar solo in a rap song. The whole message is just pissed off and to fight the ‘system’ which is basically the whole message of the album.
No Sleep To Brooklyn is a real pump up song. They distribute the rhyming very well in this song. As for the rhymes they aren’t as great as they could be. The guitar solo, yes there is another one, is actually preformed by
Slayer guitarist Kerry King.
Their best feature by far is how they put it together.
Paul Revere tells how they meet and the beat is slapped around and beat up till it is perfect much like all of the other songs. I can tell that they put so much effort into this song and boy it paid off. Another component of this is how they distribute the rhyming.
The New Style is a great example. They are in harmony when they’re together and just as good during their solos. An additional thing that contributes to this feature is the time changes and scratching the records. They do this great in [i]Rhymin & Stealin[i]. I say a major song including this
The New Style. They go from the semi fast beat to the slow and laidback beat.
The only thing that I disapprove is
Girls. It has a corny marimba melody and low bass backup sing singers. Also it is just Ad-rock which would be fine but his whiney, nasally voice gets annoying. Also the rhymes are so basic that a third-grader can come up with it. Since it is just Ad-rock there is no distributions and no great beat since it is one the whole time. The only thing that I like about it is that it is somewhat humorous and it leads right into
Fight For Your Right, which I will get into now.
Yes the album flows like a river. They put a lot of though into this factor I can tell. The 1st two songs are an example. There is a pause then the exact same tone comes in and then it takes off.
Paul Revere goes to
Hold Now, Hit It great too. They are so similar. It makes you want to look at the screen on the CD player to see if it is the same song. The goofy but great rhyming
Brass Monkey stops abruptly and goes into the slow and low um…
Slow and Low suddenly. Seriously I would like to say that that is one of the best songs on the album. The chorus is great and slow. That song is the meaning of chilling.
The closer on the album plays the perfect part.
Time To Get Ill packs the whole album in to the one song. It gets pretty humorous, it has a bunch of time and beat changes, it distributes the rapping perfectly and the rhymes are in your face as usual. This is really one of the best, if not the best closing songs ever on an album.
Usually don’t like Hip-Hop, but this type I admire. The kind that is creative, have great beats and rhymes and have a strong message is the kind that gets its place in my album collection. That really what rap is all about, right?
Pros:
Great rhymes
Great beats
Creativity
Cons:
Girls
Ad-Rock’s voice gets frustrating
3.5/5
