Licensed to Ill

Diving in on Beastie Boys' debut album that changed everything

On November 15, 1986, Brooklyn based rap group Beastie Boys dropped Licensed to Ill and in one fell swoop changed the trajectory of music forever. It is hard to overstate the impact of both the Boys and the album. Licensed to Ill became the first rap album to top the Billboard 200 and has sold over 10 million albums to date. It is a leviathan in music and pop culture history.

I’ve been wanting to explore more ideas here at HATM. By now you already know that Reckoning with Jason Herbert is launching soon. But the mothership that is Historians At The Movies will keep on trucking. Because movies and music are so closely related, it meant that it was time to try something different. I want to give you guys something different.

Enter my favorite mensch (I hope I’m using this right) in Jeff Melnick, who has been on the podcast a few times, guesting for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and also Munich. Jeff teaches a bunch of really cool stuff over at UMASS Boston including history of popular music, immigration, and twentieth-century cultural history. And of course, he’s often tweeting about music and pop culture over on twitter. I can’t tell you how much stuff he’s turned me on to.

So when I began thinking about a music episode, Jeff was immediately the person I wanted to talk to first. And Jeff then recommended we bring on his colleague Akrobatik, a rap artist and historian who teaches his history of hip hop course with him and Dart Adams, who you’re about to find out might know more about rap history than any person alive.

So what’s in this episode? We explore the Jamaican origins of rap and talk about immigration history as key to understanding music history (we definitely get in on the Great Migration too), the evolution of rap and how in the 1970s and early 80s it spread through local networks and became in a way a dialogue throughout the country. And of course, we talk about how by 1986, rap was primed for the arrival of three punk Jewish MCs who changed the game forever. We get into what the album does, as well as how Adam Horovitz, Michael Diamond, and the late Adam Yauch grew and matured over the years. We talk about the legacy of this album and how it has aged. This is such a stellar conversation and I’m excited to share with you. Here’s a quick clip below where Jeff and Dart talk about the mythology Beastie Boys created in the song “Paul Revere.”

We recorded this talk last week and did a quick turnaround on it because we want to get the HATM community’s thoughts on it and if you guys want more album pods and if so, which ones. So for now, we’re offering this to our Patreon subscribers as part of our promise to give y’all really cool stuff first. Membership is $7. We will make this available later on, but if you want it now, you can get it by going to patreon.com/historiansatthemovies.

We are cranking up production so there will be even more exclusives and early access coming soon.

Can’t wait for you guys to hear this pod.

Jason