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Rap-rock beasts and drive-by eggings: Beastie Boys’ 20 greatest tracks – ranked!
Thirty years after the release of Ill Communication, we celebrate the New York trio’s gonzo blend of hip-hop, funk, punk and pop-cultural flotsam
Photograph: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images Abandoning their usual polymorphous playfulness for a more austere tone, their sixth album, To the 5 Boroughs, found the Beasties reeling from the one-two punch of 9/11 and Dubya’s questionable election win, an uneasy mood expressed most clearly on this muscular agit-rap brawler, which took aim at the Iraq war and mankind’s addiction to oil. Ill Communication’s opening track played like a State of the Union address, establishing the Beasties’ current canon of cool (including Lee Perry, John Woo, Vaughn Bodē) and, in Yauch’s offer of “love and respect” to womankind, explicitly repudiating their past sexism. Invention reigned during those long, stoned afternoons at the G-Son studio, an inspired Yauch building a vast tube of cardboard boxes around Mike D’s bass drum to achieve the colossal, John Bonham-esque beat that drove this steroidal banger.
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