The Beastie Boys – our guys Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA (RIP) – produced eight studio albums. Seven of them made the best 1,000 albums ever, a five-year odyssey in which I catalogued the 1,000 albums that had the most impact on me and wrote a full-blown pop culture-meets-memoir piece about each.
The only B-Boys album that didn’t make the best 1,000 albums ever is called The Mix-Up, which itself is an outstanding instrumental album that brings in the fellas’ influences spanning hip-hop, jazz, soul, and rock.
The Beastie Boys, along with Run-D.M.C., helped to introduce me to hip-hop as a kid growing up on Long Island, New York. I’ve only come to revere them more over the years: the inventiveness, the looseness of the vibes mapped against the exquisite precision of the hooks and the rhymes.
But most of all, I’m not sure any group of dudes has ever had as much fun making music, and that shines through on album after album over a remarkable career.
Here are the best seven Beastie Boys albums ever along with a quote pulled from each respective album piece.
1) Paul’s Boutique (#6 of the best 1,000 albums ever)
Paul’s Boutique is a feral creature, a subway car replete with the vibes of Queens and NYC, the rank smell of hot garbage in the summer and the cool (if weird) taste of Orange Julius. It’s a subway car full of fragments, beats, turnstile jumpers, taggers, suits who wandered off the set of Wall Street, and the propulsion of the greatest city in the world.
2) Check Your Head (#21)
Like all of Check Your Head, “Live at P.J.s” feels casual, nearly improvised while going hard and even fiercely in its musical ambition to mesh hip-hop, funk, hardcore punk, cheese lounge, and soul – all with a hugely infectious DIY vibe. A more straightforward way to explain it is that Check Your Head grooves unlike any other album I’ve heard – by the Beastie Boys or anyone else.
3) Licensed to Ill (#41)
Licensed to Ill is one of those albums for me that’s weirdly less about the music itself in some ways and more about a fundamental thing – a musical artifact, I guess you could say – that has both been with me, or maybe more accurately part of me, for my entire life. And then it has also played a larger role at specific and significant moments.
4) Hello Nasty (#86)
The production on the album is ludicrously great, and so does its track sequencing. “Super Disco Breakin’” sets the mood and pace at the jump, and I always trip all the way out by the time we hit the harpsichord sample roughly halfway through “The Move.”
5) Ill Communication (#94)
Ill Communication was released on May 31st, 1994, which ties to around the time I would have been back home on Long Island after my sophomore year at Binghamton University. I bought the album shortly after it was available, and I recall listening to it for the first time in my bedroom while hanging out with one of my closest childhood friends.
6) To the 5 Boroughs (#378)
Roughly speaking, I lived the first half of my life in the orbit of New York City. While there are many great cities and places to live (and I adore living in Seattle these days), I’ll never waver on the notion that New York City is the greatest city on the planet: nothing beats its relentless energy, its throbbing manic pulse to live, engage, hustle, struggle, and thrive. And nothing beats its people – who are by design in your face, in your space, in your head, under your skin, and part of your spirit if you’ve spent any real time there.
7) Hot Sauce Committee (Pt. 2) (#757)
The Beastie Boys Book is worth reading for all kinds of reasons. It’s the story of the iconic hip hop trio, for starters, and it’s truly and often hilarious. It’s also a great story about growing up in New York City, the wild mesh of music genres, styles, and cultures going on in the early 1980s. And more than anything it’s a love letter from the book’s authors, Beastie Boys alums Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad Rock” Horovitz, to Adam “MCA” Yauch, the third Beastie Boys member who passed away in 2012.