Welcome to 3 Bad Brothers, A Beastie Boys Breakdown. For the next 8 weeks, the Dad Bod Rap Pod crew and some special guests will be going album by album through the Beastie Boys' career.

This week we are focused on Ad Rock, MCA and Mike D's first album, the wildly successful Licensed To Ill with insight from Dante Ross, who ran in the same circles as the Boys at this formative time in their lives. We will track the band from punk shows to NYC nightclubs, to arena tours, examining their rhymes, beats, cultural impact and more through discussion, interviews, and then score each album on a system we affectionately call the Rick Rubric.

Licensed to Ill is thought of as one of rap music's early masterpieces, so we re-listen to the seminal album to see how it holds up nearly 40 years later as rap music, as the beginning of a vast and exploratory career, and as a product of early Def Jam Records, the so-called nerve center of the nascent hip-hop industry at the time.

Huge thanks to Dante Ross for joining us to provide cultural context and crack jokes. Please tune in next week when we step through the doors of the cult classic Paul's Boutique.

Credits:

3 Bad Brothers, A Beasties Boys Breakdown is a production of Dad Bod Rap Pod

Hosted By Demone Carter, David Ma, and Nate LeBlanc

Executive Produced by Nate LeBlanc

Produced by Demone Carter and Paolo “Cutso” Bello

Edited by Demone Carter and Nate LeBlanc

Engineering and Post-Production by Paolo “Cutso” Bello

Artwork by Rory Simms

Photography by Stephanie Barajas

Youtube version produced by Paolo “Cutso” Bello

Theme song written and recorded by Defcee and Produced by Cutso

Dad Bod Rap Pod is distributed by Open Mike Eagle’s Stony Island Audio