Hardcore punks turned hip-hop pioneers. Sexist frat-boys turned socially-conscious Tibetan freedom fighters. With a career that spanned over four decades and produced some of the most iconic moments in music history – including a tour with Madonna at her mid-80s peak, and being the first hip-hop group to top the Billboard album charts – New York City’s Beastie Boys are a legendary band in the most genuine sense. Their career came to a tragic and abrupt end with the untimely passing of visionary leader Adam Yauch (AKA MCA) in 2012, but since their formation in 1978, The Beasties evolved from a snotty, thrashy punk band to a cutting-edge rap trio, taking in jazz, soul, electronica and many more genres along the way.
With 1989’s subversive and uniquely inventive masterpiece Paul’s Boutique, they completely changed the way artists who followed them could think about what their music might be, conceiving an entirely new way to arrange and create songs. Rulebook: consider yourself destroyed. So great is their influence that bands from myriad genres still borrow from them today. Here, an eclectic five that do just that.
