The Greatest Songs Ever! Fight for Your Right

It’s May 1986, and three clean-cut white kids and a long-haired metalhead Goliath are backstage at the Palladium in New York, where rap acts are starting to play the Michael Todd room. The four men sit drinking vodka and grapefruit juice at the tables, which are covered with incongruous lace cloths. They are scrawling on a napkin and arguing. “I remember we made a point of saying, ‘Look, we gotta get shit done,’ and we sat at one table, determined to accomplish something,” the Beastie Boys’ Michael Diamond (Mike D) said in 1987.

For two years, Def Jam chief Rick Rubin, the long-haired metalhead, has been trying to get the Beasties to pen a radio-friendly smash. This evening, in five minutes, they will come up with “Fight for Your Right.” It will be the rock-rap battering ram that will help them breach the American pop charts for the first time. It will also be the bozo frat-house anthem they’ll never live down.

In the summer of 1986, New York’s Chung King studios was the home away from home for many of the artists signed to Def Jam, Rubin and Russell Simmons’s pioneering rap label. Owned by John King, a musician and friend of Rubin’s since the two first met at the New York club Danceteria, Chung King was a single-room sixth-floor studio measuring about 13 feet by 18 feet, with fresh graffiti on the walls. Run-DMC and LL Cool J were recording there. With “Fight for Your Right” written, the Beasties arrived to convert the song into a rap landmark.

King built drum loops and helped Steve Ett engineer the Beasties’ album sessions. “It was all handcrafted stuff back then,” King recalls. “We literally cut sections of tape with drum sounds, hung them on a mic stand until we had three minutes’ worth and then stuck them together.”

The specifics of “Fight for Your Right” were simple. Its manifesto advanced the notion that the world’s problems could be solved with more beer. The working title of the album the song would promote was Don’t Be a Faggot, which was later changed to Licensed to Ill. “The song began as a goof on all the ‘Smokin’ in the Boys Room’/‘I Wanna Rock’–type songs in the world,” the Beasties’ Adam Yauch explains.

Rubin wanted the goofy irony to pervade even the mix, so he ordered a pastiche of the cheesiest ’80s-rock production possible. Rubin himself supplied a moron rock riff that drew on his love of Led Zeppelin and aped Slayer guitarist Kerry King — who was signed to Def Jam and would later play on the Beasties’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”

Meanwhile, King and Ett weren’t satisfied with the looped beats, so they decided to whack the rubber pads of the Oberheim DMX drum machine with their hands because its programming capabilities were unreliable. The “Fight for Your Right” rhythm track sounded like a gorilla banging drums on a strict “louder = more bananas” contract. Over this atavistic soundscape, the Beasties unleashed their squall of teen angst. “We called it Jewish rap,” King says. “They weren’t intimidating — they were genuinely funny guys.”

“Rick Rubin took the task of mixing the stuff in our absence,” Yauch said in a 1999 interview. “I remember someone showing up on our tour bus with a tape of what Rick had made from our demo and playing it. Rick had replaced the drums with these big rock drums and replayed the guitar with a real Top 40, cheesy rock sound.”

Bill Adler, who was Def Jam’s first publicity director, remembers the Beasties being appalled by Rubin’s commercial remix. “Rick made it far cornier,” he says. “But the guitar riffs became part of the joke: a parody of ’80s rock that was just unspeakable at that time. Somewhere out there, though, is that original Beasties version.”

When they had finished at Chung King, the Beasties didn’t think they had made history. They didn’t even think they had made a single. “None of us knew they would sell records,” Russell Simmons explained in 1999. “The only people we made Licensed to Ill for were the people they hung out with. It was a fucking joke.”

Released to rock radio in October 1986, “Fight for Your Right” became an immediate hit. But with MTV now a major force, the song needed a video. Since Rubin was busy making Run-DMC’s film Tougher Than Leather, he commissioned two friends from New York University, Ric Menello and Adam Dubin, to make a video for $20,000. For that sum, Rubin got a three-minute custard-pie fight. Menello’s mother played an outraged parent who gets one in the face. Usable footage of pie impacts was so scarce that they ended up repeating segments at the end of the clip. But it was enough.

The single went to number 7 in the United States, setting the stage for Licensed to Ill to become the first rap album to reach number 1 on the U.S. pop charts. It has since been certified platinum nine times over.

“Sonically, the Beasties were Run-DMC Jr., and they were accepted without a problem by rock radio and MTV. It was never said, but the melanin deficiency helped,” Adler asserts.

In the wake of the Beastie Boys’ triumph, other rappers went on the offensive. In 1988, Public Enemy’s Chuck D responded with “Party for Your Right to Fight,” which sampled the Beasties’ track. “Since PE were the antithesis of the Beasties, I thought it would be interesting,” Chuck says. “I thought, ‘Let’s have some fun.’ The Beasties were the first group that put us on tour, so it wasn’t meant to be facetious.”

But as they matured, the Beasties themselves came to disown their monster hit. In fact, Mike D claims that America missed the joke all along.

“The only thing that upsets me,” he has said, “is that we might have reinforced certain values of some people in our audience when our own values were actually totally different. There were tons of guys singing along to ‘Fight for Your Right’ who were oblivious to the fact that it was a goof on them. Irony is often missed.”