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    "headline": "Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill turns 40; the 1986 debut was the first rap album to hit No. 1 in the US",
    "description": "Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill, released November 15, 1986, was the first rap album to top the US chart and later shipped 10 million copies.",
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    "keywords": "Beastie Boys, Def Jam, Licensed to Ill, Rick Rubin, Slayer",
    "articleBody": "Forty years ago this Sunday, a New York trio put out the first rap album ever to reach No. 1 on the US albums chart. Beastie Boys released Licensed to Ill on November 15, 1986, through Def Jam and Columbia Records, and it went on to ship more than ten million copies in the United States. The record turns 40 on November 15, 2026. Its numbers still look outsized for a debut: Platinum on February 2, 1987, less than three months after release, and Diamond from the RIAA on March 4, 2015. A rap record with a metal guitarist on it Producer Rick Rubin was running two very different acts at the same moment. Slayer’s Reign in Blood had come out on Def Jam just a month before, and the overlap shows. Slayer guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman played, uncredited, on “Fight for Your Right” and “No Sleep till Brooklyn.” King even turns up in the “No Sleep till Brooklyn” video, a send-up of glam metal whose title pokes at Motörhead’s live album No Sleep ’til Hammersmith. The samples tell the same story. “Rhymin & Stealin” opens the album on the drums from Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” topped with the riff from Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf.” “She’s Crafty” lifts its guitar from Zeppelin’s “The Ocean,” and “Time to Get Ill” borrows from “Custard Pie.” Recorded at Chung King studio in New York City, the whole thing runs 44:32 across 13 tracks. Seven singles from one debut Def Jam milked the record hard. Seven singles came out over 13 months: “Hold It Now, Hit It” (April 1986) “Paul Revere” (August 1986) “The New Style” (November 1986) “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” (December 1986) “Brass Monkey” (January 1987) “No Sleep till Brooklyn” (March 1987) “Girls” (May 1987) Count the dates and you see the trick: the first single arrived seven months before the album, and the last one landed nearly six months after it. That stretch kept fresh singles coming for more than a year. Overseas, the album reached No. 7 in the UK and No. 5 in Canada, where it later went double Platinum. At home it finished 1987 as the year’s No. 3 album. The cover and the split The gatefold art shows an American Airlines Boeing 727 with the band’s logo on its tail, crashed nose-first into a mountain. Read the registration number “3MTA3” in a mirror and it spells a crude joke. The idea came from Rubin after he read a Led Zeppelin biography, and Eminem later echoed the design on his 2018 album Kamikaze. Our anniversary piece on Eminem’s debut album Infinite turning 30 covers the start of his own story. For all that success, Licensed to Ill was the group’s only Def Jam album. Creative differences with Rubin pushed them to Capitol Records, where they made Paul’s Boutique in 1989. Two songs, a loose take on the Beatles’ “I’m Down” and a track called “Scenario,” were pulled at the last minute; “I’m Down” was dropped over a publishing dispute with Michael Jackson, who owned the rights. The album still finds new buyers. In 2012 it topped the US catalog albums chart and re-entered the main albums chart at No. 18. November is a crowded anniversary month in rap. Seven years after this record, Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest dropped classics on the same day, as we laid out in our look at November 9, 1993. Sunday’s date makes it 40 years since the first No. 1 rap album, a debut that took 79 days to go Platinum. Further reading Wikipedia: Licensed to Ill Image: Céline Haentzler, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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