My Top 1000 Songs #583: Fight For Your Right

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Sure, definitely one for the Guilty Pleasures files these days; to the extent I listen to the Beastie Boys, I tend to stick with 1989's sample-crazy Paul's Boutique. Their 1986 debut, Licensed to Ill, is silly, sophomoric, and, yeah, kinda sexist... but let's be honest: it was also the album that first opened up hip-hop for us Jittery White Guys, backing playful raps with more comfortable rock & roll guitar hooks, whether their own (or producer Rick Rubin's), or those they nicked from Led Zeppelin. So, yeah, we played the hell out of it for a moment in time--particularly "Fight For Your Right," a late-night drunken go-to when you needed to wake yourself up for that post-party campus trawl back to the dorm. Not something I'm proud of (could there be a cringier video?), but it conjures up those college parties as clearly (ok, tempered by cheap-beer-induced brain fog) as those far-less-embarrassing R.E.M. and Connells albums.

Kick it!

Dresden Dolls, 2012: