Beastie Boys

It took one moist, lumbering, Budweiser-lubricated "HYEAHH-HHHH!" for Hip-Hop to welcome the last suburban holdouts to Planet Rock. Surely, the arena-hopping Run-DMC had long since planted their flag in Anywhere, U.S.A. helping to stomp more than one Adidas print into a well-manicured lawn. But the Beastie Boys were the only MCs who could knock Bon Jovi's Aqua Net rock from Billboard's #1 spot, the first MCs who could move four million copies, the first MCs to get a Spin magazine cover, the first MCs to have British Parliament call for their immediate banning on U.K. shores. In short, they were a sensation. With all the subtlety of a wedgie, the Beasties brought rap music to 'burban bullies and boneheads, sorority sisters and gym rats, metalheads and mooks, AOR diehards and casual channel flippers, gated community rich kids and working-class burnouts skate rats and preppies, teenagers who regularly hid cassette tapes from their parents, pre-pubescent booger-pickers trading swears on the playground... people who happened to stumble across three beer-spraying knuckleheads terrorizing Dick Clark or Joan Rivers. Released in 1986, "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)" was barely a rap song by any working definition, but it garnered more instant Hip-Hop converts than anything this side of "U Can't Touch This."