Once Adam Yauch discovered he had cancer in 2009, the Beastie Boys shelved their forthcoming The Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 1 and its companion volume, gradually reviving and revising the project once Yauch went into remission. At this point, they scrapped their convoluted plans to release concurrent complementary volumes of THSC and simply went forth with The Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2, which retained the bulk of the track list from Pt 1. All this hurly-burly camouflages the essential truth of The Hot Sauce Committee: that the Beasties could sit on an album for two years to no ill effect to their reputation or the record’s quality.
The real proof in the pudding of whether the Beastie Boys can really funk it up isn't on their own records. Naysayers have been claiming that it's all a rip, that the grooves are pure sample-happy appropriation. While Dr. Lonnie Smith gave Beck the B-3 treatment on his own Boogaloo to Beck, Love Bug mastermind and killer B-3 boss Ruben Wilson snagged P-Funk keyboard ace Bernie Worrell, saxophonist Andrew Beals, and a rhythm section that includes guitarist Doug Munro and skin popper LaFrae Olivia Sci and dug deep into the Beasties' catalog to let the real soul groove out of the bag.
Licensed to Ill is the debut studio album by American hip hop group Beastie Boys. It was released on November 15, 1986 by Def Jam and Columbia Records. It was the first rap LP to top the Billboard album chart. It is also one of Columbia Records' fastest-selling debut records to date and was certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America in 2015 for shipping over ten million copies in the US.