Beastie Boys

"It was summer 1986. We wrote it in about five minutes. We were in the Palladium with Rick Rubin, drinking vodka and grapefruit juice, and 'Fight for Your Right' was written in the Michael Todd Room on napkins on top of those shitty lacy tables. I remember we made a point there of like, 'Look, we gotta get shit done,' and we sat at one table, really determined to accomplish something." - Michael Diamond, 1987

"The song began as a goof on all the 'Smokin' in the Boys Room'/'I Wanna Rock' type songs in the world. We cut the dumb little track in the studio, and headed off on tour opening up for Run-DMC. Rick Rubin took the task of mixing the stuff in our absence. I remember someone showing up on our tour bus with a tape of what Rick had made from our demo and playing it. Rick has replaced the drums with these big rock drums, and replayed the guitar with a real top-40 cheesy rock sound. He'd mixed it with all this compression and this clean gated sound. I don't think that anyone, at the record label or otherwise, ever suspected that it would be near the hit that it became." - Adam Yauch, 1999

"The only thing that upsets me 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 it was a total goof on them. Irony is oft missed." - Michael Diamond

Press

"...a fantastic delinquent anthem" - Creem, 1987

"...you can almost taste the beer and smell the barf" - Newsweek, February 1987

"...a delerious delinquent anthem" - excerpted from Stairway to Hell by Chuck Eddy, 1991

"Armed with three chords and a snotty attitude, [Fight for Your Right] became the 'Louie Louie' of the late 80's: for eighteen months it was the essential trash-the-place end-of-night anthem at pretty much every student party throughout the English-speaking world. The lyrics catalogue the woes of a middle-class schoolboy who lives with Mom, hates his relatively simple part in the world and wants to shout about it. Around and about this tale of grief and sorrow, the Beasties interject a fractured, fist-in-the-air refrain - what seems like the only way out of the troubles a chainsmoking, porn-reading, home-living schoolboy endures. "You gotta fight - for your right - to parrrrr-tay!" - excerpted from Rhyming & Stealing: A History of the Beastie Boys by Angus Batey, 1998

"All the elements were there: a Budweiser punk nihilism, rhyme styles that flaunted and emphasized white nasal speech patterns, and a stance that didn't make clear where the love of rap and the parody of it began and ended" - excerpted from The Vibe Story of Hip-Hop by Alan Light, 1999

"...[an] all-time dumb-ass semi-ironic New Lad anthem" - New Musical Express, 1999