In the summer of 1986, the Beastie Boys were working on their debut album License to Ill. The album would drop in November, and they had to “get s–t done,” as Mike D would recall in 1987, per a report from Far Out. Because of that mindset, “Fight For Your Right” was written in about five minutes with producer Rick Rubin.
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Apparently, the song was meant to parody the style of popular party songs like “Rock and Roll All Night” by KISS and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” However, fans didn’t completely grasp the irony when the song came out. The video certainly didn’t help things. However, even now, people sometimes don’t get it, leading to Reddit threads of fans bringing up old videos of the Beastie Boys acting, essentially, like young, dumb adolescents. Which is really what they were in the late 80s.
“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,” said Mike D in 1987. “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 often missed.”
Why Did People Miss the Point of the Beastie Boys’ “Fight For Your Right”?
According to posts in the Reddit thread (it’s an 11-year-old post so keep that in mind), some fans are still holding onto an assumption that the Beastie Boys were trying to impose certain values with their ironic statement. Many people stated that the idea that “Fight For Your Right” was ironic clashes with the Boys’ hard-partying, drug-fueled, womanizing ways. Others claimed that the statement was just the Boys being embarrassed by the song years later (despite the fact that Mike D commented on the irony only a year after the album came out).
One person shared their opinion in the thread, writing, “I’ve read this before and I think it’s bulls–t revisionism. It’s an embarrassingly juvenile song that unfortunately brought them their first bit of popularity and now they hate it.” (Again, see: comments made in 1987.)
The fact that we’re still having this argument years later proves that, while the Beastie Boys may have had good intentions and a goal in mind when writing “Fight For Your Right,” it didn’t translate as well to their audience. The main point with this song, is that the Boys were aiming to parody that style of party song, not the lifestyle itself. They would adopt that lifestyle as part of their early image, after all.
“BIG correction: it wasn’t parodying ‘the lifestyle,’ it was parodying THAT STYLE OF SONG,” another person wrote on Reddit. “They’re not anti-party, or uptight, or any thing like that. They just thought party songs that were about nothing but partying for the sake of partying were funny, so they sent them up.”
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