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Production Credits:
Rhymin' And Stealin' Click for Lyrics
First Appearance: Licensed to Ill LP 1986
Written by: Beastie Boys/Rick Rubin
Performed by: Beastie Boys
Production Notes: Produced by Rick Rubin, co-produced by Beastie Boys. Engineered by Steve Ett, mastered by Howie Weinberg. Originally released under Def Jam Recordings, a division of CBS/Columbia Records.
Behind the Beats and Lyrics...
Samples:
- "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin
- "Sweet Leaf" by Black Sabbath - Master of Reality by Black Sabbath
- "I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)" by the Clash - The Clash by the Clash
References:
- The HMS Bounty - vessel whose crew mutinied in 1789
- Long John Silver - fictional pirate
- the seven seas - all the oceans of the world: the North and South Atlantic, the North and South Pacific, the Indian, the Arctic, and the Antarctic
- pieces of eight - obsolete Spanish silver dollars
- The Three Musketeers - historical novel by Alexandre Dumas
- Captain Bligh - captain of the HMS Bounty
- going A.W.O.L - military acronym for 'Absent WithOut Leave'
- Ali Baba & the Forty Thieves - fictional literary characters from the classic series of Arabic stories The Arabian Nights
- Brass Monkey - alcoholic drink comprised of rum, vodka and orange juice
- Blackbeard - notorious English privateer & pirate
- Moby Dick - literary white whale
- Betty Crocker - General Mills' trademark symbol of good cooking
- Colonel Sanders - businessman and founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise
- Davy Jones Locker - the bottom of the ocean, especially as the grave of the drowned
Sample & Reference Breakdown:
- Main drum beat: sampled from "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin
- Main guitar riff: sampled from "Sweet Leaf" by Black Sabbath
- "Because mutiny on the bounty's what we're all about" - reference to the HMS Bounty.
- "No soft sucker with a parrot on his shoulder" - possible reference to the fictional pirate Long John Silver character from Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island.
- "Terrorizing suckers on the seven seas" - reference to the seven seas and oceans of the world
- "We got sixteen men on a dead man's chest" - reference to a passage in Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!"
- "One for all and all for one" and "All for one and one for all" - reference to the Three Musketeers' motto of "All for one and one for all."
- "Friggin' in the riggin' and cuttin' your throat" - possible reference to an old sailor's sea song called 'Friggin' in the Riggin' (also the title of a Sex Pistols song) and a reference to the nickname of "cut throats" for pirates
- "I fought the law" - sampled from "I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)" by the Clash. This was originally written by Bobby Fuller of the Bobby Fuller Four.
- "Blackbeard's weak, Moby Dick's on the tip" - reference to a notorious English pirate and the title character (a white whale) in Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick
Commentary:
Beastie Boys:
"On Licensed to Ill, we didn't even have any samplers. So the stuff that's looped, we actually made tape loops. We'd record the "When the Levee Breaks" beat onto a quarter-inch tape, and then we'd make a loop and that tape would spinning around the room, dangling on mic stands, going around in a big loop. And then, in order to layer that with something else, we'd have to actually sync it up, physically." - Adam Yauch, excerpted from The Skills to Pay the Bills (2005) by Alan Light
Press & Print Media:
"...the chanted raps are short, sharp, full of silly non sequiturs" - Newsweek, 1987
"...[The Beasties] yowl about Betty Crocker and Colonel Sanders over samples of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath" - Spin, July 1994
"...cartoonish gangster visions unveiled..." - Goldmine, May 1996
"...uses a mixture of deck techniques and drum machine programming to turn a sequence of sampled John Bonham drums into a slow, loping, lazy hip-hop rhyth." - excerpted from Rhyming & Stealing: A History of the Beastie Boys by Angus Batey, 1998
"A massive slab of John Bonham's drumming is suffixed with grunting guitar riffs and sly, piss-taking raps. The track goes onto to play jocular homage to the Three Musketeers, The Clash, the Sex Pistols and The Arabian Nights. This time the Beastie Boys critique hip-hop's sonic pilfering of musical source material and base their imagery around pirates. It's a rich metaphor for them to explore, as it allows them to merge their cartoon violence with a veritable treasure chest of easily assimilable references their audience can latch on to" - excerpted from Rhyming & Stealing: A History of the Beastie Boys by Angus Batey, 1998
"John Bonham's drum break from Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" was almost a hip-hop cliche. But when the Beasties used it on "Rhymin' & Stealin'", it was seen as a homage to the drugged-up, groupie abusing hard-rock lifestyle that Led Zeppelin personified thru the 1970's" - excerpted from Rhyming & Stealing: A History of the Beastie Boys by Angus Batey, 1998
Released Versions:
Rhymin & Stealin
Rhymin & Stealin (Demo)
Rhymin & Stealin (Instrumental)
Rhymin & Stealin (Live)
Live:
Performed in 74 known Concerts.
First known Performance:
26-Dec-1986 : Ritz, The, New York, United States
Last known Performance:
08-Mar-2008 : Centro Dinamico Pegaso, Mexico City, Mexico
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