10 Artists That Disowned Their Own Songs

The entire shelf life of the Beastie Boys didn’t really seem like it was going to last very long outside of the early ‘80s. In the years when rap was just starting to become a major force in pop music, here you had these Bowery Boy style kids talking about fighting for your right to party, complete with videos that looked like one of the biggest frat parties ever made. It’s just a shame that no one really seemed to get the point of what the song was actually about.

When the Beasties were working on Licensed to Ill, they had originally tried to play this kind of schtick up for laughs, using their biggest hit as a means to make fun of the kind of alpha male douchebags that try to make a name for themselves in college. The only problem was no one really got the joke, and the same frat guys that the Beasties were making fun of were soon adopting this as their anthem, turning the Beasties into the poster children for this kind of obnoxious behavior.

In the wake of their fanbase growing in the wrong direction, the next few years would see them moving as far away from the frat stuff as they possibly could, going psychedelic on Paul’s Boutique before turning in something a bit more aggro on Check Your Head. The tone of voice may have stayed the same from the first few records, but there’s no disputing that the musical tone had changed considerably.