10 Perfect Albums That Blended Different Music Genres

There's a good chance that most of those metalheads who got on the Beastie Boys hype train back on Licensed to Ill were severely disappointed with the rest of their career. The Bowery Boy school bully schtick was only one facet of what they did, and Paul's Boutique blew the doors open for what you could do with samples, melding together a psychedelic wall of sound that became the standard for sample-based music. Samples lead to lawsuits though, and the Beasties could still rock the house without using someone else's tracks.

Coming into the '90s, Check Your Head had a much more aggro feel than anything the band had done before, creating their own backing tracks from scratch while still having that snotty Beasties delivery on songs like Pass the Mic and So What'cha Want. Rock was just one piece of what the Beasties did though, and half of this album is them getting freaky with other genres, from R&B to punk rock to funky instrumental passages, hinting at the kind of stuff that was to come a few years later on The Mix Up.

For all of the genre hopping though, they never lost their fanbase in the process, even picking up a few more fans from the alternative crowd, lumping them in with the same genre hopping weirdness of someone like Beck. The Beasties were always about hip hop, but the future seemed so much brighter when they came out of their shell a little bit.