Credit: Alamy

One of their greatest hits, ‘No Sleep till Brooklyn,’ released in 1987, is the Beastie Boys’ most obvious tribute to their rock sensibilities. Their brand of hip-hop was always cut through with a sort of hard punkishness, but this track plays with straight-up metal—so, naturally, it called for a producer with musical flexibility. It needed someone like Rick Rubin.  

Rubin, as he explained to Rolling Stone in 2016, was deeply involved with the song from its very inception, taking on a very hands-on role as producer. “The title came from Adam Yauch (aka MCA),” he said. “He had a punk-rock, alternative band beyond the Beastie Boys, and ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’ was a title that he had in that band. I thought it was a really good title and suggested that we use that for a Beastie Boys song.” What Rubin didn’t mention there is where the inspiration for the title came from: it’s a riff on Motörhead’s 1981 live album No Sleep ’til Hammersmith.

This was far from the only reference to metal found in the song. ‘No Sleep till Brooklyn’ serves as a reinterpretation of the AC/DC track ‘TNT,’ performed in an alternative tuning, and a metal legend actually features on it as a performer. While Rubin himself played the guitar riffs, the solo was handled by a seasoned thrash metal veteran—although, by the sound of it, he wasn’t especially thrilled to be involved.

“Kerry King from Slayer did the guitar solo,” Rubin explained. “I don’t think he liked the song. I think he just thought it was bizarre. He’s a real, serious metalhead. He really loves metal, and I don’t think he listens to much music outside of metal. At least then he didn’t. I don’t think it spoke to his aesthetic. And honestly, in retrospect, I don’t think he really spoke to the Beasties’ aesthetic. They didn’t really like him either [laughs]. It was kind of mutual.”

The lyrics describe the band’s exhaustion with being relentlessly on tour—”Another plane, another train / Another bottle in the brain / Another girl, another fight / Another drive all night”—but also gestures towards their total conviction to make it home to Brooklyn. The words are firmly lifted from the group’s lived experience from that period, but, all the same, Rubin helped the band with that, too.

“All four of us always wrote lyrics and then kind of pooled ideas, and we hung out a lot,” he said. “We would go out to [New York nightclub] Danceteria pretty much every night and hang out and come up with lines to make each other laugh. Usually we’d only be working on one song at a time, so let’s say that song was the song of that month. So for that month, every time we’d go out, we write rhymes and collect them all. Then eventually, we’d put them all together and try to figure out the best order for it to happen in. I remember there were a lot of really funny lines in that one. It definitely entertained us at the time.”