“Pass The Mic” by Beastie Boys

"Pass the Mic" kicked off the Check Your Head era in April 1992, the first single Capitol pulled from the Beastie Boys' third album, and it's the sound of three rappers playing their own instruments. Ad-Rock is on guitar, Mike D on drums and MCA on bass, with Mark Ramos-Nishita piling on organ, clavichord and Wurlitzer, and Mario Caldato Jr. co-producing, engineering and sharing the writing credit. The result is raw and fuzzed-out, a murky, clattering groove with the three of them barking over the top.

It reached 47 in the UK, but its longer life came in court. The track uses a 6-second flute stab from James Newton's "Choir", and in 2003 the band won Newton v. Diamond: they had licensed the recording but not the composition, and the Ninth Circuit found the fragment too slight to count against the piece as a whole.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.