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In 1979, musician John King started a record label, Secret Society Records, in a small room on the 6th floor at 241 Centre Street. His band, John King and the Cats had a hit single and were playing venues like New York’s famed CBGB, but King says, “I started touring, and I don’t like touring. I was a studio rat.” 

 

King turned the room into a cramped studio that soon became popular with local punk bands. But it was the studio’s relationship with upstart label DefJam Recordings that transformed it into the “Abbey Road of Hip Hop”.

 

 “The initial energy of Def Jam was a more urban version of punk rock,” says co-founder Rick Rubin, “That’s how we saw it - the records I was making at the time were punk rockers making hip-hop.”

 

Rubin nicknamed the studio “The Chung King House of Metal” as a nod to the Chinese Restaurant on the ground floor. It stuck, and King officially changed the name of his company in 1986.

The Beastie Boys. © unknown.

Rubin founded Def Jam Records in 1983 while living in his NYU dorm room, 712 Weinstein Hall. “I was going out to hip-hop clubs in the early 80s, then hearing the rap records that came out that sounded nothing like what was going on in the clubs,” says Rubin, “The goal was to capture the energy that you felt at a hip hop club.”

 

The Beastie Boys started hanging out at Rubin’s notorious dorm room parties while they were still in high school. Rubin was instrumental in pointing the band away from their punk roots and into rap, performing with the group as their DJ under the name DJ Double R. 

 

“Our main goal was really just to crack each other up,” says Mike “Mike D” Diamond. "All four of us always wrote lyrics and then kind of pooled ideas, and we hung out a lot. We would go out to Danceteria pretty much every night and hang out and come up with lines to make each other laugh.”

“(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)” was intended to be a parody of the frat culture of the day. "We wrote it in about five minutes,” says Mike D,  "The song began as a goof on all the 'Smokin' in the Boys Room'/'I Wanna Rock' type songs in the world.”

 

The early recordings featured drum loops made by Engineer Steve Ett, who recorded 24 tracks of percussion loops from drum machines, and then played the fader's mute buttons like an instrument. But Rubin, wanting to create the ultimate 80s rock parody, stripped off the drum loops, put on huge rock drums, and played a cheesy metal guitar solo.

 

“Rick’s a dick,” says Adrock, “He knows how to get what he wants. It’s almost a spiritual thing.”

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The video for “Fight For Your Right” made the Beastie Boys household names with the MTV generation, celebrating the very thing it was poking fun at.  "You can almost taste the beer and smell the barf," said Time Magazine.

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On March 7, 1987,  Licensed To Ill made history as the first rap album to reach number one on the Billboard album charts, landing them on the cover of Rolling Stone with the headline “Three Idiots Make a Masterpiece.” 

 

The combination of metal guitar and Brat Raps was a hit amongst hardcore rap fans and mall rats alike, breaking down racial barriers as it catapulted rap music and Hip-Hop culture into the mainstream.

 

“The Beasties opened hip-hop music up to the suburbs,” says Rubin, “As crazy as they were, they seemed safe to Middle America, in a way black artists hadn’t been up to that time.”

In 1993, John King closed the studio at 241 Center Street and moved to a multi-million dollar, 20,000-sq.ft. recording facility in New York's hip SoHo neighborhood.

 

Today the building’s 13 units are mostly occupied by small creative businesses, including design, film, and animation studios.

 

Centre Street continues to be a cultural melting pot.

 

The building sits in the middle of the block, marking the transition between Chinatown to the south and the fashionble NoLIta (North of Little Italy ) neighborhood to the north. In 2019, local business owners named the area 'Little Paris' as a nod to the street's cozy 'hole-in-the-wall' cafés, wine bars, and boutiques.

 

“The connection between Paris and New York is so strong”, said Marianne Perret, founder of Coucou French Language school, “The two cities have so much respect for each other.”

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