American hip-hop group from New York City who signed to Def Jam in 1985 and released Licensed to Ill — the first hip-hop album to reach #1 on the Billboard 200 — before evolving across multiple genres over three decades.
Broke hip-hop into the mainstream white rock audience — Licensed to Ill's success on rock radio being the moment hip-hop became undeniably crossover — and then reinvented themselves multiple times (Paul's Boutique's sampling complexity, Check Your Head's live instruments) demonstrating sustained creative evolution.
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