Brass Monkey
No Sleep Till Brooklyn Album: Licensed To Ill (1986)
by the Beastie Boys
Brass Monkey is about an alcoholic beverage. Brass Monkey is rum, vodka, and orange juice mixed over ice. Very popular with college kids trying to get drunk. The Beasties are not limited to just this cocktail, however, as the song explores various alcohol-related activities and beverages, apparently financed by their producer, Rick Rubin ("Double R. foots the bill most definitely"). Also showing up in the song: martinis, Moet champagne, and Chivas Regal whiskey.
In some circles, a Brass Monkey is mixture of malt liquor and orange juice, typically made by adding OJ to a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English. That's not what the Beastie Boys had in mind though. As Mike D confirmed, they were referring to a premixed cocktail served in a can. Made by the Heublein Company, it was sold in the '70s and '80s. The company wasn't specific about the ingredients, claiming it was made from "a secret combination of liquors."
According to Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, he's the one who got turned on to Brass Monkey. Beastie Boys were signed to Rick Rubin's fledgling label, Def Jam, and one night in 1984, Ad-Rock ended up hanging out with a rapper on the label, T La Rock, and a DJ who worked with Rubin named Jazzy Jay. A bottle was passed around, and when he took a sip, it was a revelation: This is delicious!
Jazzy Jay told him it was Brass Monkey, found on the lower shelves of nearby delis near the cheap wine and malt liquor.
According to Mike D of the Beastie Boys, they originally wanted "the Brass Monkey" to be a dance, like The Twist or The Watusi. There are inklings of this intent in the lyric ("Brass, got this dance that's more than real") but the song clearly ended up being about the beverage.
"Brass Monkey" was the fifth single from the group's debut album, Licensed To Ill, following "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)," the song that put them in the national spotlight. Licensed To Ill became the first rap album to go #1 in the US and the best-selling rap album of the '80s.
The term "Brass Monkey" comes from the figure of speech, "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey." An actual brass monkey was thought to be a naval contraption - here's the story we heard:
Back in the day of naval wars being fought with the old fashioned cannons, they would stack the cannonballs in a pyramid. This conserved space and made it easy to load them. However, they would roll around the deck if there weren't something to hold them in place. To solve this problem, they used a large metal plate with indents in which to place the bottom rows of cannonballs. They found that if they used iron, when it got wet the cannonballs would rust, so they used brass and called it a brass monkey. Brass tends to really expand and contract with the weather, and when it got really cold the indents would get smaller, causing the cannonballs to be dislodged, hence the saying, text limit
