Guaranteed plan for success: Spend your formative teenage years in early ' 80's downtown NYC, following hip hop all-nighters with full afternoons of hardcore punk at CBGB and vice versa. Confound fans of your hardcore band by working full-on rap numbers into your repertoire, ultimately dropping instrumentation altogether. Release the first ever rap album to top the pop charts, spend a couple of years as the biggest hip hop outfit ever, then go underground. Come out a few years and 180 degrees later, working live instrumental jams and straight-up punk rock back into the set. Record sales are back up past the million mark, shows selling out everywhere... and then what the fuck do you do?

Well, unless you're the Beastie Boys, you don't get this far in the first place. If you are the Beastie Boys, however, you once again release your most ambitious record to date, Ill Communication (Grand Royal/Capitol). Like its predecessor, 1992's Check Your Head, Ill Communication is a B-Boys/Mario Caldato, Jr. - produced 20-song blend of genius lyrics and rhymes (John Woo/Rod Carew, Kojak/bozack, divorcee/Lee Dorsey. . . all by the end of the first verse of lead track/first single ''Sure Shot''), soulful instrumental interludes (including the bass- overdriven ''Futterman's Rule,'' the plaintive ''Ricky's Theme,'' and closing cool-down ''Transitions''), and the occasional blast of hardcore punk (''Tough Guy,'' ''Heart Attack Man''). Unlike Check..., which was two years in the making, the bi-coastally recorded Ill Communication took barely seven months to complete-just over a year to the day from beginning of recording to release date--setting a precedent for a band whose fans have grown accustomed to three-year intervals between albums.

''We finished the Check Your Head tour around Thanksgiving '92,'' Mike D recalls. ''We were on tour for eight months, then we took five months off. Then we started on the new album in New York. We just got back together, set up all our equipment, and started playing right off. We then headed back to the world-famous G-Son studios in LA to sift through our collection of 'Space Truckin'-esque jarns and begin working on the hip hop tracks.''

As a result, Ill Communication is the Beastie Boys at their most seasoned, confldent and self- assured--But to know how they got where they are, you've got to know where they've been: In 1981, the band--then consisting of Yauch on bass, drummer Kate Schellenbach (now of Luscious Jackson), guitarist John Berry, and Mike D singing--played its first gig at Adam Yauch's 17th birthday, followed by early club gigs at the long defunct A7 and Max's Kansas City, among others. By close of 1983, the Beastie Boys had released the Pollywog Stew EP (originally released on the tiny Rat Cage label, since reissued on Grand Royal as part of Some Old Bullshit), broken up three times, replaced Berry with Adam Horovitz (formerly of the Young and the Useless), and made their tentative steps towards rap with the Cooky Puss 12-inch (also on Rat Cage, also reissued as part of S.O.B.). The band began playing outside its native New York, breaking up blocks of hardcore to put down the instruments and MC... and, for whatever reason, people started liking it.

1984 found the Boys, then slimrned down to D, Yauch and Adrock, hooking up with DJ Rick Rubin and releasing the Rock Hard 12-inch on Rubin's Def Jam label. The She's On It/Slow and Low, Hold It Now. Hit It, and Paul Revere/The New Stvle 12-inches followed, with a first album, Licensed To Ill (all Def Jam/Columbia), dropping in 1986. Selling four-million-plus and hitting #l on Billboard's LP chart, Licensed... has been credited with bringing hip hop to mainstream America--or vice versa. The B-Boys subsequently disappeared, resurfacing in 1989 with a new label (Capitol), a new homebase (Los Angeles), and a radically different new album (Paul's Boutique).

While Paul's Boutique's byzantine wordplays and B-Boys/Dust Bros. co-production didn't quite connect with white teenage America as Licensed... did, the LP did garner the band a newfound level of critical acclaim and respect (including a four-star Rolling Stone review and props from Robert ''The Dean'' Christgau). Three years later, Check Your Head would be the first record released on the band's own Grand Royal imprint. With Mike D on drums, Yauch on bass and Adrock on guitar, Check... featured the return of live instrumentation into the mix. With the able assistance of Keyboard Money Mark and percussionist Eric Bobo (both of whom appear on Ill Communication), the B-Boys returned to the stage, keeping it up for the better part of '92.

At the same time, the Beastie Boys started putting the lessons of this decade-plus career to use in areas beyond their music. The G-Son studio constructed for the recording of Check Your Head now houses the band's record company--the Grand Royal Label which has since become home to Luscious Jackson, DJ Hurricane, Moistboyz, and DFL--as well as a magazine of the same name. ''Grand Royal, the magazine, started out as a newsletter,'' says Mike D. ''Something to go out to the kids writing into our P.O. Box, to communicate with as many people as possible. It eventually got carried away and became its own full-fledged artistic endeavor.'' Grand Royal merchandise also exists, giving rise to the mistaken assumption that the Beastie Boys own the X-Large stores where it's been sold; Mike D does have interest in X-Large, Yauch and Adrock, however, do not--but then Yauch's got his snowboarding and Adrock's been known to show up on the silver screen...

... All of which makes you wonder where they find the time, whereas Ill Communication just makes you glad they do. The record puts fvrth an overwhelmingly positive vibe throughout, whether through goodtime grooves like ''B-Boys Makin' With The Freak Freak,'' ''Do It'' or ''Get it Together'' (featuring guest spots from Biz Markie and A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip, respectively), Adrock's metal damage raveup ''Sabotage,'' Mike D's turns on the hardcore (as in punk rock) mic, violinist Eugene Gore's Middle Eastern squalor on ''Eugene's Lament,'' or the spiritual elation expressed by MC Adam Yauch on ''The Update'' and ''Bodhisattva Vow.'' ''I use Buddhist terminology to state basic truths and views,'' Yauch says of the latter. ''But these ideas are not exclusively Buddhist. They relate to all humanity.''