The album's sparse beats and aggressive rhymes were in sharp contrast with the light, party-oriented sound that was popular in contemporary hip hop.

The first single from the album, "It's Like That", released on August 10, 1983, expanded lyrical boundaries in rap with its tone of social protest (unemployment, inflation).

[11] The music on the album was created by Larry Smith's group Orange Krush using the Oberheim DMX drum machine and Jam Master Jay's scratches mixed in a guitar riff.

[18] In a 2019 episode of the AMC docuseries The Songs That Shook America, "Rock Box" was applauded for its blending of snare drum beats accompanied by the guitar riffs performed by American guitarist Eddie Martinez.

Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Linkin Park, Rage Against the Machine, and Blink-182, none of them would be the same without this one song, and hip hop and rock might still be segregated art forms.

's boasts about "messages that self-improvement is the only ticket out" and viewed their style as a departure from most hip hop acts at the time; stating "they get into a vocal tug of war that's completely different from the straightforward delivery of The Furious Five's Melle Mel or the everybody-takes-a-verse approach of groups like Sequence.

[26] In his consumer guide for The Village Voice, critic Robert Christgau described it as "easily the canniest and most formally sustained rap album ever, a tour de force I trust will be studied by all manner of creative downtowners and racially enlightened Englishmen".

[31] Christgau commented on the group's "heavy staccato and proud disdain for melody", writing that "the style has been in the New York air long enough that you may understand it better than you think".

[31][32] According to journalist Peter Shapiro, the album's 1983 double-single release "It's Like That"/"Sucker MCs" "completely changed hip-hop ... rendering everything that preceded it distinctly old school with one fell swoop.

rapped over the most sparse of musical backing tracks in hip hop at the time: a drum machine and a few scratches, with rhymes that harangued weak rappers and contrasted them to the group's success.

[33] "It's Like That" is an aggressively delivered message rap whose social commentary has been defined variously as "objective fatalism",[31] "frustrated and renunciatory",[34] and just plain "reportage".