FEATURE:
Beneath the Sleeve
Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique
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THIS is a classic album…
IN THIS PHOTO: Adam Horovitz, Mike Diamond and Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys/PHOTO CREDIT: Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
that I have written about a few times before. Normally tied to a big anniverssary. Beneath the Sleeve is about exploring acclaimed albums and exploring its background and making. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for this mighty album. Paul’s Boutique is the second from the legendary Beastie Boys. Released on 25th July, 1989, it was produced by Beastie Boys and Dust Brothers. Unlike their 1986 debut, Licensed to Ill, Paul’s Boutique is a broader album. One that draws from more genres and has even more samples. This genius album was recorded over the course of two years at Matt Dike's apartment and the Record Plant in Los Angeles. Even though Paul’s Boutique was seen as a commercial failure compared to their debut, it is has come to be regarded as their true masterpiece. Their breakthrough. I think it is one of the best albums of all time. I am going to start out with some features about Paul’s Boutique. Apologies if there is repetition from previous features. I will come to a feature from last year. I am start out with this piece from Classic Album Sundays. It is fascinating to see the shift and evolution between their 1986 debut and Paul’s Boutique:
“This helped the band to receive massive airplay on college radio stations, but the record was also spun by jocks like Red Alert, Chuck Chillout, Mr. Magic and Marley Marl on New York City ‘black’ radio stations like WBLS and KISS FM. So the Beasties were getting major support from radio, but the press was a different story. The exceedingly high levels of sex, violence and decadence gave the trio a reputation of bratty frat boy rappers. Rolling Stone entitled their review ‘Three Idiots Create a Masterpiece’ and gave more credit to producer Rubin. Were the Beasties going to be a one-hit wonder?
There they hooked up with their old pal Matt Dike who introduced them to E.Z. Mike and Giz (later dubbed the Dust Brothers). They worked on a couple of tracks together and everything clicked so they ended up recording their entire sophomore effort with the team. The Beastie Boys wanted to make a more artistically mature album; an album with intelligence and creative depth. The Dust Brothers were known for their innovative use of sampling and Matt Dike for his production work with Tone Loc and Young MC so they were able to record with seasoned hip hop veterans in a fresh, new environment away from the player hating in the Big Apple.
They worked hard and the resulting Paul’s Boutique boasted a dense aural collage of 105 samples that drew from all kinds of music from jazz, soul, rap, funk, disco, prog, rock and punk. The publishing of the majority of tracks was cleared but luckily this was before the landmark lawsuit brought against Biz Markie by Gilbert O’Sullivan which subsequently changed the future of hip hop sampling. Instead, they spent about a $1/4 million in rights and licensing, an amount that would have skyrocketed even higher had it been released a few years later.
Lyrically the Beasties had also flipped the script. Their raps were as hilarious as ever, but this time they were witty. Even the notoriously brusque critic Robert Christgau gave them props for “bearing down on the cleverest rhymes in the biz” adding “the Beasties concentrate on tall tales rather than boasting or dissing. In their irresponsible, exemplary way they make fun of drug misuse, racism, assault, and other real vices fools might accuse them of.”
Paul’s Boutique gave the Beastie Boys the critical acclaim they desperately desired. Rolling Stone manoeuvred a U-turn and brazenly called it, “the Pet Sounds / The Dark Side of the Moon of hip hop.” But more importantly, it also earned the group respect with their peers and idols. Miles Davis claimed he never got tired of listening to it, and Public Enemy’s Chuck D even said, ‘The dirty secret among the Black hip hop community at the time of the release was that Paul’s Boutique had the best beats.” ‘Nuff said”.
Rather than a couple of straight reviews, I am instead going to get to features that praise the album but offer more insight. Before that, from last year, this feature highlights how Paul’s Boutique redefined Hip-Hop. A sleeper hit when it was released, it is this layered album that went on to be hailed as one of the cornerstones of the genre. Almost thirty-six years after its release, fans are still finding new things to appreciate. I don’t think there have been many albums that have the same ambition and palette:
“A lot of the tracks come from songs they’d planned to release to clubs as instrumentals,” Ad-Rock later told Clash magazine in the UK. “They were quite surprised when we said we wanted to rhyme on it, because they thought it was too dense.” The Brothers offered to strip the tracks to their bare beats, but the Beasties demurred and quickly got to work writing additional songs with their new collaborators.
Released on July 25, 1989, and named after a fictional clothing store, Paul’s Boutique (actually Lee’s Sportswear, located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; the vinyl sleeve folded out to reveal a panoramic photo of the corner at Ludlow and Rivington Streets) initially confused punters looking for more of Licensed To Ill’s jock bravado. In the years since, however, it’s been rightly hailed as one of the cornerstones of hip-hop.
Gleefully racing through samples by everyone from The Beatles to Johnny Cash (the album has spawned entire websites devoted to tracing the sources, variously estimated at between 100 and 300 samples), Paul’s Boutique made clear exactly what was possible with hip-hop at a time when the number of lawsuits issued by disgruntled songwriters was on the rise. Though everyone involved is adamant that the samples were cleared, the $250,000 allegedly spent on doing so is nothing compared to today’s licensing fees. Just as soon as the Beasties and co opened the floodgates, they were pushed shut again. It would be impossible to make Paul’s Boutique today.
Matching the mind-boggling array of samples is Beastie Boys’ own stylistic range. “Hey Ladies” is a funky, self-satirizing cut that sees the trio at their most idiosyncratically seductive (“Step to the rhythm, step to the ride/I’ve got an open mind so why don’t you all get inside”), while “Shake Your Rump” is the great party-starting single that never was and Miami bass receives an outing on “Hello Brooklyn” (part of the closing 12-minute tour de force that is the nine-part “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” suite). Elsewhere, “5-Piece Chicken Dinner” is a raucous 20-second hoedown that dives headlong into “Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun”: both a nod to Beastie Boys’ early incarnation as a punk outfit and a signpost towards future high point “Sabotage.”
On “Egg Man” the trio resurrected their frat persona, only to prove how far they’d come with a lyrical dexterity that replaces bullet shells with eggshells in a tale of dumbass street carnage. The track is exemplary of the “bulls__t tough-guy bravado” that Rolling Stone picked up on in a review that conceded it was nevertheless “clever and hilarious bulls__t”.
When ranking the 500 albums of all time, Rolling Stone placed Paul’s Boutique at 125. If anyone is fresh to this album or has not heard of Beastie Boys, then I would definitely encourage you to check out this album. Arriving in 1989, at a time when Hip-Hop was golden and saw legends like De La Soul and Public Enemy at their height, it is not a surprise that Beastie Boys had the inspiration and motivation to create a masterpiece. One that mixes samples with their incredible lyrics and explosive connection:
“Three years since their debut record, ‘Licenced To Ill’ (#192), the band had fallen out with that album’s producer, Rick Rubin, as well as his label, Def Jam. Critics had assumed the band was a one-hit-wonder and labelled their debut as frat Hip Hop. On this, the follow up record, the band, newly signed to Capitol Records, had drastically decided to change their sound. This album forged a new frontier in samplology. Produced by the Dust Brothers, the album features a total of 105 different songs sampled. They managed to weave a tapestry of sounds to completely create a collection of new songs. This is all before the brilliant rapping of Mike D, MCA and Ad-Rock.
On their debut, the band ran the risk of becoming a gimmick band, but with this album, they reinvented themselves to present a masterpiece of a record. This album is one big funky party from start to finish filled with so many music references and in-jokes, a book could be written on it alone. The album, that has been referenced as the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ of Hip Hop, samples two songs from that record on ‘The Sounds Of Science,’ as well as a track from The Beatles’ ‘White Album.’ The samples range from The Beatles to James Brown (what’s a Hip Hop record with out him?), The Eagles & The Band to The Ramones, The Commodores to Deep Purple. Artists that shouldn’t work together but do. It’s a testament to how well this album was executed. To be honest, I was a little disappointed when it finished. Last countdown was the first time I’d ever listened to this record and it immediately became one of my favourites. I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll say it again, I strongly recommend the Beastie Boys documentary on Apple TV+. It’s beautiful and emotional and hilarious and brilliant”.
I am going to end with this review. The third inclusion in Beneath the Sleeve, I will look at a Pop classic for the next edition. At a time when it is hard to produce an album that has so many samples – because of copyright and expense -, Paul’s Boutique is almost a novelty. Something that could not be replicated today. It is a shame that it is so hard for artists to have access to samples without incurring a lot of barriers and costs:
“I have a confession to make that I’m not particularly proud of. Sometimes I joke about it, but have never fully indulged in what caused the massive chasm in my listening repertoire. However, I feel that you and I have become close and I can trust you not to stone me in riotous judgement: I don’t listen to rap and hip-hop.
I grew up listening to classic rock and soul, so rap and hip hop culture was not something I’ve ever been familiar with. Recently, my brother fell into a “Golden Age West Coast Hip-Hop” phase and I caught the residual effects. We laughed at the absurdity — two white kids with Polish parents, having never stepped foot in Compton, rapping “today I didn’t even have to use my A.K.” in our apartment, eating the food our mom cooked for us. Not only did I feel silly, but I felt like a faker.
So I did what I do best — descend into a Wikipedia k-hole that killed most of my Sunday afternoon. Among the lists of best hip-hop records was unanimously the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. In a sweep of albums that meditate on inner-city gangs, killing cops, and drug use, how could one of the top albums come from three clownish white Jewish kids who reference Hunter S. Thompson and Fuzzy Navels? Deemed one-hit wonders after their first album Licensed to Ill the Beastie Boys’ sophomore project Paul’s Boutique was written-off as too experimental and peaked at #24 on the charts. The record is chock-full of samples pulled from other hip-hop tracks and films. For instance, the first and last beats of “3-Minute Rule” are from Sly and the Family Stone’s “The Brave and the Strong” and the fourth track “Eggman” samples multiple times from Public Enemy.
Paul’s Boutique has grown to receive critical acclaim and is considered a landmark hip-hop album. I have a theory that supports why I enjoy writing these throwback albums so much: the best way to discover new music is through your favorite artists’ influences. Paul’s Boutique is considered important, the way I presume, anyway, because it served as the catalyst for the trend of sampling songs in original pieces. The same way golden age hip-hop from L.A. sampled Jamaican dub music, funk soul, jazz poetry and call & response patterns from African-American religious services á la James Brown, the Beastie Boys packed dense allusions to their funk predecessors (Curtis Mayfield), black hip-hop counterparts (Public Enemy), and their hometown haunts (59 Chrystie Street). I picked Paul’s Boutique because while I’m not an aficionado of hip-hop by any stretch of the imagination, this album transcends some of the biggest decades in American culture, the hardcore lifestyle of late 1980s South Central L.A., and three Jewish “hipster” kids from New York City. For those of you who are rap newbs like me, or even if you consider yourself fluent, it is imperative that you visit Paul’s Boutique. Make sure you’re at a computer — you’ll be doing a lot of Googling”.
I shall leave things there. Not only a Hip-Hop classic, Paul’s Boutique is one of the best albums ever. In terms of its legacy, this album changed the genre. It changed how artists approached sampling and music videos. Paul’s Boutique’s experimental sound, witty lyrics and innovation moved Hip-Hop away from the Gangsta Rap scene of that time (1989 and the late-1980s). A pleasure to explore it for Beneath the Sleeve, anyone who has never heard this album needs to check it out…
STRAIGHT away.