Paul's Boutique
The Beastie Boys
Great Beats, Astute Rhymes from Hip-Hop's Heyday
Chuck D of Public Enemy once said that after this album appeared in 1989, the unspoken consensus among the hip-hop elite was that the Beastie Boys, a trio of white rappers from Brooklyn, "had better beats" than just about anyone in the game.
To be sure, the rhythm beds of this record are astounding. Rather than punching out a simple beatbox rhythm or rejiggering sampled phrases, Beasties Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, Michael "Mike D" Diamond, and Adam "MCA" yauch, along with the production team known as the Dust Brothers, break things down to an almost cellular level. On some tunes, each individual drum tone is drawn from a different source. Then, the group crams tons of information where the beats would ordinarily go, and drops in more sampled exclamations to punctuate the lyrics or provide ironic running commentary. Consider "Shake Your Rump": A sizzling bit of high-energy funk, its drum tones are derived from recordings by the Sugar Hill Gang, Bob Marley ("Could You Be Loved"), jazz drummer Paul Humphrey, and a disco track by Harvey Scales called "Dancing Room Only," not to forget one of the memorable drum fills, which comes from Led Zeppelin's "Good Times Bad Times." The vocal interjections are culled from a similarly lengthy list that includes hip-hop's favorite patron saint, James Brown.
These painstakingly assembled samples set Paul's Boutique apart from just about everything else in popular music. They also hail from the very end of what might be called the "free" era of hip-hop: The Beasties used most of the material without permission from the original creators. Less than two years after this release, a landmark lawsuit changed common hip-hop practice about samples, making it prohibitively expensive to reference other recordings in the collage style heard here.
Paul's Boutique is notable for other reasons. It documents the Beastie Boys' substantial evolution as lyricists: Once known for chuckleheaded enthusiasms—their first hit was "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)," and their debut, Licensed to Ill, was dismissed in some quarters as "frat-rap"—the trio became a machine-gunning quip dispenser, flattening rivals with wisecracks while shouting down all sorts of biases and double standards. A vivid diatribe, "Egg Man" encapsulates a bit of stereotype-busting Beastie ideology: "You made the mistake, you judged a man by his race, you go through life with egg on your face."
Genre: Hip-Hop
Released: 1989, Capitol
Key Tracks: "Shake Your Rump," "Hey Ladies," "Egg Man," "Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun"
Catalog Choice: Licensed to Ill; To the Five Boroughs
Next Stop: Beck: Odelay
After That: Luscious Jackson: Fever In Fever Out
Book Page: 57
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Comments:
#1 from Adam Herbst, New Jersey - 11/05/2008 7:33
This is one of my favorite albums. It has the Beasties inhaling all of pop culture for 25 years like some monster bong hit (sampled) and coughed up. Hip hop will never touch this sampling due to legal issues. And this is before all of the East Coast, West Coast nonesense. The Beasties have left this all as well. It is a snapshot of a time that we won’t see again. Hip hop could have gone in this direction but chose something else. How many samples on this album -over 100. How many samples on your average Timbaland album - I don’t know.
