FEATURE:
The Sounds of Science
Looking Ahead to the Thirty-Fifth Anniversary of Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique
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1989 was a truly legendary year…
IN THIS PHOTO: Beastie Boys in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Rider
for Hip-Hop. Among the big releases from that year was De La Soul’s debut, 3 Feet High and Rising. Not only was this album one of the most important Hip-Hop albums of 1989: Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique is among the finest albums ever released. One of the best from the year for sure. It is testament to its sampling, production and extraordinary variety that the trio’s second studio album is so enduring. It is still played to this day. A big step on from their 1986 debut, Licensed to Ill, not everyone embraced Paul’s Boutique. After their debut, there was so criticism. Some feeling they were a joke or novelty act. Some accused them of sexism and bad attitudes towards women (something the trio addressed on Paul’s Boutique). One reason why Paul’s Boutique alienated some was the amount of sampling and its scope. Perhaps not as accessible as Licensed to Ill. Their second album masterpiece was produced by the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers. It was recorded over two years at Matt Dike's apartment and the Record Plant in Los Angeles. Even if Paul’s Boutique was not promoted widely by Capitol and the sales were not as big as expected, it has become the group’s most loved albums. An iconic and seismic release. I am going to get to some reviews and features about the album. An album I would urge people to buy, I do wonder whether there will be a thirty-fifth anniversary reissue. Paul’s Boutique was released on 25th July, 1989. I would recommend people look at this Billboard feature that is a track-by-track guide. Also, this feature explores one of the greatest albums ever. I am going to start off with this article from Albumism. On its thirtieth anniversary (in 2019), they took us inside the brilliance and background of the Beastie Boys’ stunning second studio album:
“The road to making Paul’s Boutique was not an easy one, largely due to the all too familiar tale of the music powers that be and the artists not being on the same page. In the midst of the success of their 1986 debut Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys’ vision of where they wanted their careers to head were vastly different from that of producer Rick Rubin and Def Jam founder Russell Simmons. From 1986 to 1988, the Beastie Boys carved their own space in the frat boy hip-hop territory. Despite having hip-hop’s first Billboard #1 album, by 1987, the trio (Adam Horovitz a.k.a. Ad-Rock, Adam Yauch a.k.a. MCA and Mike Diamond a.k.a. Mike D) started to grow disenchanted with their situation.
According to their memoir The Beastie Boys Book, Horovitz said, “Things seemed to be going great, so we just rolled with it all. Going on tour, opening for Madonna, and then Run-D.M.C., it was like a dream that we didn’t even know existed for us that had come true. We’d become a big group of friends having ridiculous fun, making music, playing shows, traveling, and getting paid money to not actually have a job. But at a certain point, Rick and Russell started coming up with ideas and making decisions for us.”
Horovitz also claimed that Rubin chose the artwork for Licensed to Ill and re-produced their biggest hit, “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!),” without their consent. “We were too busy living the high life to pay attention. Big mistake. Kids, when someone’s making decisions for you, you can also bet that they’ve decided to take what’s yours,” Horovitz added.
Eventually they grew tired of that act, especially when Simmons suggested to Yauch that he continue his onstage persona of the drunk guy at the party offstage. The Beastie Boys became victims of the age old trick of being forced to tour endlessly, only to discover by the end of the tour that they were flat broke and they owed the label another album.
After a year of contentious lawsuits, the Beastie Boys signed a deal with Capitol Records with the groundbreaking Paul’s Boutique being their first record for the label. The group got a brand new lease on life and an opportunity to contribute to the making of the album. Produced by the Dust Brothers, Paul’s Boutique is a masterpiece that would not be able to be made today because of its groundbreaking use of samples. It would be financially prohibitive.
By the time the Dust Brothers and the Beastie Boys got together, most of the album’s tracks were instrumentals that the producers had been working on previously. In a 2009 interview with Clash magazine, Yauch stated, “They had a bunch of music together, before we arrived to work with them. As a result, a lot of the tracks on Paul’s Boutique come from songs they’d planned to release to clubs as instrumentals— ‘Shake Your Rump’, for example. They’d put together some beats, basslines and guitar lines, all these loops together, and they were quite surprised when we said we wanted to rhyme on it, because they thought it was too dense. They offered to strip it down to just beats, but we wanted all of that stuff on there. I think half of the tracks were written when we got there, and the other half we wrote together.”
The aforementioned “Shake Your Rump” contains an array of samples that require multiple listens to figure out exactly where the beats came from. The samples range from “Funky Snakefoot” by Alphonse Mouzon to “Jazzy Sensation” by Afrika Bambaataa and The Jazzy 5 to “Get Off” by Foxy. “Shake Your Rump” is three minutes and nineteen seconds of organized chaos that is infectious.
Among the other highlights from Paul’s Boutique are the lesser known “Egg Man” featuring the baseline from Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” and the theme from Jaws and “High Plains Drifter,” a song about a low life drifter traveling cross country with samples from “Those Shoes“ by the Eagles, “Your Mama Don’t Dance“ by Loggins and Messina, and “Put Your Love (In My Tender Care)” by The Fatback Band as the background music. The most successful single from Paul’s Boutique was “Hey Ladies,” which managed to peak at #36 on the Hot 100. It was a far cry from the hits on Licensed to Ill, but in terms of overall quality, the songs on Paul’s Boutique are far superior.
As you listen to the album, it’s clear that this is a Beastie Boys production without interference from a label head or producer. This was their voice going forward. They crafted outrageous stories set to beats and samples that set them apart from many of their peers. In his speech inducting the Beastie Boys into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, Public Enemy’s Chuck D stated, “After Licensed to Ill, the Beasties left the Def Jam label and broke with their producer Rick Rubin and still kept it going on. Everyone wondered and many people were pessimistic about how the hell they were going to top their multi-platinum debut, Licensed to Ill. But their second album, Paul’s Boutique, broke the mold, and with it they accomplished everything they hoped for”.
Its approaching thirty-fifth anniversary is cause for celebration. I do wonder whether the surviving members, Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horovitz and Michael ‘Mike D’ Diamond will mark it – we sadly lost the brilliant Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch in 2012. I want to move to this feature from Tidal. Again, in 2019, they were keen to go deep inside Paul’s Boutique on its thirtieth anniversary:
“Despite the success of Licensed to Ill, critics seemed less than impressed by the Boys. They often derided the Beasties as an obnoxious “comedy act,” Run-DMC poseurs cashing in on the rap-rock sound. (The durags didn’t help.) Naysayers characterized the beer-fueled antics, irrepressible horniness and degradation of women in their music (and live shows) as earnest immaturity instead of thinly masked satire. (It was likely somewhere in the middle.)
The “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” video could have been called a documentary and no one would have blinked. With that single alone, unwittingly or not, three ex-punks were credited with creating the soundtrack to the execrable acts of fraternity pledges who probably found Andrew Dice Clay insightful.
Rolling Stone granted the Beasties some self-awareness, but their review of Licensed to Ill attributed the visceral, speaker-frying hybrid of concussive percussion and searing rock guitar entirely to Rick Rubin, despite the fact that the Beasties are listed as producers. If their scores on Kool Moe Dee’s infamous “Report Card” reflected the views of the Beasties’ peers, those who shared stages with the group also gave them a low passing grade.
Amid the critical backlash, Def Jam was, according to the Beasties, withholding royalties from Licensed to Ill as a punitive measure. The label wanted a sophomore record, but the group wanted a break after a year-plus of touring. “They did not fucking pay us — Rick [Rubin] and Russell [Simmons], our friends, Def Jam,” Ad-Rock wrote in 2018’s Beastie Boys Book.
There are differing accounts of how the Beastie Boys wound up recording the majority of Paul’s Boutique at the small, Hollywood apartment of the late Matt Dike, co-founder of the now-iconic Los Angeles label Delicious Vinyl (Tone Loc, the Pharcyde, Young MC). Ultimately, the Beasties were captivated by the instrumentals they heard from Delicious Vinyl affiliated producers the Dust Brothers (John “King Gizmo” King and Mike “E.Z. Mike” Simpson).
By 1988, they had split from Def Jam and moved to L.A., signed to Capitol for millions, and rented a mansion in the Hollywood Hills in hopes of making a record that would erase, or at least distance them from, the frat bro image.
“I think that they were focused on not being a one-hit wonder and breaking away from the popularity and the fanbase that the song had garnered for them,” Mike Simpson told KEXP in a 2015 interview. “They really wanted to reinvent themselves and make a statement that they were more than ‘Fight for Your Right (to Party).’”
For the past three decades and for all eternity, all talk of Paul’s Boutique rightfully begins with the beats. The Dust Brothers took the thundering walls of disparate sounds pioneered by the Bomb Squad on Public Enemy records (e.g., It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) and dialed back the dissonance while dialing up the funk.
In the Dust Brothers and Matt Dike, who was present for and influenced many recordings, the Beasties had found true musical kinsmen — people whose eclectic tastes went beyond the rap and rock that had informed Licensed to Ill. Rubin’s beats on that album almost sound primitive by comparison.
“They’d grown up listening to many of the same records, so they were into it,” Simpson told KEXP. “It seemed to be a good match.”
Those records became Beastie-tailored collages, a collection of beats composed of (literally) hundreds of samples pulled from funk and soul (Curtis Mayfield, Rose Royce, Zapp, Kool & the Gang, the Meters), rock (the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix), rap (Funky 4+1, BDP, Run-DMC), reggae (Pato Banton, Scotty) and more. Drum breaks, bass lines, guitar riffs, vocals from rap records and radio commercials — nothing was off limits. The Dust Brothers and Beastie Boys expanded the horizon and parameters of sampling further than anyone thought sonically or technologically possible in 1989.
Capitol reportedly paid between $200,000 and $300,000 to clear as many samples as they could, but there are undoubtedly more left uncleared. The sum is paltry considering the amount rap artists would later pay for a single sample. It’s proof that the beats on Paul’s Boutique could have only existed in the era before sweeping and expensive (and arguably incommensurate) copyright litigation forever hamstrung the genre.
The only 1989 rap record that approached sampling with the same scope and playfulness was De La Soul’s Prince Paul-produced Three Feet High and Rising (which did result in a lawsuit).
There’s a fan-run website devoted to textually cataloging every sample (and lyrical reference) on Paul’s Boutique. If that’s not sufficient, you can visit WhoSampled to play the exact bar(s) the Dust Brothers and the Beasties looped. Hearing the pieces of music in isolation affirms the artistry required to make them fit together, to make them virtually indivisible.
For a test case, you needn’t look any further than “Shake Your Rump,” which is essentially the first song on the album. (“To All the Girls” is an intro.) There are four different drum breaks, but it never sounds like they’re from different records. Instead, they come off like brilliant tangents or improvised solos. If no one told you that the rubbery, undeniably funky bass line came from Rose Royce’s “Yo Yo,” you might think it was also from the same song sampled for the main drum break (Harvey Scales – “Dancing Room Only”).
The sounds on every beat, whether that’s the infectious Commodores riff on “Hey Ladies” or the multiple Beatles samples on “The Sounds of Science,” become inextricable parts of the whole. It’s as if each beat were a house made of vinyl, a structure that would collapse without the support of each interlocking bass line, drum fill and vocal sample embedded in dust-coated groove.
One of the main reasons the beats on Paul’s Boutique work so well is that the Beastie Boys were equally unpredictable, trading punchlines and shouting them in unison with an effortless polish and fluidity not present in the more rigidly delivered verses of their debut. Together, they weave in and out of each other, in and out of the drum breaks, like the Showtime-era Lakers on a fastbreak.
They don’t just rhyme around the esoteric vocal samples, the samples become part of the rhyme schemes, part of their hooks. They converse with them. The combination of their three distinctive voices, although grating to some, packed the collective bravado necessary to compete with the dozens of sounds playing in unison.
Lyrically, Paul’s Boutique was a marked leap forward for the Beasties. Largely jettisoning the Licensed to Ill narratives that played like an X-rated version of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, they had begun to find the right mix of high and low brow. Literary references to Jack Kerouac and J.D. Salinger appear on the same album with similes about The Flintstones and The Brady Bunch. With odes to egging people (“Egg Man”) and songs that seemed to glorify grand theft auto (“Car Thief”), it’s clear that they hadn’t abandoned all hijinks”.
I will end with a couple of reviews. There were a few dissenting voices in 1989. In years since, the retrospective reaction has been hugely positive. Paul’s Boutique was remastered on its twentieth anniversary. Pitchfork gave it a perfect ten when they shared their thoughts. I did not hear Paul’s Boutique when it came out in 1989. I discovered it in the 1990s. I first heard their debut before Paul’s Boutique. It was quite a leap in imagination and faith experiencing their second album! Since then, I have played the album so many times all the way through. I still have not to the bottom of it! A masterpiece in terms of sampling and its innovation, maybe Paul’s Boutique represents a time we can never return to. Artists unable to get clearance to samples so they can create something like Beastie Boys’ sophomore release:
“Paul’s Boutique is a landmark in the art of sampling, a reinvention of a group that looked like it was heading for a gimmicky, early dead-end, and a harbinger of the pop-culture obsessions and referential touchstones that would come to define the ensuing decades' postmodern identity as sure as “The Simpsons” and Quentin Tarantino did. It’s an album so packed with lyrical and musical asides, namedrops, and quotations that you could lose an entire day going through its Wikipedia page and looking up all the references; “The Sounds of Science” alone redirects you to the entries for Cheech Wizard, Shea Stadium, condoms, Robotron: 2084, Galileo, and Jesus Christ. That density, sprawl, and information-overload structure was one of the reasons some fans were reluctant to climb on board. But by extending Steinski’s rapid-fire sound-bite hip-hop aesthetic over the course of an entire album, the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers more than assured that a generally positive first impression would eventually lead to a listener’s dedicated, zealous headlong dive into the record’s endlessly-quotable deep end.
There’s a lot that's already been said about the daring eclecticism and arguably irreproducible anything-goes technique with which the Dust Brothers assembled the album’s beats. The music is a big, shameless love letter to the 1970s filled with a conceptual bookend (the Idris Muhammad-sampling, ladies-man ether frolic “To All the Girls”), numerous line-completing lyrical interjections from Johnny Cash, Chuck D, Pato Banton and Sweet, and, just for kicks, nine truncated songs spliced together and stuck in at the end as a staggering 12 and 1/2-minute suite. If the sonics on It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back evoked a sleep-shattering wake-up call and 3 Feet High and Rising a chilled-out, sunny afternoon, the personality of Paul’s Boutique completed the trinity by perfectly capturing the vibe of a late-night alcohol and one-hitter-fueled shit-talk session. Even now, after being exposed to successively brilliant sample-slayers from the RZA to the Avalanches to J Dilla, it’s still bracing just how meticulous the beats are here. These aren’t just well-crafted loops, they’re self-contained little breakbeat universes filled with weird asides, clever segues, and miniature samples-as-punchlines.
There’s dozens of clever touches and big, ambitious ideas that still sound inspired: a cameo appearance by the opening drumbeats of Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” in “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun”; the manic yet seamless percussion rolls and the giddy tour through the Car Wash soundtrack on “Shake Your Rump”; the two-part slow-to-fast tweaking of late-period Beatles on “The Sounds of Science”; a sparingly-used Alice Cooper guitar riff adding a mockingly pseudo-badass counter to the whimsical Gene Harris-based soul jazz backbone of “What Comes Around.” It all gets writ large in “B-Boy Bouillabaisse,” the aforementioned album-closing suite, which careens through turntablist striptease, a not-yet-throwback 808/beatboxing showcase, funk grooves of every conceivable tempo, and a Jeep-beat bass monster so massive and all-consuming that Jay-Z and Lil Wayne 2.0’d it in late 2007. Even the less-frenetic moments are sonically inventive; there’s only two acknowledged and minimally-tinkered-with samples in “3-Minute Rule,” augmented with a starkly simple bassline from MCA himself, but it’s one of the finest examples of deep, cavernous dub-style production on any golden age rap record.
And, of course, there’s Ad-Rock and MCA and Mike D themselves. Where the aesthetic of Licensed to Ill could have permanently placed them in the crass dirtbag-shtick company of “Married With Children” and Andrew Dice Clay if they’d kept it up, Paul’s Boutique pushed them into a new direction as renaissance men of punchline lyricism. They were still happily at home affecting low-class behaviors: hucking eggs at people on “Egg Man”; going on cross-country crime sprees on “High Plains Drifter”; smackin’ girlies on the booty with something called a “plank bee” in “Car Thief”; claiming to have been “makin’ records when you were suckin’ your mother’s dick” on “3-Minute Rule.” But they’d also mastered quick-witted acrobatic rhymes to augment their countless pop-culture references and adolescent hijinks. “Long distance from my girl and I’m talkin’ on the cellular/She said that she was sorry and I said ‘Yeah, the hell you were’”—we’re a long way from “Cookie Puss” here.
While each member has their spotlight moments—MCA’s pedal-down tour de force fast-rap exhibition in “Year and a Day,” Mike D having too much to drink at the Red Lobster on “Mike on the Mic,” and Ad-Rock’s charmingly venomous tirade against coke-snorting Hollywood faux-ingénues in “3-Minute Rule”—Paul's Boutique is where their back-and-forth patter really reached its peak. At the start of their career, they built off the tag-team style popularized by Run-DMC, but by ’89 they'd developed it to such an extent and to such manic, screwball ends that they might as well have been drawing off the Marx Brothers as well. It’s impossible to hear the vast majority of this album as anything other than a locked-tight group effort, with its overlapping lyrics and shouted three-man one-liners, and it’s maybe best displayed in the classic single “Shadrach.” After years of post-Def Jam limbo and attempts to escape out from under the weight of a fratboy parody that got out of hand, they put together a defiant, iconographic statement of purpose that combined giddy braggadocio with weeded-out soul-searching. It’s the tightest highlight on an album full of them, a quick-volleying, line-swapping 100-yard dash capped off with the most confident possible delivery of the line “They tell us what to do? Hell no!”.
The final review I want to highlight is from AllMusic. It is always interesting hearing different perspectives on this wonderful album. Thirty-five years after its release, Paul’s Boutique continues to inspire and amaze artists. I am going to be interested how critics and fans view the album on its anniversary:
“Such was the power of Licensed to Ill that everybody, from fans to critics, thought that not only could the Beastie Boys not top the record, but that they were destined to be a one-shot wonder. These feelings were only amplified by their messy, litigious departure from Def Jam and their flight from their beloved New York to Los Angeles, since it appeared that the Beasties had completely lost the plot. Many critics in fact thought that Paul's Boutique was a muddled mess upon its summer release in 1989, but that's the nature of the record -- it's so dense, it's bewildering at first, revealing its considerable charms with each play. To put it mildly, it's a considerable change from the hard rock of Licensed to Ill, shifting to layers of samples and beats so intertwined they move beyond psychedelic; it's a painting with sound. Paul's Boutique is a record that only could have been made in a specific time and place. Like the Rolling Stones in 1972, the Beastie Boys were in exile and pining for their home, so they made a love letter to downtown New York -- which they could not have done without the Dust Brothers, a Los Angeles-based production duo who helped redefine what sampling could be with this record. Sadly, after Paul's Boutique sampling on the level of what's heard here would disappear; due to a series of lawsuits, most notably Gilbert O'Sullivan's suit against Biz Markie, the entire enterprise too cost-prohibitive and risky to perform on such a grand scale.
Which is really a shame, because if ever a record could be used as incontrovertible proof that sampling is its own art form, it's Paul's Boutique. Snatches of familiar music are scattered throughout the record -- anything from Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly" and Sly Stone's "Loose Booty" to Loggins & Messina's "Your Mama Don't Dance" and the Ramones' "Suzy Is a Headbanger" -- but never once are they presented in lazy, predictable ways. The Dust Brothers and Beasties weave a crazy-quilt of samples, beats, loops, and tricks, which creates a hyper-surreal alternate reality -- a romanticized, funhouse reflection of New York where all pop music and culture exist on the same strata, feeding off each other, mocking each other, evolving into a wholly unique record, unlike anything that came before or after. It very well could be that its density is what alienated listeners and critics at the time; there is so much information in the music and words that it can seem impenetrable at first, but upon repeated spins it opens up slowly, assuredly, revealing more every listen. Musically, few hip-hop records have ever been so rich; it's not just the recontextulations of familiar music via samples, it's the flow of each song and the album as a whole, culminating in the widescreen suite that closes the record. Lyrically, the Beasties have never been better -- not just because their jokes are razor-sharp, but because they construct full-bodied narratives and evocative portraits of characters and places. Few pop records offer this much to savor, and if Paul's Boutique only made a modest impact upon its initial release, over time its influence could be heard through pop and rap, yet no matter how its influence was felt, it stands alone as a record of stunning vision, maturity, and accomplishment. Plus, it's a hell of a lot of fun, no matter how many times you've heard it”.
On 25th July, the landmark Paul’s Boutique turns thirty-five. In 1989, when so many genius albums were released, one of the finest albums ever came out. It really changed Hip-Hop. Taking it in new directions and showing what was possible. If you get a chance, go and listen to the album and play it the whole way through. It really is a listening experience…
LIKE nothing else.