Why "Paul's Boutique" Stands Out as the Best Beastie Boys Album

And maybe hip-hop's most influential production masterclass.

Let’s start with the Miles quote.

In an interview, the jazz legend allegedly (and I say allegedly because, despite spending a ton of time trying to find an archived version online, I’ve come up empty on a reliable source) cited Paul’s Boutique as a game-changer for him musically. He couldn’t stop listening to it. As fun as it is to picture Miles leaping off his couch, flipping the LP over, and restarting it from the beginning right after it ends, it also supports the consensus about the Beasties’ sophomore studio outing. Hailed as hip-hop’s equivalent to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Pet Sounds, it’s now considered a classic that redefined how emcees, producers, engineers, and label bigwigs thought sampling could be.

That reputation wasn’t acquired overnight, however.

For a moment, imagine being the Beastie Boys in 1987. Your debut album, License to Ill, is a phenomenon, already certified Platinum in the U.S. and adored by fans worldwide as an endlessly listenable rap-rock crossover. Critics are similarly laudatory, with The Source awarding it a five-mic rating and publications like Rolling Stone and Vibe naming it among the best records ever made. They’d already opened for Madonna on her Virgin tour and were selling out arenas as the headlining act.

And yet, despite all their success, the group was essentially in a no-win situation. Run it back for a sequel, and they’d be pigeonholed as a one-note frat boy act, something their label, Def Jam, was keen on. Reject those expectations, and they risked alienating the creative team that helped them skyrocket to fame in the first place, not to mention their existing fanbase.

The latter is what ultimately occurred.

“We felt like we had to be out there doing this,” Michael “Mike D” Diamond said in the Apple TV documentary, Beastie Boys Story, “but we weren’t really mature enough to express that we started to not like our own songs, which was a really s***** feeling.” “The last 12 months of touring felt like a tornado had ripped me out of my apartment in New York, spun me barfing all around the world, and dropped me on my head in Hollywood,” added Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz. The ordeal was especially grueling for the late Adam “MCA” Yauch, who told Def Jam’s Russell Simmons that he quit. As a result, the label stopped paying the group royalties. “In hindsight, [Simmons] just needed three white rappers to get on MTV,” Mike D added, which led to them cutting ties with Def Jam, signing with Capitol, and decamping to Los Angeles to record their follow-up.

For production duties, the group turned to the Dust Brothers, a then-burgeoning duo consisting of Michael “E.Z. Mike” Simpson and John “King Gizmo” King. After writing and producing early genre staples for Tone Loc and Young MC on the Delicious Vinyl imprint, they linked up with the Beasties through mutual friend Matt Dike. According to Simpson, much of the material the trio initially heard was his and King’s sensibilities boiled down to their essence:

Paul’s Boutique [was] such a unique situation because those songs had been created to be a Dust Brothers record. I would say 70% of that record was made from ideas we made before meeting the Beasties. In essence, that music was made without an agenda. The other records, the Rolling Stones or Hansen, had an agenda. That was work for hire. Someone came in and said, “make this kind of music for me.” In those cases, everything I did was to serve the client. For Paul’s Boutique*, that music came from my heart. That was the most natural and genuine expression of my own creativity.*

To say that the Dust Brothers’ work on this LP changed sampling in hip-hop would be to sell the seismic shift short. Until then, emcees might rap over snippets of one or two records, while producers preferred a more bare-bones approach to the instrumentals. But, starting in 1988, everything changed. This record, along with Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, dense sample layering, opened up new possibilities for building entirely new sonic ecosystems out of pre-existing songs. The most apt comparison may be Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” strategy for music-making. As he said in 1964, “It was a case of augmenting, augmenting. It all fit together like a jigsaw.”

To go through the Dust Brothers’ magical contribution to Paul’s Boutique piece by piece would reduce it to stats-based tedium (for reference, here’s a handy video guide to every sample they used). That process would also take forever—there are 14 samples from the likes of Ronnie Laws, Rose Royce, and the Sugarhill Gang on “Shake Your Rump” alone. For its time, it was one of the most diverse collections of samples ever assembled, featuring everything from free jazz to P-funk to glam rock. It even boasts multiple nods to hip-hop’s early years, sampling artists like Afrika Bambaataa and Kurtis Blow. By shortening the snippets and loops used to stitch together each track’s backbone, Simpson and King set the stage for hip-hop’s future. They crawled so legends like Madlib, J Dilla, the Alchemist, and many others could run.

As good as it sounds today, part of me wonders if the production, considered wildly experimental at the time, was one of the reasons it flopped commercially. Is being too ahead of your time a lousy move for sales? Was stretching hip-hop to its sonic limits, conceptually and technologically, too “out there” a move to be considered a true mainstream follow-up to a certified blockbuster? In reality, the cock tough guy act from the License to Ill days didn’t disappear totally. But, amid what Rolling Stone critic David Handelman called “hilarious b*******,” there’s a whirlwind of ear candy delights to compensate—or, depending on your point of view, accentuate.

In the run-up to writing this post, I had thought a lot about the slow burn as a cultural influence. Most popular entertainment mediums have examples of texts like this one that, while not hugely successful upon their initial release, have grown substantially in stature each passing year. It’s all the more impressive in hip-hop, where even great or near-great records tend to have a relatively short shelf life from a pop culture standpoint. Think of how many famous rappers have fought tooth and nail to hitch their wagons to throwback tours and genre retrospectives to keep their names from fading permanently into the night. Unlike those acts, the Beastie Boys’ peak, of which this LP is the creative fulcrum, has aged spectacularly well.