Beastie Boys - Paul’s Boutique
Listen to an audio version of this review by Greg
I can remember being a Junior in High School. Each day when the school bell would ring, signaling the end of the day, many of us would make our way to the parking lot. But during the warm months, I never got right into my car to leave. We would all open our car doors and blare tunes. Frisbees would come out, and cigarettes, hacky sacks and fake IDs would be passed around.
One of my friends, Brad Solinsky, had a cool truck. He was a quiet dude, but always friendly to me and was always playing music from his truck. I sat shotgun one afternoon while the sun shined on our little after-school parking lot party. This was 28 years ago and I remember it like was yesterday. Brad’s car stereo was playing something grooving, To All the Girls. It was funky, jazzy, and slow, and had more of a hip-hop vibe to it. All of a sudden the song transitions into a faster, meatier, grittier, louder, full-on hip-hop song. It was Shake Your Rump.
Now at the time, if you had approached me and told me I must listen to a song called, Shake Your Rump, I would have rolled my eyes and NEVER listened to it. Plus, in the glory days, we couldn’t just pull up a song whenever we wanted. If we didn’t own the album, or one of our friends didn’t have it, we’d have to wait for it to get played on the radio, or MTV.
When I first heard, Shake Your Rump, I can remember time stopped. People all around me were having conversations. I was asked to pass something to another, but I couldn’t function. I was taken hostage by this song. It remains one of my favorite hip-hop songs of all time.
Paul’s Boutique is the 2nd studio album by the Beastie Boys. Released on July 25th, 1989, it did not resonate with many mainstream music fans and was not met with as much success as the group’s previous album, Licensed to Ill.
What’s incredibly unique about Paul’s Boutique, is that it’s an album made up predominately of samples. If you’d asked me in 1989 if I would review an album made of samples, I would likely have said no. But I wanted to dig the hole, pile up the dirt, dive into the hole, and dig deeper into this one. Why did an album filled with samples, an album completely different from a group’s debut, an album that initially was considered a failure, gain so much of a cult following and eventual underground popularity that today it is considered among the top 5 Hip Hop records of all time?
Let’s find out.
Coming off huge commercial success, Licensed to Ill, the Beasties had big shoes to fill. They were entering the studio to record their sophomore record, which many bands fail to achieve the same success as the first. Licensed to Ill topped the Billboard 200 Chart, was certified platinum (1 million copies sold) within a year of its release, and certified Diamond (10 million copies sold) by 2015. Singles like Brass Monkey, No Sleep Til Brooklyn, and Fight for Your Right to Party, were played in regular rotation on radio stations across the globe. The Beastie Boys had also created a brand. They had made a genre of rap/rock. Interestingly enough, they weren’t as well received by the Hip-Hop community. Because of songs like Fight for Your Right to Party, they had inadvertently appealed more to hard rock and heavy metal fans.
What came next in Paul’s Boutique would blow the doors off the whole genre and send them in a direction towards hip-hop. But the die-hard fans stayed on board, eager to hear what the band had in store.
I use the word “band” because the Beastie Boys did indeed play their own instruments. I witnessed this in person, seeing them in concert in 1994. The band was formed in 1978 as a punk rock group called the Young Aborigines. Michael “Mike D” Diamond was the original member on vocals, John Berry on guitar, Jeremy Shatan on bass, and Kate Schellenbach on drums. Jeremy Shatan left the band in 1981 and was replaced by Adam “MCA” Yauch on bass and vocals. John Berry left the same year and was replaced by Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz on vocals and guitar. The group changed their name to Beastie Boys and gained some minor success with their single Cooky Puss, which officially launched them in another direction, more towards Hip-Hop. Kate Schellenbach left in 1984 and the Beasties continued on.
The early-mid 1980s were really the infancy of hip-hop. One could argue the genre developed in the 70s on the streets of New York, but that’s up for debate. I think the street music from the 1970s, mainly from the African American community was eventually mixed with more aggressive talking instead of singing. Yauch, Horovitz, and Diamond liked this music and wanted to take it in another direction.
The album was produced by Matt Simpson and John King, also known as the Dust Brothers. As I mentioned before, Paul’s Boutique was created almost entirely from samples and was recorded over a two-year period in a Los Angeles apartment owned by then hip-hop producer Matt Dike.
The Beasties loved the influences the Dust Brothers provided them: hip-hop with a funk and jazz feel to it. This was a very different direction for the band.
To avoid serious legal and copyright issues, the Beastie Boys paid out a reported $250,000 to the rights owners of each song they sampled, which was a total of 105. The band convinced the Dust Brothers to put many of the samples on top of much of their instrumental, jazz funk sound they were experimenting with at the time. The Dust Brothers were surprised by this request. The fee of $250K does not compare to the licensing fees today. This number would be in the millions. More likely, an album like Paul’s Boutique would not be made in today’s day and age.
Released on July 25th, 1989, the album cover denotes a clothing store named “Paul’s Boutique”. The store name itself is fictional. The group placed a sign over the original, which was Lee’s Sportswear, located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Shake Your Rump was the first song they’d record with the Dust Brothers. In the track, the actual line, “Shake Your Rump – A” is a sample from a song titled Unity (Pt 2 – Because it’s Coming) performed by Afrika Bambaataa and James Brown in 1984. The primary bass line was sampled from a 1974 song called Yo-Yo by the artist, Rose Royce.
I had a lot of fun researching this album and writing this review. I was able to go back and listen to most of the sampled songs and get turned on to new music. Well, music that is not new in release. Just new to me.
The album’s final track B-Boy Bouillabaisse, which is made up of 9 parts, has a total of 24 separate samples. When you listen to it, you can tell how groundbreaking it was. No hip-hop artists were rhyming and sampling over their own instrumental music, created by the band themselves.
When it was released in July ’89, Paul’s Boutique was not considered a commercial success. Even though it reached #14 on the Billboard Top 200 and #24 on the Top R&B/hip-hop albums, this was apparently considered a failure by the record label. But it just needed to marinate a little. As word grew, the album reached gold status (500,000 copies sold) and Double Platinum (2 million copies sold) by 1999. Despite the contrast in sales compared to Licensed to Ill (10 million), Paul’s Boutique was unlike any hip-hop album ever made. The result is a dense, textured soundscape. The lyrics are witty, clever, and insightful. The Beastie Boys' trademark humor is still present, but there is also a new maturity and sophistication in their writing.
Quest Love, a member of the band The Roots, a member of the house band for the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and a Broadway musical producer, interviewed the Beastie Boys in 2020. During the interview he commented to Mike D and Adam Horovitz, “Paul’s Boutique, that record was everything. Even more than Licensed to Ill. I feel that that record is your magnum opus.” He went on to say, “I still consider Paul’s Boutique a work of art”.
Paul’s Boutique is a cohesive and well-crafted work of art. The songs flow together seamlessly, and the album has a strong overall message. If you haven’t heard Paul’s Boutique yet, turn on track 1 right now and just go! If you’ve already listened to it, give it another spin. But be careful, you might fall out of your chair.
