paul's boutique

The Beastie Boys reinvented themselves and changed the face of hip hop with the dense and daring psychedelic post modern sample collages of this legendary laugh-out-loud landmark.  The trio had been written off as frat boy one hit wonders with their debut album 'Licensed to Ill'; and, after they separated from Def Jam Records over non-payment of royalties, it seemed that they might be done for.  They signed with Capitol / EMI and began working with the production team The Dust Brothers (Mike Simpson and John King) on a more experimental sound to break away from their image and show more depth.  

Adam Yauch would recall:  "The Dust Brothers had a bunch of music together, before we arrived to work with them. As a result, a lot of the tracks 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."

Simpson says:  "Sampling was just a hobby for us. It was just something we did for fun while we were in college. John was destined to become a genius computer programmer, and I was going to enrol in law school. We never had any intention of making records. I didn't even know what record producers did at the time. In the course of doing samples for Delicious Vinyl Records, every once in a while we put something together that seemed just too dense and too busy and too crazy for a rapper to rap on, and we put these tracks aside as instrumental Dust Brothers tracks. Then the Beastie Boys wandered into the studio, and heard one of these tracks, and they loved it. That's how the album got started.    Up until that point in hip-hop, people had been using samples very sparsely and minimally. If anything, they would use one sample in a song and take a drum loop and that would be the foundation. But what we were doing was making entire songs out of samples taken from various different sources. On 'Paul's Boutique' everything was a collage. There was one track on which the Beastie Boys played some instruments, but apart from that everything was made of samples. But we never had a grand vision of trying to make groundbreaking music. We just enjoyed making music in a way that was an extension of our DJing, combining two or three songs, but with greater accuracy than you could do with turntables."

'Paul's Boutique' was recorded in Los Angeles at Matt Dike's apartment and The Record Plant studio with engineer Mario Caldato Jr. and assistant engineer Allen Abrahamson.  The groundbreaking multi-layered approach utilized one hundred and five different samples from diverse musical genres to produce a surreal pop culture pastiche that alienated and confused many of their fans.  The album only went to number twenty-four on the Hip Hop/R&B album chart; but it continued to sell over the years as word spread in college circles.  By 1999, it had sold over two million copies.  






http://www.beastieboys.com/







 "Shake Your Rump" 



"Egg Man" 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyar2C_wEq8



"Hey Ladies" 



"Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr1Qe2m8oOA




"Shadrach"




"Year and a Day / Hello Brooklyn"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM32R91KMDc








'Paul's Boutique'
full album:

https://myspace.com/beastieboys/music/album/paul-s-boutique-18984728

http://www.last.fm/music/Beastie+Boys/Paul's+Boutique

http://www.playthishiphop.com/beastie-boys-pauls-boutique/

http://open.spotify.com/album/1kmyirVya5fRxdjsPFDM05



1. "To All the Girls"   1:29
2. "Shake Your Rump"   3:19
3. "Johnny Ryall"   3:00
4. "Egg Man"   2:57
5. "High Plains Drifter"   4:13
6. "The Sounds of Science"   3:11
7. "3-Minute Rule"   3:39
8. "Hey Ladies"   3:47
9. "5-Piece Chicken Dinner"   0:23
10. "Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun"   3:28
11. "Car Thief"   3:39
12. "What Comes Around"   3:07
13. "Shadrach"   4:07
14. "Ask for Janice"   0:11
15. "B-Boy Bouillabaisse"   12:33
"59 Chrystie Street" - :57
"Get on the Mic" - 1:14
"Stop That Train" - 1:59
"Year and a Day" - 2:22
"Hello Brooklyn" - 1:32
"Dropping Names" - 1:03
"Lay It on Me" - :54
"Mike on the Mic" - :48
"A.W.O.L." - 1:46