Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique (July 25, 1989)

On this, the final day of the stunt month, I've decided to abandon my own rules and write about the second album from the Beastie Boys, the monumental Paul's Boutique.  A lot of you two have been waiting around for this write-up ever since Licensed To Ill hit the site.  Why, you could even go so far as to say that this entire stunt month was manufactured as an excuse for me to finally get around to writing about the fucking album. Now if only I would do the same for some of the other artists who have been ignored on this blog, right?

Anyway, Paul's Boutique.  After the success of their debut (rap) album Licensed To Ill, MCA, Ad Rock, and Mike D. grew restless in their Def Jam Records label home, as Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons were trying to force them to record a quickie Licensed To Ill 2 follow-up, which the Beasties had zero interest in doing.  Instead, they found a way out of their record deal, signing up instead with Capitol Records (the home of Miilkbone), who promised them endless creative freedom as long as they actually managed to move units.  In response, the Beastie Boys immediately moved out West and started doing as many drugs as humanly possible.  (They were obviously aware that they pissed off their former Def Jam gods, who immediately sicced their other (mostly) white rap group 3rd Bass on them; however, I believe they were too stoned to care all that much at the time.)

Paul's Boutique grew out of a chance meeting with production team The Dust Brothers, named as such not because of how untidy they kept their studio.  The team had produced several instrumentals that they intended to morph into club-ready dance tracks, but the Beasties convinced them to give up the beats (and help create a few more) in favor of their new album.  Aside from their rampant drug abuse, the Dust Brothers were also known at the time for their method of using eighty thousand motherfucking samples in their songs, stitching everything together to create Frankentracks that actually sounded like original compositions.  (Part of the reason why it took me so long to get to this write-up is because of my delusional attempt to piece this review together out of sentences taken from other HHID write-ups, which proved both impossible and really fucking stupid, although it sounds funny.)

Paul's Boutique was released in 1989, three years after Licensed To Ill, and it immediately sold zero copies.  Although it earned a bit of critical acclaim, the use of multiple samples (I've joked in the past that Paul's Boutique samples every single song ever recorded, both before and since 1989, and I'm only half-wrong) proved to be too challenging for listeners, so the Beastie Boys found their second album (as a rap group; this was their third full-length project overall) collecting dust (no pun intended) on store shelves.  However, a funny thing happened on the way to their next project: people finally caught the fuck on.  Today, Paul's Boutique is praised as an experimental masterpiece that doesn't alienate the hip hop audience who grew up on Licensed To Ill: in fact, it was ultimately successful in expanding their fanbase beyond the rap world, which helps explain why they remain one of the most beloved hip hop groups in the genre today.

Paul's Boutique is one of my wife's favorite albums of all time; she's also been wondering why it's taken me forever to write about it, just for your information.  When we first met, she loaned me her copy and insisted I listen to it from start to finish.  (At the time, I hadn't ever listened to it before: my experience with the Beastie Boys started with Hello Nasty for some weird reason, and I worked my way both backward and forward from there.)  After absorbing the project in full (many many times), I figured out one thing: that girl had amazing fucking taste in music.  It would be ridiculous for me to claim that I married her just because of her musical taste, but...

1.  TO ALL THE GIRLS

Seems to take forever to pop up in your speakers, so by the time you realize that this is just a corny trifle of a rap album intro (unofficially, anyway), it's already fucking over.

2.  SHAKE YOUR RUMP

I've always believed that this song would have made a better intro to Paul's Boutique, but maybe I'm the only one who feels that way.  This track could still rock a house party at the drop of a hat, which is just a testament to both the playful rhymes from all three Beasties and to how the Dust Brothers managed to translate a shitload of samples into a timeless sound.  There's a Madlib remix of this song that I first heard on The Criterion Collection's Beastie Boys Video Anthology that rocks even fucking harder in an entirely different way, for those of you two who are into that sort of thing.

3.  JOHNNY RYALL

The Boys dedicate an entire track to Johnny Ryall, the "king of the homeless", and their otherwise playful and contagious tendency to pass the mic back and forth, sometimes mid-word, makes for an interesting juxtaposition to what should be depressing-as-fuck subject matter.  The Dust Brothers provide an instrumental that sounds as though it's going to pass out at any moment, with the drum hits acting as the paddles that shock its heart into pumping for just a little bit longer.  It is odd that a rap song written about a homeless guy would inadvertently portray the same dude as an alcoholic superhero, but this is a Beastie Boys song, after all, and an entertaining one at that.  So there you go.

4.  EGG MAN

This was the song my wife was most excited for me to hear when she found out that I hadn't yet listened to Paul's Boutique.  The overall vibe is playful, but kind of bleak, what with the overall violent theme and the Curtis Mayfield "Superfly" sample laid throughout, making everything sound funkier by default.  Proof positive that the Beasties had fun in the studio: why else would they devote an entire song to throwing eggs at motherfuckers, son?

5.  HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER

I've never cared for this track.  The outlaw-esque tale the Boys weave (without resorting to cliches borrowed from Westerns: in fact, the film Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is name-dropped at one point) is okay, but the instrumental has always sounded incomplete to me.  Everyone involved with this track has done much better work.  Spoiler alert: "High Plains Drifter" is the only real misstep on Paul's Boutique.  So you have that to look forward to.

6.  THE SOUNDS OF SCIENCE

The Beastie Boys drop science and "k-nowledge" over a subdued Dust Brothers groove...at least at first, before everything switches up in favor of a dope-as-fuck beat that the trio absolutely murder.  Approximately nine thousand and two samples are thrown into every second of this song, including several Beatles songs that they probably just now found out about while reading this, so whoops!  You're welcome, lawyers for the Fab Four!  Anyway, this song is the fucking tits.

7.  3-MINUTE RULE

The song as a whole is longer than what the title would suggest, but Mike D., MCA, and Ad Rock rhyme for roughly three minutes combined, so I suppose it isn't an outright lie.  Production-wise, the brothers Dust lend our hosts a simplistic drum loop with some subtle scratching thrown in for good measure, while each Boy performs their own verse (without assistance from the other group members!  Shocker!), which has absolutely no connection to the last.  There's no chorus, no overall theme, and no real structure to speak of, just three hot verses that turn "3-Minute Rule" into one of the most obvious actual "hip hop" songs on Paul's Boutique.  "Simplistic" isn't always a criticism, folks: this track still chugs away just fine, twenty-two years removed from its release date.

8.  HEY LADIES

Probably the song most people marginally familiar with Paul's Boutique will remember, as "Hey Ladies" was the first single from the project.  It exhibited a sound that was worlds away from the rock-tinged loops prevalent on Licensed To Ill, and yet shares its sensibilities with that earlier album thanks to the Beasties and their juvenile (and catchy) rhymes.  Hardly what you would call radio-friendly, and yet you wouldn't ever want to kick it out of bed.

9.  5-PIECE CHICKEN DINNER

A short, goofy, banjo-driven interlude.  Which makes the transition into the next track much more jarring than it needed to be.

10.  LOOKING DOWN THE BARREL OF A GUN

Easily my favorite song on Paul's Boutique.  I fucking love this song.  Everything about it, from the violent lyrics, the guitar-driven beat, and even the video, which features a scene where the Boys pass around a bong in the backseat of a limo (I may be remembering this incorrectly), is fucking perfect.  References to A Clockwork Orange abound, which make complete sense when you listen to this track, unlike hearing the entirety of Cage's Movies For The Blind.  This is one of the very best tracks the Beasties have ever made.  Luckily for the trio, this wasn't the last good song they ever recorded.  It sounds much darker than the rest of the project, but it's still awesome in its own way.  Nice!

11.  CAR THIEF

This track is all over the place, thanks to the Beasties and their undoubtedly-recorded-under-the-influence verses,  The Dust Brothers come through in the clutch, though, lacing the instrumental (pun probably intended) with a nice fucking melody that helps move you along to the next track.  Kind of slower-paced, a bit too slow for my liking, but it acts as a reprieve after getting your shit kicked in by "Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun", so.

12.  WHAT COMES AROUND

Aside from the use of the phrase hinted at in the title, which ranks among the most overused ideas in music history, this track is funky-as-hell diversion from the darkness prevalent on the previous two tracks.  Most of the lines make very little sense ("You're all messed up like pasta primavera!"), but the playful way in which they are delivered is fucking contagious.  But again, that hook hurts the track more than it helps: I'm just waiting to hear several rap songs interpret the saying "you get what you pay for" in their own respective special ways.

13.  SHADRACH

I had written earlier that "High Plains Drifter" is the only real misstep on Paul's Boutique.  That's still true, but "Shadrach", also released as a single for some ungodly reason, never grew on me.  There isn't anything technically wrong with the song itself, but I never really cared for the beat, which throws a lot of shit at the wall and uses everything that didn't stick, including an annoying-as-shit female vocal sample during what counts as the hook.  I'm sure that I'll hear a lot of shit for this in the comments, but I personally don't like this track.  But it does fit into the overall sound Paul's Boutique is going for, so that was nice.

14.  ASK FOR JANICE

A brief interlude.

The final track on Paul's Boutique consists of nine separate compositions which serve as a ridiculous, pretentious, and entertaining-as-shit outro.

15.  B-BOY BOUILLABAISSE

(A) 59 CHRYSTIE STREET

Given our hosts's penchant to pass off the mic after spitting a single bar, this quick mockery of a song, which sounds like a leftover from Licensed To Ill, ends up literally sounding like the three Beasties are getting ready to fuck the same girl.  Which is the problem with that type of format.  Let that be a lesson to all you new crews out there.  Anyway, this shit was bland as shit, so let's move on.

(B) GET ON THE MIC

Ad Rock and MCA spend all of their allotted time trying to convince Mike D. to get on the microphone, but their ploy doesn't really work, since Diamond doesn't actually appear on here (as a rapper, anyway).  The simplistic beat, combining drum hits with beatboxing, gives this brief song an old-school flavor that sounded like everything else back in 1989 but comes across as downright fucking refreshing today.  Not bad.

(C) STOP THAT TRAIN

This final track on Paul's Boutique is filled with half-thought out ideas that could never be stretched into full-on songs.  "Stop That Train" is an ideal example of this, as the Beasties give the listener two verses based around riding the train around New York City.  I liked this, but I wasn't in like with it.

(D) A YEAR AND A DAY

Somehow the guys fit three full verses into "A Year And A Day", which features distorted vocals that don't really add to the listening experience.  That Isley Brothers sample sure does get a fucking workout, though: I'm left wondering why nobody has ever used "That Lady, Pt. 1 & 2" in a similar fashion since.  It's been twenty-two years, people!  It's okay to adopt that idea!

(E) HELLO BROOKLYN

Jay-Z fans will recognize this shit right away, as "Hello Brooklyn" laid the foundation for American Gangster's "Hello Brooklyn 2.0".  This bass-heavy affair actually fits these guys much better than Hova and (shudder) Lil Wayne: even though you will at no point buy that the Beastie Boys are thugs, the very end, which segues into a Johnny Cash vocal sample, is chilling nonetheless.

(F) DROPPING NAMES

There's really not all that much to this, unless you're a fan of the Chemical Brothers song "Block Rockin' Beats" and you're interested in hearing that Crusaders "The Well's Gone Dry" sample being used in a slightly different manner.

(G) LAY IT ON ME

A quick trifle that doesn't exactly have "more flavor than Fruit Stripe Gum", but still sounds pretty goofy today.  I actually liked a lot of the individual lines on here, especially MCA's dismissal of the girl that spilled her wine "on my lyrics as you wasted my time".  He actually comes off as a bit harsh, which is commendable in and of itself.

(H) MIKE ON THE MIC

Mike D. finally takes the bait laid for him on "Get On The Mic", tackling this quickie one-verse wonder for dolo, sounding pretty damn good in the process.  It's enough to make you wish that the trio would occasionally let each other handle their own verses during the songs, but that wouldn't be the Beastie way.  I don't think I would want to hear Mike Diamond for sixty-plus minutes rapping all by his lonesome, but this?  This was nice.

(I) A.W.O.L.

DJ Hurricane helps the Beasties end Paul's Boutique with this simulation of a live show, on which their lone "verse" consists of the same rhetorical question ("What'cha gonna do?") repeated ad nauseum, all while the fake crowd screams their heads off.  A nice way to go out, I suppose.

"A.W.O.L." then leads into an unlabeled reprise of "To All The Girls", thereby ending our evening.  (Side note: the twenty-year anniversary reissue of Paul's Boutique inexplicably separates each "song" onto its own audio track, making it appear as though the re-release contains twenty-three tracks to the original's fifteen.  Don't be fooled.)

FINAL THOUGHTS:  Paul's Boutique is a masterpiece that somehow sounds even better now than it did when I first listened to it.  The Beastie Boys reinvented themselves for a second time on this project, and the end result not only stands up to the test of time, it's also one of the finest hip hop music releases in motherfucking history.  The production by the Dust Brothers precludes their work with Beck and (the hell?) Hanson, with their sample-heavy techniques bringing out the best of MCA, Ad Rock, and Mike D.  Lyrically, these guys will never win any awards, but their nerdy, reference-heavy bars and their knack for making everything sound playful is contagious, even when they dive into some of the more violent tracks on Paul's Boutique.  I don't believe that there's much more to be said, and not just because this means the stunt month is finally over: Paul's Boutique is just really.  Fucking.  Good.  So there. 

BUY OR BURN?  Buy.  Buy.  Buy.  Now.

BEST TRACKS:  "Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun"; "Hey Ladies"; "Shake Your Rump"; "3-Minute Rule"; "Egg Man"; "Johnny Ryall"; "B-Boy Bouillabaisse"; "The Sounds Of Science"...oh, fuck it, the majority of the album

-Max

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