BEASTIE BOYSHip-hop’s
first headphone album gets remastered, reissued and reimagined
By 1988, the Three Hip-Hop Stooges in
the Beastie Boys—Adam “MCA” Yauch, Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz,
and Michael “Mike D” Diamond—had already accomplished much in
their short careers. They’d started out as a punk band (The Young
Aborigines), opening shows for the likes of Bad Brains and Dead
Kennedys. They released the first rap album (1986’s Licensed to
Ill) to go to #1 on Billboard’s charts, becoming the
first relevant white hip-hop act in the process. They introduced the
world to the joys of "Brass Monkey." They conducted a
bacchanalian world tour complete with cage-dancing girls and a giant
inflatable penis borrowed from the back pages of the Rolling Stones’
playbook. Perhaps most notable of all, they fought (via heavy
rotation on MTV) for your inalienable right to party. These
achievements notwithstanding, they’d taken a few knocks, too. Their
Liverpool show had erupted in a riot that resulted in Horovitz’s
arrest on assault charges. Their early success had prompted them to
leave Rick Rubin’s Def Jam Records to sign with Capitol (resulting
in a hailstorm of lawsuits/countersuits), which ultimately served as
the catalyst for their decision to leave their beloved New York City
altogether, relocating to the sunnier but less hospitable environs of
Los Angeles in an effort to start somewhat afresh. So by the time
1989 rolled around, it was anybody’s guess as to what was going on
within the group’s ever-clowning but tightly-knit internal dynamic.BEASTIE BOYSBeneath the goofy frat-boys-in-da-hood
posturing and clouds of cheeba smoke, the answer to that question was
Paul’s Boutique—hip-hop’s first “headphone album”
and a masterpiece of massiveness. To this day, it remains the finest
selection in the Beastie Boys’ catalog, not to mention one of the
greatest pop albums of all time, right up there with OK Computer,
Revolver, Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde on the
scale of universally recognized rock ‘n roll righteousness. What
made it so was the difference between Rick Rubin’s
metal-meets-pedal, bare-bones production style and the richly
evocative cut-and-paste sampling favored by the Dust Brothers (Mike
“E.Z. Mike” Simpson and John “King Gizmo” King), who stitched
no fewer than 105 samples together to form the crazy-quilt of sound
that gives Paul’s Boutique its cratedigger’s soul and
musical backbone. Much as Girl Talk’s Gregg Gillis has done using
modern software tools, the Dust Brothers magically weaved
together—sometimes within the context of a single song, such as the
album’s hit, “Hey Ladies”—snippets from artists as disparate
as Sweet, Kurtis Blow, Cameo, Kool & the Gang, Zapp and James
Brown into a cohesive statement, one unimaginable beforehand and
impossible to repeat since.
Hovering atop this wall of sound were
lyrics unlike anything the Boys had attempted to date—a
party-hopping, science-dropping orgy of pop culture that bobbed and
weaved between anything from a daytime TV reference (dig the Brady
Bunch bite when Ad-Rock busts out, “Like Sam the Butcher,
bringin’ Alice the meat,” on “Shake Your Rump”), to local
politics (“He’s even more over than my mayor, Ed Koch,” Ad-Rock
spits on “Johnny Ryall”). Meanwhile, their epic love letter to
New York City, the 12-minute-plus “B-Boy Bouillabaisse,” was a
26-track samplefest which managed to create mini-suites featuring
Manhattan’s Chrystie Street subway stop, Jamaica Queens (“Stop
That Train”) and MCA’s native Brooklyn, even from the relatively
laid-back remove of El Lay. In hindsight, it’s clear that the boys
were pining for home, and in many respects, Paul’s Boutique
now reads like an extended letter from camp via a troop of slightly
neurotic, emotionally-wrought but nevertheless fun-loving
expatriates.
The album’s re-release adds no new
music (a shame, considering the quality of such b-sides as “33%
God” and “Dis Yourself in ’89 (Just Do It)”), but does
include a downloadable file featuring track-by-track commentary from
the Boys themselves reminiscing about some of the stories and
characters behind the songs themselves, such as the tale of the real
Johnny Ryall (“He was a bum on my stoop; Russell Simmons got on me
for letting him wear one of our Def Jam satin tour jackets because it
was so cold out!” remembers Mike D).
Regardless of whether anything “new”
was included here, Paul’s Boutique nonetheless proves
entirely worthy of a 20th anniversary re-release. The album is not
only the Beastie Boys’ finest hour, nor is it indisputably one of
hip-hop’s best albums; it’s a record that sits atop pop’s
mountain as one of the best of all time. Kick it!