Paul’s Boutique Minus Paul’s Boutique
Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.
July 25 was probably the 25th anniversary of Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. (Google and a few other sources say the release date was actually June 25, but July 25 is the consensus.) There’s a new mural of the group, painted by Danielle Mastrion, at the corner of Ludlow and Rivington, on New York’s Lower East Side, where the album cover was shot.
This remix of Paul’s Boutique, released a few years ago, has also been recirculating on Twitter and Soundcloud. Caught in the Middle of a Three-Way Mix, by DJ Cheeba, DJ Moneyshot, and DJ Food, recombines the album’s original source tracks and a capella verses with audio commentaries and a handful of newer songs.
The remix is fun to listen to, but mostly, it just reminds you that Paul’s Boutique sounds amazing because its sampled sources were amazing. Like De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, released the same year, Paul’s Boutique lifts tracks that would cost a small mint to borrow from today. (Three Feet High has never had an official digital release because the rights holders still can’t sort out the royalties.) The Beatles, The Supremes, The Ramones, Curtis Mayfield, Dylan, Hendrix, Sly, Bernard Hermann, and James Brown (of course) are all there. But mostly, it’s a love letter to old-school New York City hip hop: Kurtis Blow, Afrika Bambaataa and the Jazzy 5, The Sugarhill Gang, The Funky 4 +1, and contemporaries like Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions, and Public Enemy are the glue that holds the whole project together.
Now, if you know Paul’s Boutique well, you can’t hear those older songs any more without hearing Paul’s Boutique. There’s specific moments in those songs that hide there waiting for you to trip over them, like quotations of ancient Greek in an Ezra Pound or TS Eliot poem. Beastie Boys didn’t just find a way to make older music sound new; they found a way to invent their own precursors.
It’s still wonderful to go back to the roots. In 2012, I found tracks from a handful of playlists and website listings and edited them together to make a Spotify playlist that I called “Paul’s Boutique Without Paul’s Boutique.” (Later, I updated it using Benjamin Wintle’s comprehensive playlist, which is really the base here — he did an amazing job tracking down these songs.) It’s just the sampled songs, roughly in the order they appear on the album. It’s ridiculously fun. I like it better than the three-DJ mix, and I might like it even better than the Beasties’ album.
It feels like you’re at an amazing party at Adam Yauch’s house, the Dust Brothers have control of the record player, and Mike D and Adam Horowitz are watching TV and telling you jokes the whole time. I never want it to end.
Update: Scott Orchard made a version of this playlist on Rdio, for the Rdio fans in the house.
Stay Connected