Paul’s Boutique by Beastie Boys

The Joshua Tree

U2’s leap into global domination explored the liberations that come with constraint.

The Joshua Tree represented something new for U2: the gospel influences, the emotional nakedness, the introduction of understatement to a sound that had defined itself by its forthrightness. In the past, they’d let their songwriting be loose and in the moment. Now they were exploring the liberations that come with constraint.

If you lean in close, you can pull apart the sound in layers: the wisps of guitar, the bits of pocket-watch percussion (“One Tree Hill”). But if you sit back, it sounds minimal and direct. The words point to romantic love (“With or Without You,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”) but also to the search for God and meaning—a reflection of the dualities they found in both gospel and the romanticism of Van Morrison and Patti Smith. The backdrop—the inky washes of sound, courtesy of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois—captures constant change. But the foreground—the march-like rhythms, the impassioned vocals—is steadfast and firm. They rock with the tools of their era, but they also tap into something eternal.

Paul’s Boutique

Beastie Boys

The Beasties go Hollywood and upend the entire idea of hip-hop.

In 1989, sampling in hip-hop was in its Wild West period, before lawsuits slowed the free-for-all with a morass of legal hurdles. As it turns out, in 1989, the Beastie Boys were also in their Wild West period, having decamped from their native NYC to the Hollywood Hills to reap the many benefits of Licensed to Ill’s runaway success. Paul’s Boutique is the frenetic and fried collision of these two concurrent phenomena.

“We decided to put every crazy idea that we had in the record.”

Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz

Beastie Boys

Following a messy split with Def Jam Records and Rick Rubin, the Beasties tapped LA duo The Dust Brothers for production duties. Over their kaleidoscopic barrage of vintage funk and soul samples (some obscure, all soon to be cost-prohibitive), as well as a snippet of The Beatles’ “The End,” Mike D, MCA, and King Ad-Rock reveled in the primal joys of hedonism, vandalism, and having “a beard like a billy goat.” It didn’t sound like anything they had done before or like anything anyone else had done before; it also was a massive commercial flop. Three years later, they’d swap potentially litigious sampling for live instruments, reinventing themselves for the third time in three albums. But Paul’s Boutique remains a monument to the art of sampling, and a pinnacle of hip-hop at its most inventive and mischievous.

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Paul’s Boutique