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By: Ron Hart
I'll never forget the moment I first heard Paul's Boutique . It was the fall of 1989 and my first semester as a high school sophomore. After English class one day, one of my friends produced a red cassette tape and declared it to be the best hip-hop album he had ever heard. That red tape was Paul's Boutique by Beastie Boys. "These are the same guys who did that stupid 'Fight For Your Right To Party' song?" I quipped skeptically right before I put my Walkman headphones on and was literally blown away by the pastiche of sounds, stories and urban-psychedelic imagery that swirled around in my head. Songs like "Egg Man," "Looking Down The Barrel of a Gun," "Car Thief," "Shadrach" and "High Plains Drifter" created a beautifully shot panoramic view of the corner of Rivington and Ludlow on the Lower East Side that unfolded before my eyes, a sorrowful but comfortable nostalgic snapshot of that neighborhood two decades before the trust fund brats moved in and chased out all the starving artists with their blue condos, Thai restaurants and American Apparel shops. To this day, I still hear stuff I didn't hear in previous listens thanks to The Dust Brothers' masterfully dense production, which, for my money, is more White Album than Sgt. Pepper by an avenue (in fact, their fusion of the Fab's "Back in the USSR," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and its subsequent reprise, "The End," and "When I'm Sixty-Four" remains possibly the best flow of samples in hip-hop history).
Paul's Boutique remains the Beastie Boys' unheralded masterpiece, as they arguably only managed to release one more album on par with the brilliance they displayed in '89 four years later on 1992's organic return to their punk roots, Check Your Head , before falling off a creative cliff with a string of subpar releases that all failed to capture the majesty of their sophomore classic. This 20th anniversary remaster, outside of sounding a whole lot better and splitting up the "B-Boy Bouillabaisse" the way the Beasties originally intended, leaves much to be desired, especially considering the veritable wealth of b-sides on the album's rare coinciding EPs, Love, American Style and An Evening At Home With Shadrach, Meshach And Abednego, which would have made this reissue far more valuable to collectors had they been tacked on as a bonus disc or something. Nevertheless, for those of us who have slept a hot minute on revisiting Paul's Boutique in recent years, this new edition is like a welcome visit from an old friend. You know, the one who got you into punk rock, Zapp and Roger, Johnny Cash and sinsemilla.
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