Paul's Boutique - Conception

Conception

Derided as one-hit wonders and estranged from their original producer, Rick Rubin, and record label, Def Jam, the Beastie Boys were in self-imposed exile in Los Angeles during early 1988 and were written off by most music critics before even beginning to record their second studio album, Paul's Boutique. Following the commercial success of Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys were focusing on making an album with more creative depth and less commercial material. The group's previous album had been enormously popular and received critical acclaim among both mainstream and hip hop music critics, although its simple, heavy beats and comically juvenile lyrics led it to be labeled as frat hip hop. The group signed with Capitol/EMI Records, and Paul's Boutique was produced with the Dust Brothers, whose extensive, innovative use of sampling helped establish the practice of multi-layered sampling as an art in itself. While the Dust Brothers were set on making a hit record, the duo agreed with the group on producing a more experimental and sonically different record. In total, 105 songs were sampled on the album, including 24 individual samples on the last track alone. The backing tracks were allegedly produced with the intention of being released as a Dust Brothers instrumental album, but the Beastie Boys convinced the duo to use the tracks as the basis of their follow up to Licensed to Ill.

Contrary to popular belief, most of the sampling for Paul's Boutique was cleared, but at excessively lower costs compared to today's prevailing rates. A 2005 article by Paul Tingen about The Dust Brothers reveals that "most of the samples used on Paul's Boutique were cleared, easily and affordably, something that would be 'unthinkable' in today's litigious music industry." Mario "Mario C" Caldato, Jr., engineer on the album, later said in an interview that "after did Paul’s Boutique we realized we had spent a lot of money in the studio. We had spent about a $1/4 million in rights and licensing for samples." This type of sampling was only possible before Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc., the landmark lawsuit against Biz Markie by Gilbert O'Sullivan, which changed the process and future of hip hop sampling.

Speaking about the album 20 years on, Adam Yauch told Clash magazine,

The Dust Brothers had a bunch of music together, before we arrived to work with them. As a result, a lot of the tracks come from songs they’d planned to release to clubs as instrumentals – "Shake Your Rump," for example. They’d put together some beats, basslines and guitar lines, all these loops together, and they were quite surprised when we said we wanted to rhyme on it, because they thought it was too dense. They offered to strip it down to just beats, but we wanted all of that stuff on there. I think half of the tracks were written when we got there, and the other half we wrote together.”

All of the songs for Paul's Boutique were recorded in Matt Dike's living room in Los Angeles, with the exception of "Hello Brooklyn". The fifth part of the album's finale suite "B-Boy Bouillabaisse" was recorded at the apartment building of the Beastie Boy-member Adam Yauch, aka MCA, in Koreatown, Los Angeles. The location of recording was credited in the album liner notes as the Opium Den. The recordings for Paul's Boutique were later mixed by the Dust Brothers at Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles.