Paul's Boutique

The Dust Brothers, a pair of unknown producers working out of a Los Angeles apartment, had been making beats so dense and sample-heavy that they assumed no rapper would be able to get on top of them. When the Beastie Boys heard the tracks, they insisted on rapping over them anyway. What the Dust Brothers had built for themselves became the foundation of one of the most intricate and purely joyful albums ever made.

Paul's Boutique contains somewhere between 100 and 300 samples woven into a single continuous collage of sound, depending on who is counting. Curtis Mayfield, the Beatles, the Eagles, Pink Floyd, Sly Stone, the Ramones, James Brown, and dozens of others appear in fragments throughout, never as obvious loops but as textural building blocks stitched together so seamlessly that the album sounds like its own entirely original world. Recording engineer Mario Caldato Jr. later said that 95 percent of the record was sampled and that the team spent over $250,000 on clearances alone. The last track contains 24 distinct samples by itself. A lawsuit four years later against another hip-hop act made it essentially illegal to sample this freely, meaning Paul's Boutique exists as an artifact of a creative window that closed immediately after it was made.

Commercially it underperformed the group's debut, which had been built on a simpler party rap formula. Critically it has aged into something completely different: a record widely regarded as one of the most innovative albums in hip-hop history and a direct influence on virtually every producer who came after it. Turn it up loud, let it run from start to finish, and pay attention to what is happening underneath the vocals.