'Beastie Boys' Doco Airs This Week - Without This LP, There May Not Have Been A Story

Remember when you realised that Steely Dan didn’t suck? After years of hearing them mocked as elevator muzak by crusty defenders of the punk religion, all it took was one spin of 1977’s Aja for you to realise that The Dan were bigger than Reelin' In The Years and deeper than any meme about yacht rock or audiophile boomers. Or how about The Beach Boys? If you’d stayed in your lane and kept away from whatever this Pet Sounds record is, they’d only be the smiley surfboard-boys who sold their songs away to Cadbury and The Good Guys for jingle money. For secretly killer groups with sketchy reputations, usually all it takes for conversion is one great album. For the Beastie Boys, it’s their second effort, 1989’s Paul’s Boutique.

To close your eyes and play this record is to look through a kaleidoscope where every surface is a different genre of pornography. It’s like pressing your face against the glow of a CRT television to channel-surf on rapid-fire through the seedy landscape of midnight programming. It’s a game of 52 pick-up with the required-reading of a high-school curriculum. On Paul’s Boutique, the Beastie Boys created their own circle of Dante's Inferno. One where high and low brow sat side-by-side on the same forehead; an Animal House tapestry where JD Salinger, Colonel Sanders and Charles Dickens are mentioned in the same breath that rhymes Harry S Truman with Alfred E Neuman.

"A copy of it should be sold with every beanbag."

By 1988, the frat boy pantomimes of their debut record, Licensed To Ill, were already starting to feel as corny as a Whoopee Cushion or a Fart-In-A-Can. With unapologetically Black, politically combustible albums like Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and NWA’s Straight Outta Compton mutating hip hop into something that kept parents up at night and gave the FBI a sweaty arse-crack, suddenly, songs about fighting for your right to party, no matter how ironically intentioned, quickly became about as dangerous as Camp Granada.

Grizzled by the road and painted by critics of the day as one-or-two-hit-wonders with monkey brains, the Beasties set to distance themselves from the tongue-in-cheek buffoonery of their commercial breakthrough. No more girls in cages dancing next to a giant motorised penis – their next record would be musically rich “how-do-you-like-me-now?” to the those who had written them off so quickly. It was a tall order for a group who spat beer into their crowd for fun.

Rick Rubin, the young production guru, famous for his sparse and dry approach to recording, who had guided them to the stars, had already become estranged from the group. But in order to completely sever the ties of their past, the group would split with Rubin’s trendy Def Jam label and their distributor, Columbia, to move to Los Angeles and make a deal with the empire of Capitol Records. Eventually striking up a partnership with a rising production duo by the name The Dust Brothers, the Beastie Boys and their studio wizards began cooking up an album made entirely of record samples, a move which would change both hip hop and the music industry, forever.

Paul’s Boutique is a headphones record. While its colourful production still shines on a good pair of speakers, particularly on the low end, this is a dense record that’s made to be savoured. It’s like Dylan or any good rap; the more attention you invest into it, the better it gets. To close to your eyes and follow the characters, situations, gags and double entendres inside the lyrics is like watching a sketch show unfold inside your brain. A copy of it should be sold with every beanbag.

The musicality of this thing makes Licensed To Ill, a record with some pretty great beats and samples for its time, sound like something cooked up with the preset drums on FL Studio. With around 105 samples, most of them legally cleared, The Dust Brothers' work on these beats covers just about every genre of music they could get their hands on. From the lunatic stop-start of Shake Your Rump to the turn-it-the-fuck-up rock of Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun, Paul’s Boutique proved that the Beasties could spit over just about anything. They even have their own Abbey Road-style medley, with a collection of short, sketch-like songs at the back of the album, a suite entitled B-Boy Bouillabaisse.

800-ish words just aren’t enough to properly talk about the world within this record and its impact on not only the reputation of the Beastie Boys but hip hop as a genre. It’s unabashed positivity, the entire website dedicated to understanding the cultural references within, its initial commercial failure thanks to Capitol and Donny Osmond, the reoccurring karmic and philosophical allusions, or just how damn funny it is. This is a record to live inside.

Beastie Boys Story hits Apple TV this Friday (24 April)