Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun

Paul's Boutique is the greatest sampling record ever made — a record that could not be made today because the clearance costs would be prohibitive, built by the Dust Brothers and the Beastie Boys from hundreds of samples sourced across every genre. It was a commercial disappointment in 1989; it is now considered a masterwork.

Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun opens the album and announces immediately that this is not Licensed to Ill: harder, stranger, more confident. The Beasties' vocal delivery had matured from the frat-boy aggression of the debut into something more controlled and more inventive.

The subsequent Beastie Boys catalog — Check Your Head, Ill Communication, Hello Nasty — is one of the more consistent runs in hip-hop history. But Paul's Boutique is where they became what they were going to be.