My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (4) Paul's Boutique - Beastie Boys

[This is the seventh in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Following an abortive career in punk, the Beastie Boys made an overnight leap to stardom with Licensed to Ill, a tone poem of gleeful idiocy that quickly became the best-selling album in hip-hop. Headed by producer Rick Rubin, and armed with an even more finely tuned version of the rock formula already worked to near-perfection on Run-D.M.C.'s Raising Hell, Licensed to Ill proved an enduring surprise, thanks to the sharpness with which the Beasties skewered the frat culture they had, from the outset, (mostly) transcended. Even those who appreciated the wink behind "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)," though, could never have anticipated Paul's Boutique, which presented hip-hop as a legitimate mode of expression on a scale never before attempted. It honed the wit of the debut and was saturated with a pop culture referentiality presaging nearly 3 decades of post-Tarantino media to come. It retained the signature, labored rhymes that lent the MCs their peculiar charm, but also provided the maturing rappers with genuinely impressive technical showcases. Finally, it lay upon an unparalleled bed of samples assembled by the Dust Brothers; befitting a medium that lives and dies on the spoken word, it not only surrounds and invigorates the lyrics, but complements and occasionally even answers them. Smarter than Licensed to Ill, better produced than Raising Hell, and more consistent than Straight Outta Compton, Paul's Boutique survived a vigorous commercial flop to find acclaim throughout the world of rap as perhaps the first album fully to live up to the genre’s potential. Of course, subsequent to the album’s release, both momentous litigation and a growing awareness on the part of record labels of the potential profitability of sample-based music would ensure that no album could ever be made to sound quite like Paul's Boutique again. Few other hip-hop albums have ever sounded so literate; far fewer have ever been as immaculately produced; and possibly none to date have been so resoundingly successful in both.