Paul's Boutique - Beastie Boys

I was working at Sound Warehouse when Paul's Boutique came out.  This was right after college, 1989.  There were all kinds of amazing, new things happening with sampling and rap and dance music.  We were pretty much all of us fans of the entire Def Jam catalog so we were always playing License to Ill and all the other rap, punk, and rock hybrid stuff that was out so we were really looking forward to Paul's Boutique.  We played that album to death.  It came out just in time for Mardi Gras and became that year's album.  We had it in my boombox on autoreverse with all the EQ and the volume pushed up to the top all day.  The first song of the album popped up in random and I let the album play.  Man, it still makes me want to shake my butt. 

The RIAA has pretty much killed this kind of truly abandoned sampling.  That's one reason the Beastie Boys switched to playing the parts on instruments instead of building with samples.  I think something has been lost in the progress of music.  Snipping bits of people's audio memories and making something completely new of it is a path music should be allowed to pursue.