Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique

Remember how I said Beastie Boys were really divisive? Well, yeah, there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that Paul’s Boutique is the singularity that exploded the copyright powder keg. Now, this is a confusing story, so you have to stick with me. We have to go all the way back to 1983 and look at an actual legitimate copyright infringement case. British Airways straight up used “Beastie Revolution” in a television commercial without permission or compensation. That is the actual type of protection the Copyright Act was designed to provide. Beastie Boys hired a lawyer, and handily won $40,000 as compensation for the obvious copyright infringement committed by an international company exploiting an emerging artist for their own commercial interests. The Beastie Boys used that money to buy an apartment and set up their studio to make more music.

As the story goes, the first taste of a problem came from their first official single, Cookie Puss. Some kid came up and said “I talked to my uncle and convinced him not to sue you for using the name Cookie Puss.” The track itself is samples from their own music, snippets of crank calls to an actual Carvel shop, juvenile misogyny, etc. In general, everyone thought they were a bunch of annoying jackassess, and they were, but they were also genuinely more interested in sampling and tape loops than they were being a hardcore punk band. Authenticity isn’t really the issue here, the issue is the putting two and two together. You’ve got a group of jackasses who made their initial money from a copyright lawsuit gaining more and more traction, their first album with Def Jam is an instant smash hit but the jackassery gets them labeled as “frat hip-hop” so they exile themselves to the other side of the country and score a deal with Capitol to make a more artistically motivated sample-based album. It wasn’t intended to be a commercial success, but the critics are actually raving about it, and that’s when everyone pauses and says “wait a minute, these jackasses are making big money by sampling our music but we aren’t making a dime? Time to turn their own tables.” Pretty soon, suing each other for money is the standard business model.

I have a big problem with that, and it’s a structural problem. At this point, from a legal perspective, there’s basically no difference between something like The Score and Paul’s Boutique, albums you buy to hear Fugees’ and Beastie Boys’ Hip-Hop creations having no idea what they’ve used for samples, and rip-off compilations from Pickwick or even Najee’s version of Stevie Wonder’s album. I don’t think that lack of distinction is true or fair at all. Sampling, Sampledelia, Plunderphonics, whatever you want to call it is fundamentally different from covering a song or straight up republishing a recording. Imagine you are a visual artist and you make a large piece by buying 30 issues of Esquire, cutting out all sorts of various photos and building a collage of those scraps to make some statement about the conceptual world they create. You sell that work of art for 20-million dollars. How strong of a claim would Esquire or the individual photographers have to the profits from that sale? I’m not answering that question for you, I’m answering that question for me, and I think it’s preposterous.

I think real Hip-Hop falls under Fair Use, and I think the proof of that fair use lies in the dedication to the art form itself. Combing through crates of records others have discarded, exploring the aesthetic experience of listening to them, taking parts that speak to you and building something new from a foundation of gratitude and respect; turning people on to the appreciation of culture they would otherwise ignore. That’s Hip-Hop.

There’s another distinction to be made, however, and it comes from the real commercialization of merely using the chorus from one song as the chorus of your own, or Weird Al if he wasn’t intentionally using parody (Weird Al pays regardless). Think Eminem and Dido. That’s not Hip-Hop, it’s Crossover. Conceptually speaking, regardless of how you interpret the significance of Stan, it’s “Eminem Featuring Dido,” but we’re essentially listening to Dido’s Thank You while Eminem raps about an obsessed fan over the top of it. Much different from slapping Dido’s record on the table and doing an extended scratch routine on her phrase “I’m wondering why,” or physically manipulating two copies to make the drum loop like Grand Master Flash would have done.

The irony is that it all came crashing down on a band whose career was funded by a legitimate copyright lawsuit, who, whether you like the Beastie Boys or not (I actually think Check Your Head is 1,000 times better), created an amazing (if still overly juvenile) Hip-Hop album called Paul’s Boutique and ruined the party for everyone.