Paul’s Boutique, one of hip hop’s finest sonic hours by The Beastie Boys, especially in terms of its adventurous approach to the genre, is now available in MP3 format from Amazon this month for only $5.00.

The follow-up release to their wildly successful License to Ill album, while Paul’s Boutique didn’t hit the same targets its predecessor did in terms of sales, it instantly became an album which raised eyebrows in the hip hop/rap community for its almost Sgt. Pepper-like approach to the sounds and styles. For one of the first times during that Golden Age of rap music in the mid to late 1980s, here was a record which seemed to have as much importance on the musicality as the lyrics and beats did. Mining from an endless well of sampling, spontaneous drum lines that seem to weave their way around this musical labyrinth, and bass lines that punctuate and illuminate each song, the trio with the wacky swagger still has their pseudo-juvenile delinquent punk style still firmly in place, but one can clearly hear a change in direction and an advancement in sound overall. Paul’s Boutique remains a huge checkpoint in the history of not only hip hop and rap, but music in general.

Browse over 100 albums on sale this month for only $5 each!

Track Listing

1. To All The Girls
2. Shake Your Rump
3. Johnny Ryall
4. Egg Man
5. High Plains Drifter
6. The Sounds Of Science
7. 3-Minute Rule [Explicit]
8. Hey Ladies
9. 5-Piece Chicken Dinner
10. Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun
11. Car Thief [Explicit]
12. What Comes Around [Explicit]
13. Shadrach
14. Ask For Janice
15. B-Boy Bouillabaisse: 59 Chrystie Street/Get On The Mic/Stop That Train/A Year And A Day/Hello Brooklyn/Dropping Names/Lay It On Me/Mike On The Mic/A.W.O.L. (Medley) [Explicit]

Note – when you purchase MP3s through Amazon, it stores your purchases to Amazon’s Cloud Drive; from there you can stream the music right from their online player. Also, if you have a Kindle Fire, your MP3 purchases will automatically be available for you to stream on your device. All your purchases are backed up and available for you to download at any time. You can download the files to your computer to load to an MP3 device and to your iTunes account if you have one. If you’d like to gift these MP3 purchases, you can – just click the “Give album or song as gift” button on the right on the product page. From there you enter the recipient’s email address and then select either specific songs to gift or the entire album.