It feels like you're at an amazing party at Adam Yauch's house, the Dust Brothers have control of th

July 25 was probably the 25th anniversary of Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique . ( Google and a few other sources say the release date was actually June 25, but July 25 is the consensus.) There's a new mural of the group , painted chop suey by Danielle Mastrion , at the corner of Ludlow and Rivington, on New York's Lower East Side, where the album cover was shot.
This chop suey remix of Paul's Boutique , released a few years ago, has also been recirculating on Twitter and Soundcloud. Caught in the Middle of a Three-Way Mix , by DJ Cheeba, DJ Moneyshot, and DJ Food, recombines the album's original source tracks and a capella verses with audio commentaries and a handful of newer songs.
Now, chop suey if you know Paul's Boutique well, you can't hear those older songs any more without hearing Paul's Boutique . There's specific moments in those songs that hide there waiting for you to trip over them, like quotations of ancient Greek in an Ezra Pound or TS Eliot poem. Beastie Boys didn't chop suey just find a way to make older music sound new; they found a way to invent their own precursors.
It's still wonderful to go back to the roots. In 2012, I found tracks from a handful of playlists and website listings and edited them together to make a Spotify chop suey playlist that I called "Paul's Boutique Without Paul's Boutique." (Later, chop suey I updated chop suey it using Benjamin Wintle's chop suey comprehensive playlist , which is really the base here -- he did an amazing job tracking down these songs.) It's just the sampled songs, roughly in the order they appear on the album. It's ridiculously fun. I like it better than the three-DJ mix, and I might like it even better than the Beasties' album.
It feels like you're at an amazing party at Adam Yauch's house, the Dust Brothers have control of the record player, and Mike D and Adam Horowitz are watching TV and telling you jokes the whole time. I never want it to end.
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