THIS PAUL'S BOUTIQUE MIX IS GOING TO KILL ME...

I'm only five minutes in and I've spent close to two hours to get there. I've already used, uh, seven different songs to get there. It's going to have to start going faster. At this rate, Paul's Boutique will be celebrating it's 40th anniversary when I finish. I gotta say, though, there's only three hip hop records that truly communicate the beauty and functionality of sampling and sampling's contribution to the game: 3 Feet High and Rising, Fear of a Black Planet and Paul's Boutique. All of them different, but so very similiar in the fact that they're absolutely dripping with breakbeats. 3 Feet ran the gamut in the sample game taking everything from the Turtles to Funkadelic to kid's sing-a-long recordings. What made it so very cool is that it took so many different elements and managed to house them on record without sounding out of place. The spectrum from which Prince Paul worked is impressive in itself. The fact that he actually pulled it off is twice as impressive. Fear of a Black Planet took recognizable samples or breakbeats and cut, split, reversed, spliced and melted them down to almost nothing to a level that was absolutely boggling. You could listen to the same recording for years and never hear James Brown's "Give It Up or Turn It Loose," but trust me, it's like Prego: it's in there. The Bomb Squad used sampling to create fuzz or noise, but still manage to make it listenable. I don't think anyone but the Bomb Squad will really know all the samples and breaks that were used to make that record. If Puff Daddy was basically lifting eight bars from a Police record and making a five minute record from it, the Bomb Squad were taking one sixteenth note from a Sly record and using it once. Every James Brown grunt or bass drum kick were like bullets from a semi-automatic and they pinned you to the wall. Paul's Boutique, while is equally as sample-intensive, the way that the samples are used and cleverly layered, it's difficult for a listener to decipher where one ends and the next begins. Trust me, I've been trying to pull apart "Shake Your Rump" for the last two days. It's absolutely sick. I gotta throw a video up here. It's, without question, my favorite Beastie track ever: "Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun" from Boutique. Dope video.

I love how they bleep out the expletives, but don't find anything objectionable about Mike D taking a bong hit in the back of the car. Man, if that video doesn't make you just wanna jump on a mountain right now, I don't know what'll do it for you.

The Wu mix has been tapped a record 1,222 times and counting. Impressive. It got a slow start until one of my Lesson brethren threw it up on the Soul Assassins' sight and then it just blew up. I think he's the one that's calling me DJ j3. I'm certainly not that, but it's a compliment nonetheless. Thanks for throwing me up on the site. While I'd like to attribute all of those hits to the traffic on The Root Down, I know I ain't getting 1,200 people visiting this puppy.

Keep y'head up, kids. It's Thursday. I love you.