Produced by the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers, the album's composition makes extensive use of samples, drawn from a wide range of genres including funk, soul, rock, and jazz.
However, despite its initial commercial failure, it became recognized as the group's breakthrough achievement, with its innovative lyrical and sonic style earning them a position as critical favorites within the hip hop community.
Derided as one-hit wonders and estranged from their previous producer, Rick Rubin, and record label, Def Jam, Beastie Boys were in self-imposed exile in Los Angeles during early 1988, after being written off by most music critics.
[4] Put together on samplers with tiny memories, small fragments of staggeringly disparate musics drop in, then are snatched away abruptly; rhythms and melodies remain in focus as textures and sounds constantly shift.
On the cover of the album, the group hung a sign saying "Paul's Boutique" on an existing clothing store called Lee's Sportswear at the corner of Rivington and Ludlow streets, in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
[15][16] The album received a gold certification by the Recording Industry Association of America on September 22 of its release year; it went on to sell over 2 million copies by January 1999 and was certified double platinum.
[26] Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune commended the Dust Brothers' "deft" production and Beastie Boys' rhymes, which he called "hilarious, vicious, surreal, snotty.
[29] Writing for NME, Roger Morton gave praise to Paul's Boutique, finding that in terms of "weight of ideas", Licensed to Ill "shrinks to nothing in comparison".
[32] Robert Christgau said although it "doesn't jump you the way great rap usually does", "the Beasties and Tone-Lōc's Dust Brothers have worked out a sound that sneaks up on you with its stark beats and literal-minded samples, sometimes in a disturbing way."
"[33] In Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990), he said the album's "high-speed volubility and riffs from nowhere will amaze and delight you", calling it "an absolutely unpretentious and unsententious affirmation of cultural diversity, of where [the group] came from and where they went from there.
[35] In a 2003 review for Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield called it "a celebration of American junk culture that is still blowing minds today—even fourteen years of obsessive listening can't exhaust all the musical and lyrical jokes crammed into Paul's Boutique".
[18] Nate Patrin of Pitchfork described it "a landmark in the art of sampling, a reinvention of a group that looked like it was heading for a gimmicky early dead-end, and a harbinger of the pop-culture obsessions and referential touchstones that would come to define the ensuing decades' postmodern identity".
[13]In a Vibe interview of all three Beastie Boys, Chuck D of Public Enemy was quoted as saying that the "dirty secret" among the black hip-hop community at the time of release was that "Paul's Boutique had the best beats."
During the same Vibe interview, Mike D was asked about any possible hesitation he or the band might have had regarding their overt sampling of several minutes of well-known Beatles background tracks, including the song "The End" on "The Sounds of Science".
[50] The historian LeRoy McCarthy began to advocate for the intersection of Ludlow and Rivington streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the location of the Paul's Boutique album cover, to be renamed "Beastie Boys Square" after Adam Yauch's death in 2012.